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Totally wild, to me, to see the director of 13TH give this much of a pass to Kamala Harris.

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Aug 14, 2020Liked by Jack Crosbie

great piece, jack. been struggling with the idea that, if biden/harris win, harris the cop is probably? the next dem nominee in 2024. & she probably has a good chance of losing to whatever fox news anchor decides to run. either way, saying goodbye to progress for another 4/8/12 years.

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The most annoying factor from the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" crowd is that the nuance of holding your nose and voting for bad people dies with your vote. A lot of mainstream Democrats will see a sweeping Biden victory as an approval of their "work" during the Trump Era and learn the wrong message, setting us up for future disaster when the next Republican monster wins POTUS.

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It's also important to note that critiquing powerful people, both during elections and while in office, may superficially align with reactionaries but on a deeper level has to be done. A lot of the more moderate anti-war movement went away in 2009 when Obama took office, though that administration never pulled out of Afghanistan and prosecuted wars in many different countries, including blowing up a DWB hospital. Republicans would occasionally cynically take potshots at his foreign policy, and the sentiment was to rally around the President from bad-faith attacks.

But it was still horrific foreign policy, and those that remained mobilized in the anti-war movement were right- from his candidacy through the presidency, President Obama needed to be held to account for continuing the post-9/11 open-ended War on Terror.

"Vote Blue No Matter Who" turns into "Defend Blue No Matter What" when in office. Actually demanding accountability isn't as common as it needs to be. I'm from northern California, I first saw Kamala Harris in person in 2011 when she wasn't even Attorney General yet. There's the nativist and misogynistic attacks she's already facing, but there's also a record that's long, full of bad shit just like Biden's record is. You can't pull back entirely just because she's getting hammered for bad reasons by the Trumpists.

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Another good argument from another ex-gawkerite on the other side of that coin. They get you coming and going.

https://hmmdaily.com/2019/03/12/elections-are-no-substitute-for-democracy/

"We mustn't question them, its too important to win the election, hold them accountable once in office!"

"Holding elected officials accountable is a distraction, and the voters should figure it out in the next election!"

And before the libs can 'well actually' me, yea. That's Pelosi ducking her responsibilities against Trump, a massively unpopular, blatantly criminal figurehead for the other party.

So they'll probably be real good about holding their own people's feet to the fire. They'd never stand for a Dem president locking kids in cages away from their families or looking the other way while banks and housing lenders commit open fraud to confiscate almost all black wealth, Dem congresses voting to gut the post office or sell out unions, or ignore the military strafing MSF hospitals or the CIA killing American children because somehow, when accountability means embarrassing their own people, THAT'S when they find their backbone and moral clarity. We're really gonna dig into all the people corroborating Tara Reade and all the Kamala's refusal to share evidence with the victims of sex abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church once they're governing.

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“Disrespectful to our elders” is all you need to read to cut to the heart of her argument. It’s the Millennials and Gen Z’ers who should be respected as the generations who have both given the most and have the least. If Ava DuVernay’s health insurance was connected to her job and then lost that job, she would likely feel the urgency that drives younger generations to demand more.

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So Ava DuVernay thinks that COVID-19 is going to just vanish when we've elected a new President? Does she assume Biden and Harris are going to massively fund a contact-tracing effort, make treatment and quarantining compatible with economic survival, and roll out faster free testing on a large scale? Because if they don't do those things, the disease is not going to stop spreading, and they have specifically said they do not want to do step 2, which will lead to sick people continuing to go to work and probably spread the disease.

The pandemic will stop when action is collectively taken to stop it. If Donald Trump rolled out the above steps, the pandemic would end. Donald Trump could still be a terrible asshole, but the pandemic would end. You can make the case he won't do those things under any conditions, because he's a terrible asshole, but if someone who you thought was not a terrible asshole took inadequate steps to stop the pandemic, then the pandemic is going to keep going. Reality is not shaped by the inherent moral quality of our politicians. It's shaped by what our politicians do.

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I can’t help but think, Jack, that you haven’t fallen into the rhetorical trap set by Republicans. Your opinions are valid - but the timing of them is in reaction to a bad-faith argument that seeks to devalue and demoralize our people on the middle>left.

Duvernay purports now is not the time - and it sure as hell isn’t! You want a more progressive policy plank? If Biden wins in the fall, raise hell as he builds his transition team and cabinet and starts signaling his initial priorities.

The next 90 days will be full of the worst lies Trump can tell, and our best response cannot be to agree with some minor thrust of what he is saying, but. Sure, we need a better path forward for impoverished Millenials and Z’ers! But let’s get them to vote before we say “Biden is likely to do nothing for you!”

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If the party has enough momentum on the progressive side they will have no choice but to incorporate some of those ideas. At the end of the day, Biden and Harris are pollsters that will do whatever it takes to stay in power.

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