Opinion

At a time when we’ve never needed good to prevail over evil more, I simply don’t trust enough of my fellow white men in America to do the right thing in November.

As an expert spanning 64 years on this sore subject, I want to spend a few minutes kicking that — and us — around a bit today.

This week may well see a court decide the fate and future of Fox “News” and thus the Republican Party, at least in its current hard-right neofascist form. And odds are Fox viewers are blissfully ignorant about the pitched battle that just played out in a Reno courtroom over the future of their beloved propaganda outlet.

Sir Keith Murdoch was the notoriously racist and misogynist owner of a small newspaper chain in Australia. It was inherited by his son, Rupert, who — using sensationalism and bigotry — turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that spans three continents.

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

Donald Trump has seemed so larger-than-life to so many Americans for so long that it’s almost impossible not to think of him as a perpetual, ongoing threat.

And, indeed, he has already tried to mount one coup against our nation which was largely ignored by our Attorney General for two long years, setting up the virtual certainty of a second attempt this fall should he lose by a small margin.

Last week, I was telling you about how Vice President Kamala Harris hurt her opponent so badly that he would spend his remaining time on the campaign trail replaying what she did to him at the debate. She damaged his ego by saying to his face and in front of 60 million television viewers:

Donald Trump is what he hates.

I used to be a Republican. Right out of college, I worked for the legislature, then governor, of a conservative state. Governor Robert Orr (R-Ind.) was disciplined and kind, and his ethics were beyond reproach.

Fast forward three decades and time spent among different cultures. After seeing trickle-down up close, how it benefits wealthy donors but few others, my perspective changed. When I ran for Congress in 2020, it was as a Democrat.

Republicans don’t want women to vote. They now think they may have a strategy that could help make that happen.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and former president Donald Trump were pushing the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Eligibility Act), demanding it be part of must-pass legislation to fund the federal government for another year (the funding runs out at the end of this month and then the shutdown begins).

Tim Walz was in Michigan recently. In a stump speech, he noted differing views on the meaning of homeownership. He said that for “the real estate mogul, the venture capitalist, whatever,” a house is “just an asset to be traded and sold.” To everyone else, however, it’s “a place to gather around the kitchen table to talk with our kids about what happened at school.”

The message was simple but powerful.

Congressional Republicans are enthusiastically doubling down on the corruption openings five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave them when they legalized political bribery with Citizens United. Their newest scam is trying to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

A new study this year by the RAND Corporation found that Americans pay 4.22 times more for brand-name drugs than the citizens of any other developed country. That’s a 422% markup against the (already profitable) prices people in other countries pay for the same drugs, with the entire burden borne by citizens of the US, directly or indirectly.

They’re competing unfairly with Medicare, and you and I are paying for it. It’s obscene.

When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.

The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, is in a helluva lot more danger right now thanks to the convicted felon, Donald J. Trump, than Trump ever was while working hard as always on the campaign trail at a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday.

Further, AMERICA is in a helluva lot more danger right now, thanks to the America-attacking Donald J. Trump, than it has been in recent memory, because this soulless bully has spent the past nine years sowing violence and spreading lies and distrust in a country he’d rather split in two than unify.