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RMDolddave's avatar

Thom, thanks for reintroducing the best frame ever created to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Specifically, we need to label the good guys as our citizens who are entitled to collaborate with our government to get our general welfare promoted properly and label the bad guys as the factions which do things adverse to our rights and our communities’ interests (I’m paraphrasing Madison’s quote). The important factions (the oligarchs and morbidly rich that control our government’s decision-makers) are the most destructive forces that humans have ever visited upon Earth’s creatures, and they have amassed their power by taking over the authority and powers of our government. Basically, the big factions are not subject to governmental oversight because they decide how our government’s “checks and balances” will work. The lesser factions (grifters, polluters, and their ilk) just take advantage of the big factions’ influence and regulatory captures like poop-starved bacteria that follow dung beetles around, making them trivial opportunists compared to the uber factions.

The oligarchs pay their propagandists to manipulate our poorly educated with fear and hate. That buys them about 30% of the vote because they are convinced that the conflict over the future of our democracy is 100% Americans (the good guys) vs. everyone else (the bad guys). In other words, they believe the good guys are those of us who have Anglo Saxon lineage (or some other northern European white guy place) vs. everyone else (otherisms go here). We need to seize the labels, frame, and messaging to make it so everyone understands that all of our citizens who are not engaged in faction-type behavior are the good guys (and the victims), and the bad guys are the factions. We just need a critical mass of citizens to accept that the people who are demonized and dehumanized so that our poorly educated will vote for the factions’ candidates are not the enemy, the factions are.

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Barry J Kaufman DO's avatar

Unfortunately all of this is true. It is equally true that you and much of "progressive" media have been apologists for a Democratic Party that is rudderless and inflicting significant harm on the American people with its acquiescence to corporate America and its petrifying fear of narratives pushed by Republicans and corporate media. Their and your political expediency have helped to put us in this precarious position.

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