Welcome to Issue #44 of Playing in the Pocket. This is the free version of the newsletter. If you would like to receive one newsletter a week, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you value this work, subscribe!
November 8, 2022
Today is election day. You may have heard that Democracy is on the line. It is. It might seem like your vote doesn’t matter, but collectivity, it does. We can’t bend the arc toward justice without democracy.
A woman’s right over her body is *still* on the line more than ever, as is the economy.
The economy’s health can’t be separated from a woman’s autonomy over her body or democracy. Women are a large part of the economy and workforce.
A healthy democracy undergirds all else and is intricately tied to a functioning economy and human rights for all who get to live here.
When half the country doesn’t have autonomy over their bodies. We are not living under democratic values and can no longer claim we live in a free society.
Blue state residents are aware of this, as are POC who we rely on again and again to vote democratic, who overwhelming ushered in the Biden Presidency. Yet, POC are still marginalized by society and killed at higher rates by the police.
The system is indeed broken.
But at least we still have a system and not chaos.
Not yet. It will get much worse if elections aren't honored and the loser doesn't step down. The horror of January 6 will play out again and again, at state Capitols, school boards, election offices, and courthouses.
Political violence will become more and more common.
America was not perfect under the Obama Administration. It wouldn't have been perfect under a Hillary Clinton Administration, but compared to a republican fascist agenda - an America that only works for cis white Christian well-off men - a democratic led Congress is far better for everyone.
We could be much better with a Democrat in the White House and a democrat-controlled House and Senate. We could accomplish many good things and bend the arc of justice to help more people.
At the very least, we could stop the Republican agenda:
Tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk
A national abortion ban
Shoving a Christian fascist agenda down our throats.
Stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing Christian extremists
Owning the libs - telling us who we can and can't love, when and if we have children, what sex we have to be, what we can and can't read, if we can learn the correct history of America
That is their agenda.
That is it.
I feel the anxiety and unease about the future of democracy permeating around the country. I live in a blue state where my rights are not being impinged. Yet.
Our current dystopian state is where the election of Trump got us.
Much blood was shed by brave souls who fought to free this country from tyranny to become the world's symbol of democratic values and justice. Many women died to get women the vote. These values that other countries look to emulate are under assault daily by the Republican Party.
We find ourselves on the precipice of losing it all - free and fair elections, the bedrock of democracy. Where each person gets their vote counted, and elected officials need to comply with the will of those voices.
Most people know what's on the line, but far too many don't.
Political violence is encouraged by the right, even by republicans who hold political office.
Our institutions have been badly bruised by lies fomented by Trump and republican officials, with the exception of Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
The stop-the-steal conspiracy is the big lie millions of MAGA Republicans believe. People who don't know how to read or are too lazy. Who love to wallow in their inferiority and grievance complexes and have no ability or desire to do any digging into reality.
They believe the 2020 election was stolen because Donald Trump and his henchmen say so. Even though 60 federal judges - elected by Trump - said it was not.
Undermining our elections was the goal from the beginning as soon as Trump came down the golden escalator.
Violent rhetoric from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green, Kari Lake, and Trump is meant to intimidate and make us question our election process.
The very process that makes us a democracy.
Undermining elections is the first step towards an autocracy, right out of the fascism playbook. It isn't that hard a code to crack. Just look to history to know how it starts, how it proceeds, where it ends and you see the same play repeatedly from Hitler to Stalin to Putin.
Donald Trump started undermining our election process while running against HRC.
In combination with the false claims Trump makes about elections not being secure, he continually attacks the Fourth Estate –the press.
Unrelenting attacks and lies about the press, his claims of "fake news," all while he spreads fake news himself, are harmful to democracy.
Respected journalists from the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the like are truth-tellers. They adhere to journalistic integrity and investigate leads backed by multiple sources before they are allowed to print those as facts.
Occasionally they get it wrong. Rarely do they not tell us when they reported something inaccurately.
We need reporters to seek out and report the truth. Other countries don't have freedom of the press; like Russia, they keep their citizens in the dark as a form of control. We need reporters to call out people like Elon Musk, who recently tweeted a conspiracy theory from an unreliable "news" outlet.
The tweet was deleted but not before it was heard around the world. Journalists set the record straight.
Since Trump was elected in 2016, we've witnessed a slow-moving coup, all-out lies and ranting at rallies meant to keep him in power no matter the people's will.
Trump has repeated the lie that elections are rigged since he ran against Hillary Clinton. He thought he'd lose in 2016. No one was more surprised he won the electoral college than Trump, which explains his claims of fraud up until the election and even after the election trying to justify why he lost the popular vote to Clinton by 3M votes. After the 2016 election, he continued to say millions of ballots were fake. Not true.
It's possible a woman can run against Trump and kick his ass in the popular vote despite the lies he repeatedly tells. We saw it happen. Had it not been for Russian interference in the 2016 election, we never would have had to live through a Trump Administration and be in a much better place as a country.
We held the line in 2020 when we voted to elect Biden overwhelmingly in a free and fair election. Let's not make that the last time our votes get counted.
Vote republicans out of office until they reject the lies spewed by the loud MAGA movement.
Vote. Vote blue. Let's win this by an overwhelming margin, even though democracy means the side with the most votes wins, even if by one vote.
The Capitol police held the line on January 6. They protected members of Congress and the Vice President who were in the Capitol that day to conclude the people's business in a long-held tradition of certifying the election results for the person who won the most votes, Joe Biden.
Republicans in several races across the country are saying (out loud, not caught in secret on a hot mic, but out loud) that they will not accept the results of the midterm elections if they do not win.
Here are just a few,
Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month. - NYT
This sentiment is the opposite of democracy.
Men with guns are hanging out at voting places, trying to intimate Americans exercising their rights to cast a ballot and have their voices heard.
Nancy Pelosi, the woman second in line to the Presidency, had her home broken into by a man who was carrying zip ties with the intent of tying her up, breaking her kneecaps so that she'd have to be wheeled into Congress as an example of what can happen to elected officals if tyrants and bullies don't get there way. Power by intimidation.
Is that how we want our country to run, by force, to take power by violence instead of at the ballot box?
David DePape's attempt to kidnap and torture the Speaker of the House was a delayed continuum of January 6. Pelosi's 82-year-old husband's skull was fractured by this QAnon conspiracy pusher. Paul Pelosi he nearly lost his life.
This is how it happens. This is fascism - when one party takes power by political violence, force, and intimidation because they can't win on the merit of their platform or lack thereof. Republicans only offer lies and election denialism.
Is this the kind of society we want to live in?
Every election is important. If Americans took that truth seriously, we might not be in the position we currently find ourselves in.
Independents and some republicans are joining democrats and voting blue to save our democracy—a democracy under attack from one party.
One party has made it clear they want to take power by force, not by the ballot box.
See you next Tuesday. Have a great week!
Jessica - xoxox
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Happy voting. Vote hard. #votebluein2022
Dark day ahead.
Riley and I tried to unwind with some classical music last night.
https://twitter.com/CareyAnthonyGLY/status/1589841656815456256?s=20&t=z2_qOfFPNOCrUcTpAbn3eg