Tag Archives: 2024 Election

What Did You Vote For?

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Did you vote for increased inflation and higher prices due to tariffs? Did you vote to pay higher taxes so that billionaires and multinational corporations could receive large tax cuts? Did you vote to increase the deficit and add trillions to the national debt? Did you vote to consolidate more power in the executive branch by taking power away from the courts and your elected representatives?

Did you vote to have unvetted 20-something-year-old geeks sort through all of your private information and cut thousands of federal jobs? Did you vote to make America more racist again by eliminating DEI programs and firing government and military leaders just because they are women or people of color? Did you vote to have inexperienced and unqualified people take control of government agencies?

Perhaps you voted to arrest and deport immigrants who are violent criminals, but did you vote for mass deportations of essential farm workers and those who work in meat processing plants? Did you want to see families torn apart? Did you vote to have your immigrant neighbors and community members arrested and deported without due process? Did you want to see innocent immigrants and US citizens imprisoned in El Salvador and beaten and tortured or thrown in concentration camps?

Did you vote for cruelty?

Did you vote to have masked men with military weapons kidnap working Americans without warrants? Did you vote to have armed military in our streets? Did you vote to have judges and congressional representatives arrested?

Did you vote to dispense with the rule of law?

Did you vote to deport Afghan interpreters who saved the lives of US troops? Did you vote for massive cuts to the Veterans Administration? Did you vote to see millions thrown off Medicaid, including elderly in senior care? Did you vote to make healthcare unaffordable for millions of your fellow Americans? Did you vote to close hundreds of rural hospitals? Did you vote to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control? Did you vote to cut medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases?

Did you vote to eliminate foreign aid programs that save millions of lives? Did you vote to alienate are most loyal allies, including Canada? Did you vote to make foreigners afraid to visit our country and to stop buying our products? Did you vote to end Voice of America? Did you vote to help Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?

Did you vote to ignore climate change while cutting funds for NOAA and the National Weather Service and eliminating FEMA? Did you vote to increase the use of fossil fuels and lease public lands to oil companies?

Did you vote to lower taxes on gun silencers? To watch our leaders engage in massive bribery schemes and corruption? Did you vote to pardon the criminals who violently beat police and planned to hang the Vice-President and many in Congress on January 6? Did you vote to have the president pardon felons in exchange for presidential bribes? To sell green cards for millions of dollars?

Did you vote for increased attacks on freedom of the press and freedom of speech? Did you vote to undermine the US Constitution?

Maybe you didn’t intend to vote for many of those things. But if you voted Republican in 2024, that’s what you got. Indeed, that’s who you are. Because your vote is a reflection of you.

Trump Has Already Irreversibly Damaged Our Nation.

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Forget his plans for a second term. Pay no attention to the impending execution of Project 2025. Disregard his planned revenge against political opponents. Try to ignore the coming mass deportations, the threats to leave NATO, the refusal to address climate change, and his pandering to the obscenely wealthy and large corporations. Those are only symptoms of his impact on a nation that was once proud to be a beacon for the poor and the oppressed.

Trump long ago set the United States on an unprecedented path of hate, cruelty and injustice.

Following a decade of his rhetoric, our political theater has evolved from a time when word of an extramarital affair was disqualifying to a point where a majority of our citizens voted for a man who previously would have been a model for the most evil and the most dastardly cartoon villain ever.

Despite his constant lies, his bragging, his blatant cruelty, his obvious racism, the dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault, his felony convictions and multiple grand jury indictments, his fraudulent use of taxpayer funds, his failed response to the pandemic that killed many thousands of Americans and crashed our economy, his cavalier handling of our nation’s most guarded secrets, and his attempt to overthrow our government, a plurality of Americans chose him to be their leader.

How could that happen?

It’s not as if voters were unfamiliar with Trump’s darkest tendencies. They had four years to observe his unethical, immoral and incompetent actions during his first term as president. Journalists exposed his more than 30,000 lies while in office. They reported that he was schooled in racism and eugenics by his father, that he was mentored by a lawyer for the Mafia, that his company was found guilty of defrauding the government of taxes, and that he created phony “charities” to further avoid paying his fair share.

It has been revealed that Trump’s best friend was a sexual predator. And that he gleefully bragged of sexually assaulting young women himself. But millions of Americans marked their ballots for him anyway.

Why?

I believe that Trump, unfortunately, represents the values of a large segment of our population, including many Americans who claim to be devout Christians.

Regardless of what happens over the next 4 years, the damage has already been done. He has coarsened our public conversations. He has further divided our population. He has encouraged Americans to distrust journalists and scientists, to ignore evidence and facts. He has further politicized the courts and the churches. He has modeled hate, cruelty, greed and corruption for the next generation of American leaders. He has even led them to question the value of democracy.

From here I fear there is no turning back. All we can hope for is that the outcome of future elections will result in the restoration of our Constitution and our nation’s most essential institutions. Even then, America will never be the same.

It has been made clear that our claim of American exceptionalism based on “freedom, justice and dignity for all” is little more than a myth. And the vision of a shining city on the hill has been forever dimmed.