Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

You are here: Home / Democratic Response to Trump 2.0 / Partners in the Fight, Not Donors to the Cause

Partners in the Fight, Not Donors to the Cause

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Is the term hopium a slur?  Or is it the way forward?

To my mind, the term hopium has mostly been a insult, hurled derisively by people who don’t understand that having hope doesn’t mean you’re waiting for your pony to magically arrive.

Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles, defines hopium as hope, with a plan.   I do like the phrase hope with a plan, but I am still not a fan of the word hopium.  On the other hand, I’m not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

They want to take these things away from us.  I say, “not so fast!”

Partners in the fight not donors to the cause.

I really think this is the way forward.

Simon Rosenberg:

Getting Louder/Building A 24/7/365 Politics – This is a familiar topic for Hopium readers, but there is real urgency here too. For background see my post-election posts on the need for us to get louder here, here, here and most recently this one on how we need to get far smarter in how we strategically contest the right’s information superiority in our campaigns themselves. I am going to be talking a lot about the need to see the millions of people supporting our campaigns as “partners in the fight, not donors to the cause” and help unlock not just the financial or volunteer potential of our family but also its capacity to become information warriors and amplify.

There are some good links in the above paragraph; take a look if you want to learn more.

The election for DNC Chair is coming up fast – it’s this Saturday!

In a world with Ben Wikler as DNC Chair, I think we are definitely seen as partners in the fight, not donors to the cause.

In a world where one of the other top candidates is DNC Chair, I think we’re still donors to the cause.  But if the election doesn’t go the way I hope it does, I think it’s more business as usual, which would feel like one more blow in a serious of blows.  Hoping that doesn’t happen, but if it does, I will try to keep an open mind.  Because when predicting something will be bad, you have to be an idiot to not be open to something that could be better than you anticipate.

In the meantime, we have our work cut out for us.

Simon Rosenberg:

Morning all. We are a week in and it’s clear now that Trump 2.0 is a wild, reckless, impulsive mess. Just like him. Eliminate FEMA! Start trade wars with close allies! Tariff everyone! Blow up the 80 year old global trade system! Fire everybody! Round ‘em all up! Let ‘em all go! Seize land from sovereign nations! Clean out Gaza! Buy my memecoin, my bibles, my sneakers! Shut down all foreign aid (even to Ukraine)! Turn off funding to life saving medical trials and hospitals! Stop infrastructure projects already under construction across the US! Nazi salutes! Yeah baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s ridiculous. Yes some of all this is strategic but a great deal of it is idiotic. Trump and his team are reckless, fanatical, dangerous fools. They are in Silicon Valley speak manically “moving fast and breaking things” but the things they are breaking are not theirs. They are ours – our nation’s honor, our government, our laws, our prosperity, our health, our democracy, our safety, our warming planet…..

We cannot for one moment let this stuff become the new normal, or as I’ve been saying we cannot let Trump’s madness become our own. But our elected leaders in Washington and across the country need to start moving as fast as Trump and his team to minimize the damage being done and to start talking to the American people about what is happening. We are in the fight now, 24/7/365. It is here now and we need to dramatically, immediately raise our game.

So what’s the biggest and best hose we’ve got to fight the firehose levels of crap from this administration.

What can we do today?  Today.  Literally.

Resistance.  Opposition.  What do those look like, not just from our leaders, but from us?

Can we come up with 10 things we can do today?

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  3. 3.

    Sxjames

    Find a way to pointedly work “Gulf of Mexico” into a conversation.

    Bonus points for Mt. Denali

  4. 4.

    dc

    Can we come up with 10 things we can do today?

    How about 1 thing? 10 is a lot for overwhelmed, shell-shocked people. Maybe with an addendum of more stuff for those with more energy and time.

    For me: Send a missive (using Resit Bot ) to my asshole Repub (I repeat myself) senators using the price of eggs to demand they step up against the muzzling and hobbling of our public health organizations.

  6. 6.

    chrisanthemama

    What I did last week: finally set up a monthly donation to both ACLU and Planned Parenthood. I ordered a box of Red Cards (https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards-tarjetas-rojas ) to hand out in person/leave in public places. I ordered another 10 copies of “On Tyranny” (so far, I have already given away 15 copies to my simpaticos)–some of the new batch will get distributed among LFLs in the neighborhood; some I will donate to our local public library. I’m on FB (still, mainly for the cat videos and lurking on family members’ photos) and on BSKY, and I post whatever informative stuff I find from reputable news sources on both platforms. I find comfort in knowledge and have to limit the outrage-porn. Reading library books (“The Nation That Never Was” by Kermit Roosevelt III in heavy rotation; “Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Battle for Democracy” by Christopher Steele up next). I pray for my enemies to hopefully drive them crazy. Already had cancelled NYT and WaPo, and now they’re all-the-way gone. Cancelled Amazon Prime. I order books from my local bookstore (powells.com). Small acts of kindness and senseless beauty. Eating and sleeping well at home and trying to stay grateful for the grace and mitigate the cruelty.

  7. 7.

    dm

    Re: DNC chair, I hope it’s Been Wikler, but I hope he talks a lot to Fariz Shakir. I heard an interview with the latter on one of the PodBros casts, and I liked the way he talked about involving the DNC in things like union organizing efforts.

  8. 8.

    Glory b

    @dm: How about we do whatever it is that we can do or would have done, no matter who is DNC Chair?

    Stop looking for one guy to save you. DNC chair doesn’t run the whole party

    It’s starting to feel like too many people ate putting ALL their energy into this one election.

  10. 10.

    PJ

    Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

    – Vaclav Havel, from Disturbing the Peace.

  11. 11.

    TBone

    @PJ: thank you for that – we do the thing because it is right and true, not because it is easy.

    I wish I had the energy to participate and give some ideas of how to do opposition and resistance today, other than to merely change the fucking channel so we don’t platform the assholes for one minute longer than is absolutely necessary to stay informed.

  12. 12.

    bluefoot

    Had a call w some friends yesterday about what we can do. We have some pretty different skills sets. Some ideas that came up:

    getting involved in local elections

    attending school board meetings (and PTA for parents in the group)

    Some discussion about guerrila art and ways to distribute info not online i.e. flyers about what your rights are if you get stopped if you fail the paper bag test

    couple of lawyers are looking to get involved in legal aid

    remembering that courage is contagious and try to act on that

    talking to the young people we know about what they’re thinking and doing

    working through established aid groups and churches

    ETA: commit to give each other moral support even if it’s just a text check in regularly

  13. 13.

    scav

    Focus less on what you need.  Focus on what you need to do.

     

    Actually, that could be one of the ten.

  14. 14.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @Glory b: The preferred candidate is a white man.

    Mind, Ben Wikler is a *great guy,* but really, we’re at white people re-taking the reins everywhere, including in the Democratic Party.

    I’m certain it will all work out.

  16. 16.

    suzanne

    Is that what “hopium” means to others? I have always thought of it as a portmanteau of hope + opium. As in: a drug that dulls your senses to reality and makes you feel good, but causes dependency! I think of hopium as the lies we tell ourselves to feel better at night.

  19. 19.

    AM in NC

    That fantastic sticker from an earlier post – with Elon giving the Nazi salute and the tag:  “Grocery Prices Are Higher. I did NAZI that coming”.  It would be easy to find a file of that image online, I bet, and duplicate it to fill a sheet. Print on regular paper. Cut apart, and you have a stack ready to tape across the egg aisle, dairy section, coffee aisle, etc.  And in EVERY bathroom stall you enter.

    Or if that is too complicated, maybe just type text: “If we didn’t want higher prices, we need to vote differently next time”.

    Call your elected officials every day to let them and their staff we hold them responsible for ALL of it.

  23. 23.

    bluefoot

    @suzanne: That was my understanding too, that it is a portmanteau. Hence its use derisively.

    I also think it’s useful for myself to separate my hopes and my expectations.

  24. 24.

    WTFGhost

    Can we come up with 10 things we can do today?

    Um. Good luck with that, you other people!

    If people want to mock “hopium” keep in mind that opiates are powerful pain killers, that sometimes keep you going when you’d otherwise collapse, and maybe even die of shock.

    I hope when personal hope seems idiotic. I hope when Trump gets elected the first time. I hope (and cry) when he’s elected again. I hope when he steps on his, uh… his Long Red Tie, shall we say. I hope when he seems to know what he’s doing, and I hope when he’s flailing around dangerously.

    Any twit who can’t hope through all that is a coward and a weakling who has no business mocking those who do, because it takes real courage to maintain hope through all that crap. “Hopium” Is a fine word and concept.

  25. 25.

    WTFGhost

    @suzanne: Friend, may you never need to lie like eff to yourself, to keep from (distressing description of suicide, skipped).

    No offense to you, or to the OP, or to anyone who uses “hopium” derisively, but, I recognize a desire to *say* something morbid (like the skipped description of suicide) as me being triggered – ready to snap at people who don’t get it.

    Look: hope isn’t a *lie*. It’s like faith, you don’t have *proof* that things will get better, but you refuse to believe that they *won’t*. Because you know, if you’re going to see a better day, it will only be because you worked for it, and why did you do all that work? One word: hope.

    Anyway: triggered, tired, time to fellate this portable popsicle purveyance!

  26. 26.

    TBone

    @WTFGhost: it is also the ability to keep going even though you expect that things will not get better in your lifetime.  It is the ability to have a reason to blow the doors off this thing for the others who will follow us, even when it appears that all is lost. Especially then.

  27. 27.

    Ruckus

    @Glory b:

    I see two sides to the concept of putting it all on this one election.

    First, shitforbrains is going to fuck up everything he touches for one of two reasons.

    1.Because he doesn’t know how to do anything correctly.

    2. Because he is an aging out fucking moron. Which means his brain is worth doodly squat (yes, that’s the most it ever has been worth) and his brain works far less/worse than it did last time. Which wasn’t worth all that and a couple of saltine crackers, last time.

  30. 30.

    Nancy

    @WTFGhost:

    I wish I could easily express how I felt reading your statement. I think hope is an active choice made minute by minute in the face of discouragement and despair.

  31. 31.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @chrisanthemama: I too am reposting relevant news articles from bsky over to fb. And trying for acts of kindness, moments of grace, and nourishing food.

    I wish I could think of 10 things, but I might be trying to change or add 10 routines to my daily self care, because of personal challenges.

  33. 33.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @WTFGhost: hope isn’t a *lie*. It’s like faith,

    you don’t have *proof* that things will get better, but

    you refuse to believe that they *won’t* get better

    So it’s worth working for the good outcomes we’d like.

    And it’s good to avoid denial, at the same time, referring to Suzanne’s idea about not numbing the senses with false positives or overly done optimism.

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