For some time, I've been reading American Historian Heather Cox Richardson's near-daily letters from an American. She is a Democrat and a big fan of President Joe Biden. As are her loyal, ardent legion of readers, based on reader comments under her letters. Here's a link and the lead into her letter yesterday:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-21-2021
Summarizing U.S. political news these days sometimes feels like following two entirely different threads. On the one hand, there is the story about what’s happening in the White House and among the Democrats in Congress, who are trying to pass laws that are really quite popular—like the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Build Back Better bill—and to shore up the democratic alliances that have been central to our place in the world since World War II.
On the other hand is the story of the January 6 insurrection and the ongoing attempt of the Trump Republicans to undermine our government and seize power.
I'm an Independent, who thinks the insurgents who breached and entered the Capitol should have been shot dead by the Capitol police, and the instigators, Donald Trump on down, should have been arrested for Treason and put in Guantanamo and waterboarded like other terrorists there until they told everything they knew. I'm also a former practicing attorney, who knows that isn't going to happen.
I also have two eyes and two ears, and I see and hear a civil war has occurred in America, and most of the right side could care less what the left side thinks about January 6, or what the left side wants to do to try to help America.
While the left side rails, as do I, about January 6, the right side has rigged the voting process in many states, to try to ensure the right side wins the 2022 mid-term federal and state election, and the 2024 presidential and federal and estate election.
Lurking is a U.S. Supreme Court, which thanks to three right Trump appointees, has five right-side justices, who hold in their hands the outcome of the January 6 Congressional investigation and U.S. Department of Justice prosecution of the January 6 instigators, Donald Trump on down.
Those cold hard facts cause me to wonder if anything Heather writes, and anything her readers comment, matters a hill of beans? It causes me to wonder if the right-side already won the civil war and the left side have become second class citizens or serfs?
I even wonder if the time is approaching when free speech in America, without which democracy does not exist, will be like free speech in Putin Russia and Communist China? Already on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, and in a spirituality group I participate online, moderation boards (czars) decide what can be published.
I'm not talking about the blocking of hate speech. I'm talking about the blocking of speech that hurts some people's feelings, pisses some people off, scares some people. I'm talking about blocking speech that provides alternative perspectives which do not have the full faith and credit of, say, Facebook, Twitter, the spirituality group, the right side and the left side.
The Democrats do not seem to get it even yet that all their talking, all their lamenting and hand-wringing, has absolutely zero effect on the civil war the right side is waging and perhaps already has won in America.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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