How We Make It Through Another Week

It's exhausting to get up every morning and be hit with a barrage of bad news. Let's try a different way.

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Feb 13, 2025

Brainstorming in red and blue — Graphic created with Bing AI

It’s been a week, amirite? Actually, it’s been three weeks that have felt like three months, and now we have HHS Secretary RFK Jr and his brainwork to contend with - but I digress.

Karoli has written a great piece this week about how we cope with all of the lawless chaos that’s been engineered to make us feel powerless. (Hint: we’re NOT powerless, and she maps out how we use the power we DO have.)

Aliza and I are doing all we can to take Karoli’s advice, in that while we are keeping informed on everything, we are also reacting to the bits that are… comical. And in this week’s podcast, that included the rebranding of the nation’s southern waters as the “Gulf of America.” As well as welcoming our new territory of “Red, White, and Blueland.” And watching our new unelected co-president - and his four-year-old - dominate an Oval Office press conference.

Check out the video below:

Or listen to the audio version:

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Quit Doomscrolling, Start Brainstorming

by Karoli

Are you battered with a barrage of bad news every morning? There are days where I dread opening my email, but before I even get there I can have a pile of text messages with more bad news and doom, served with a side of notifications with the same themes.

If I wasn’t depressed when I first woke up, it doesn’t take long for me to get there.

Let’s start with the truth: No matter what happens, we’re not going back to how it was before. They’ve broken too much, they’re using their message machines to justify the looting of America’s wealth and knowledge to make government as we’ve known it unrecognizable. The courts are our best chance to preserve our democracy, but that will be a slow process.

Here’s the other truth: What they’re doing will have immediate repercussions which will hit people in the pocketbook. Inflation rates are already rising; the job market is in retreat. Pretty soon the ICE raids will cause food to rot in the fields instead of going to the market for us to consume. And those repercussions will do harm to everyone, while Trump sits and tries to blame Biden for his folly. People won’t like what Musk and Trump are doing quite as much when the consequences arrive.

Jamelle Bouie, in his New York Times op-ed (gift link) entitled “There is no going back” wrote:

For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.
Trump may have lied about the influence of the far right on his plans, but it is clear that his voters did not anticipate anything other than a return to the status quo before the pandemic. What they’re getting instead is a new crisis pushed on by a dangerous set of corrupt oligarchs and monomaniacal ideologues. As dangerous as the president and his allies are, however, their hold on government is not as total or complete as they imagine. The president’s opponents, in other words, still have room to maneuver.

This is where we need to focus: On how we reimagine government and rebuild our democratic institutions.

In 2013, the Groundswell group led by Ginni Thomas was born with the intention of waging a 30-front war on the left. The hard right was depressed. Obama won a second term, immigration reform was on the table, and they were seeing their hopes for a repeal of the ACA fade away. But instead of being sad and stressed about it, they decided they’d start working on a messaging and policy machine with a coalition of their activist groups to push their agenda forward.

Yes, agenda. They had one. They didn’t simply decide to push for what they were against, they decided they needed to be FOR something. In their case it was voter suppression and a nativist immigration policy, as well as a plan to use the Benghazi tragedy to do harm to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. These were all plans which succeeded, in part because of the billionaires who funded them and in part because they were just dogged about harassing key senators and representatives while amplifying their message over and over again. But their overarching goal was more broadly the goal of making government fail and here we are 12 years later.

As Bouie writes, “should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.”

So let’s brainstorm that. What do WE want? Do we want an end to Citizens United? Yes. Medicare for All? Yes, and while we’re at it, let’s reimagine Medicare and our healthcare system to be something more streamlined, efficient and patient-driven. What else? Leave a comment and tell me.

Bottom line here is this: We have to be FOR something. And we should be free to reach for that something, not approach it with caution. If we’re not going back, then let’s actually reimagine a government of, by and for the people that works for them instead of the Elon Musks of the world. Then let’s work in opposition to President Trump/Musk with a vision of what we want in front of us instead.

In other words, dare to hope.