The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.
And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.
We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.
We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.
We know our police forces are infected with white supremacists and wage constant war against our most marginalized citizens.

We know just how much tolerance for brutality there is among. Not just tolerance—but enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.
We know that open white supremacy can run for high office and win, and receive the unwavering support of its political establishment.

We know our Evangelical Christian churches can be counted on to be the enthusiastic, loyal, sustaining energizing force behind that movement.
We know that nothing can shake that support to supremacy—no scandal no matter how unsavory, no betrayal of national security no matter how dire, no incompetency no matter how embarrassing, not even a deliberately and systemically orchestrated pile of a half-million corpses.
And now, we are going to be asked to forget—chided, at first, for remembering; mocked, eventually, as "clinging to the past" for the crime of understanding our present.

But we know now, and we can't unknow.

We can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.
And Donald Trump didn't create any of this.

It was already there. It's been there the whole time. He just picked it up.

To some degree at least, he's putting it down now.

It's still there.
We'll be asked to put all this horror on a single grotesque and cruel man, for the purpose of exonerating those who cheered for him louder the more grotesque and cruel he got, and the systems of power that seemed optimized for him, were unable to stop him, and rarely even tried.
And then we'll be asked to never mention him again, to forget the lessons he taught us.

To look forward, not back—not for sake of forward-thinking, but so that needed changes to our malicious priorities, which might prevent the next him, might be kept always in the vague future.
And we'll hear that this is not who we are, and that we're better than that, and we'll be asked to believe it.

But we can't become what we hope to be if we won't admit what we are.

Never forget.

More from A.R. Moxon

Pundits: The fact that Ossoff and Warnock are unlikely to both win their elections means Joe Biden needs to court Republican votes rather than push a much-needed progressive agenda

*Ossoff and Warnock win handily*

Pundits: Ah. Nevertheless,


The only way political reporting in this country makes sense is if you understand that the almost universal, almost subconscious default assumption: that conservative white people are the protagonists of any story that's being told, no matter the facts of the story.

Just do the obvious and necessary good things and let the horrid evil people who hate good things squeal and cry about it forever.

I really need Democrats who will state the clear and obvious truth, which is that Republicans are our enemies, because they insist on attacking the very idea of a shared society and are more than happy to use violence to do it, which is the very definition of an enemy.

You can't make people who want to kill you not be your enemies even if you wish they'd be your friend.

They can stop trying to kill you, but until that happens they are your enemy, and acknowledging that fact isn't what makes that fact true.
Bullshit.

I have family members all the way up the Fox News Facebook misinformation hole, and they didn’t get vaccinated because they felt respected; they got vaccinated because their children told them they wouldn’t get to see their grandchildren until they got vaccinated.


3 observations:

People don't tend to change their worldviews from a place of comfort.

When selfish assholes decide to behave like selfish assholes, the problem isn't that others aren't coddling their feelings enough.

Selfish assholes aren't everyone else's job to fix.

Selfish assholes would love for you to *think* they are everybody else's job to fix.

It puts them at the center and in control.

That means when they act like a selfish asshole, it's *your* fault. You should have been more persuasive. Daddy hits you because you made him angry.

Truth is, vaccine resistors are behaving this way because their feelings ARE being respected.

Malicious media entities created self-feeding networks that reassure selfish assholes they can be selfish assholes and still be respected.

Antvax, racist, sexist, all are welcome.

The way you make a selfish asshole stop being a selfish asshole is well known.

You draw a clear boundary and then you enforce that boundary. You tell them that their bullshit won't be tolerated, and then you don't tolerate their bullshit.

I think we all know that, actually.
The reality is very simple: The Republican Party is no longer participating in democracy. They're running a series of ops against every election cycle, predicated on the notion that only their power is legitimate.


This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years. It includes Gingrich's scorched earth methods, Bush v Gore, the politicizing of the Bush DoJ, the judicial obstructionism and nullification of the McConnell Senate, and the entire Trump presidency.

It includes decades of tortured racist gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, Citizens United, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, PACs, and deliberately colluding with foreign powers.

This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years.

The Republican Party is not participating in democracy. They are quite obviously an organization dedicated to the destruction and overthrow of the government of the U.S. as we know it, and should be treated as such.

There are no legitimate Republican office-holders.

I think there's a distinction to be made. Democrats are often weak/ineffective, and many are complicit because they're those things by choice—but institutionally they aren't authoritarian, and they aren't fascist. They're a corporatist conservative party.

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The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW