Fridays with Nicole Sandler

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29 replies
    • Rayne says:

      Please do not dump YouTube links without context. “Recommended” is insufficient context.

      Video title: Post election trauma: An emergency therapy session | Shrinking Trump
      Uploaded by: Really American
      Blurb: Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal speak with master therapist Dr. John Skrovan about how millions of us can understand and deal psychologically with our shock, disorientation, loss, and fear
      https://www.youtube.com/live/Yf3uzp-Cqi8

  1. -mamake- says:

    Nicole, i haven’t listened to this yet, but wanted to reach out after the devastating news this week. Went to last week’s post to let you know you were not alone and especially now, but comments were closed. Wherever you are this week, I gather you have a loving family and live in a place where there is great natural beauty.
    My message to myself in this dark time is rest, renew, and resource, resource, resource ourselves with all that helps us stabilize and feel strong enough to go forward – for our daughters, sons, ancestors and descendants.

    Blessings to you, Marcy, Rayne, Peter and everyone here who keeps me/us going.

  2. Inner Monologue says:

    Thank you for this. I agree that we must make the brow-beaten mainstream press do their job with the expected Jack Smith report. In my lived experience, I disagree, respectfully, with “I guarantee that they knew nothing of his prosecution when they cast a vote for him on Tuesday.” I took you to be referring not to diehard supporters, but to people who had not followed the situation (thanks in no small part to the press’ malpractice). My relations and friends that voted for him are not all actively engaged with the news, BUT they do not care, either. Flashback to a couple of decades at a family dinner with discussion of the Patriot Act. I knew then that people at the table would throw in with anti-democratic authoritarians and time has proven me correct. A vote for him goes to the heart of who a person is, fundamentally. I want the report to be published and covered widely. I do not expect the people I know to be swayed, but hope others are.

  3. Phillatius says:

    Apologies if I’m jumping the gun, but I hope there wasn’t a problem with my posting a link to the most recent Shrinking Trump podcast: “Post election trauma: An emergency therapy session,” that is in the hopper.

    [FYI – see remarks at that comment. URL triggered auto-moderation requiring human intervention. /~Rayne]

  4. wa_rickf says:

    The analysis that I am reading is that 20m fewer voted in 2024, then in 2020. That white women voted to codify abortion in four of the five states where abortion was on the ballot, then turned around and voted for the guy who caused the problem. That white women don’t want a woman president.

    I was buoyed by the Ann Selzer Iowa poll and truly believed that it would be the women of America who saved democracy.

    Having married a foreign national two weeks ago in my spouse’s native country, our plan was to apply for a CR1 visa and everything will be fine. Then anti-immigrant Trump got elected.

    • Michael1976 says:

      Not all the votes on the West Coast have been counted yet. 158.4 million people voted in 2020. Currently, we’re up to 74.3 million votes for Trump, 70.3 million votes for Kamala, 685,000 votes for Jill Stein, 664,000 votes for Kennedy and 602,000 votes for Chase Oliver. By the time the votes are counted, we’ll probably have approximately as many votes as in 2020.

      • Hoping4better_times says:

        @Michael1976. Math is not your strong suit. Add 74.3 and 70.3 to 144.6 million votes counted to date. California (my home state) needs to count another 1.4 million. Washington and Oregon are much smaller states (still counting). But let’s (probably over) estimate 2-3 million more votes yet to be counted. Then 2024 total votes would be 144.6+3 or 147.6 million in 2024. Compare to 158.4 million (2020). That still leaves 10 million votes that were not cast in 2024. I am simply pointing out that turnout in 2024 was lower than 2020 by a significant amount.

        [Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the SAME USERNAME and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You attempted to publish this comment as “Hop” triggering auto-moderation. Assuming this was a typo, it has been edited to reflect your established username. Please check your browser’s cache and autofill; future comments may not publish if username does not match. /~Rayne]

  5. Krisy Gosney says:

    I don’t get the chance to have actual conversations with Trump supporters but I did with the woman who cleans our house. I wouldn’t say she’s a conservative. She knew of some of the bad things Trump said he’d do but she told me the bad things couldn’t happen because we have rights and laws that would stop him. I told her he could make new laws like a national abortion ban. She said but Calif won’t be affected. I said all states would be effected. She said we’d still have the morning after pill. I told her no that would be outlawed too. She asked if it was to increase population. I said it was to control women. We had about an hour long conversation like this. She disparaged Harris for things like not answering a question with yes or no. I pointed out no politician does that. And Trump is the worse. She said ‘but he moves his arms a lot’ and imitated Trump’s accordion arms. This woman is smart and with common sense but Trump made her set all that aside for his television persona. And she was convinced Harris was for the rich and elite and Trump was for her. She’s lower economic class and Hispanic. She asked me to name what Harris would do for the people. I told her small business loans. She said ‘for people like you?’ I said no for regular people wanting to start a small business. She rolled her eyes at that. Part of the problem being a woman trying to get things done in the public is that most people are prone to believe negative things about women especially if it’s coming from a man. Even if the things are outrageous, most people will believe them to some degree. Personally I was surprised how much of the country did vote for Harris. That’s a huge accomplishment for her and for the country.

      • Spencer Dawkins says:

        That’s an excellent question. It’s also worth asking if she’s read “First They Came” by Martin Niemöller. At this point, if you’re not basically Elon Musk, you’re in the Beetlejuice waiting room in hell, and they’ll get to you when they call your number. Pretending that you’re not, so you don’t have to care about others, is absolutely going to end badly.

        • Rayne says:

          Yes to Niemöller. Because the brown shirts aren’t going to give a shit if a lower-economic Hispanic cleaning woman is legal or not when they perform a sweep.

          In the mean time we should be discussing how we are going to protect them from their own ignorance when the sweeps begin.

      • harpie says:

        Rayne, have you seen this piece by Michael Tomasky?

        Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?
        It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else.
        It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer. https://newrepublic.com/post/188197/trump-media-information-landscape-fox Michael Tomasky November 8, 2024 10:25 a.m. ET

        […] But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

        The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media [list] sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win. […]

        It’s orchestrated propaganda.

        • harpie says:

          Heather Cox Richardson brings the Tomasky article
          into her discussion in today’s Letters From An American: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-8-2024
          …which begins with:

          Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. […]

          And later brings this:

          […] In a social media post, [Amanda] Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” [< Quote from Angelo Carusone of Media Matters]

          In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. […]

        • Rayne says:

          Haven’t, thanks. I admit I’ve been avoiding all articles/essays which purport to explain what happened because there’s been a bloody deluge of them.

          We’ve known for decades now we need a leftwing media ecosphere and for some fucking reason (narrator: it’s the money) we can’t manage to pull one together.

        • harpie says:

          Sorry Rayne…Yes, most of the “takes” are awful, but I thought this one was better than most. One thing that became clear to me as I read these, is that this doesn’t work as well with people who are less Authoritarian, because they are less Authoritarian. [Kind of like the “herding cats” idea.]

        • Geddy Myung says:

          It is also social media, which many people believe feeds them accurate “news.” It bolsters much of the rightwing media’s messages.

          Rayne, apologies for this going to moderation. I’ll do my best to avoid repeating whatever triggered it.

          [Geddy — very sorry, I can’t tell what tripped auto-moderation. Could be algorithm is a little tight right now. /~Rayne]

      • harpie says:

        There’s a part of Timothy SNYDER’s new piece that I think relates here:

        What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist? Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/what-does-it-mean-that-donald-trump-is-a-fascist Timothy Snyder November 8, 2024

        […] Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word [fascist to describe their opponent], though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. […]

        A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand.
        A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true.
        A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump. […]

  6. Spencer Dawkins says:

    Marcie, you are the best person on the planet as of yesterday, with the exception of my lovely wife. Thank you for your wisdom, and thank you for your blunt encouragement.

    There are so many things I wanted to comment on your interview, but I don’t want to distract your important work by adding comments for you to read!

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Glad you feel that way. It will make it easier to spell her name correctly, Spenser. Click the “about” tab to find out.

  7. Greg Hunter says:

    It was a devastating night nationally, but it could have been far worse as locally I was surprised our Democrats for the Wyoming House hung on as well as the Laramie City Council and Albany County School Board.  While our state house has become a christian nationalist legislature, the Democrats picked up one seat and that seems to parallel the Montana Legislature pick up even as Jon Tester is sadly gone, just when our Public Lands needed him.

    I think the local races were won by hard work on the ground even as the tide of disinformation mailers and social media made these local races closer than they should have been.  I suspect the Montana wins were achieved with a great ground game, but I will have to look.

    I think we can optimize the support for public education by finally telling the truth about what made public schools great for a large swath of Americans.  I propose my analysis of this issue in a way that most have not considered, but I would love to collect more data on my analysis as I think it can be proven with census data.

    I work with a great deal of younger men as I am now a mentor to this young cohort and while I teach them about the history of environmental regulation, they exposed me to Joe Rogan and their fears.  Ignoring Joe Rogan and cancelling Dave Chappelle had serious consequences that were impossible to overcome with this cohort.  I had proposed 18 months ago that Sherrod Brown should meet with Dave Chappelle and have him promote his campaign as I feared that Ohio voters already had abortion protections so the abortion issue was off the table, but not the transgender sports issue.  I also thought that Sen Schumer should have resigned as Leader and put a fly over Senator in that place and I really do think this should be done now even as we lost some good ones for that spot.

    Enjoy the vacation and thanks for the Blue Sky tip as I look forward to finding an organizing place where we can tell the truths that people did not hear about Donald Trump.

    • Rayne says:

      Fuck Dave Chappelle. Punching down isn’t comedy and it shouldn’t be normalized.

      Think about normalizing a cis-het Black comic beating on a small community composed of persons with a genetic hardware/software mismatch. What’s next? Asian comics beating down on gays? Hispanic comics beating down on Muslims?

      What puts the brakes on White comics beating on Jews? Roma? disabled? elderly? Black, Asian, Hispanic, other minority groups all for the sake of a laugh?

      When does that stop being acceptable comedy and start being permissible behavior?

      How much of this last four years has been the process of normalizing exactly that, so that when the mass deportations start, a majority of this country thinks it’s wholly acceptable? So when the random death squads start that mostly white majority think, “Ha, how amusing, will it make SNL’s cold open?”

      There are far too many people who refuse to draw a line and make it absolutely clear this crap stops now. Including lauding a moron like Joe Rogan as an authority figure.

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