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Biden's speech is top fold today. Thanks MM.

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Ah, the good old Oliver Hardy Defense. Never change, GQP.

RIP Diane Feinstein

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It is almost as if we are all ships passing in the night .... hoping. People who read, regularly, or have read this speech really get what’s happening. We go to the market, our jobs, text, wash dishes... in a kind of dissociative horror of what’s happening, what’s coming. We join substacks, donate, look to volunteer, write notes like this with a desperate question.

Are we really getting what this means? Journalism isn’t about predicting the future. They report and that’s difficult enough. Fiction writers can, but then it’s fiction. We again disassociate. That can’t really happen

We don’t define what “that” is. But it’s there, like a perpetual Scream emoji.

We have no time for quiet desperation. We need to let the fear guide us. Yes, I said it.

We have Hitlers Germany to fear. But we aren’t that. America is its own entity. Do we really grasp what we become if we don’t stop this possible future?

What do people see happening? What do they think they will get out of it? Who wins? Who loses? Who adapts? Because that tells us who will fight it, and who won’t.

But first we need more than this endless state of inner Scream We need to let our minds go, to fully articulate what it will be to live in it.

The Warning is the first step, we can’t get stuck in it. It needs to be an imaginative leap because American are clueless, we don’t conceive a world without democracy at least tangentially present.

This is real. It’s happening. It’s beyond discussion. It’s here. Come on people. We need to picture it, in order to fight it like a Ukrainian fights Russia.

What will living under Authoritarian rule be for America? Do we care enough to stop it?

We only get one shot.

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