Best Essays, Part 2 + new Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice launches +
Helping in Afghanistan + ReplaceJoeManchin.com + Delights
In this issue:
Best essays (and a few interviews), part 2, focusing on the authoritarian threat to democracy from a variety of angles.
Political scientist Robert Crawford examines the relationship between nativism and extreme right-wing parties, deriving crucial lessons from the recent German experience about the need both for mainstream parties to reject right-wing immigration frames and for popular mass mobilization to defend immigrants.
Akwe Amosu and Chris Stone interview Indian social justice campaigner Harsh Mander, who describes how the Modi government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act inspired the largest wave of protests since Independence.
Spencer Ackerman explains how Trumpism has its roots in the disastrous “War on Terror” launched by Bush, and largely legitimized and continued by Obama, providing a timely reminder of the relationship between foreign wars and domestic racist politics.
Steve Phillips reminds us that what we are seeing now is not at all new — the white party in American politics has always tried to subvert multi-racial democracy. He argues that we “must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and values.”
Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson propose a much more serious effort to combat the infiltration of right-wing extremists in the military and law enforcement, as well as vigorous enforcement of existing laws to break the back of armed right-wing militias.
Laura Nelson wrote a deeply disturbing exposé in the LA Times on how QAnon has become embedded in parts of the New Age, yoga, and wellness communities.
Political scientist Liliana Mason talks about crucial new research we featured previously showing that Trump’s support (unlike that for other Republicans) is driven by animosity to people of color and that he has consolidated a bloc of people united by animus.
And a couple of older, deeply reported pieces by Evan Osnos examine the role of the 1% in the rise of authoritarian politics and Trumpism.
We are thrilled to announce that the Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice will launch this fall! Deepak has been working to establish the Leadership Center as part of a brilliant team that includes Jessica Barba Brown, Ricardo Anez Carrasquel, Abigail Feder-Kane, Gara LaMarche, Andy Rich, and Tiffany Traille, and an advisory council of 25 movement, community, and labor leaders. It’s a new national initiative to recruit, train, place, and support early and mid-career social change makers, especially people of color, women, and people from working-class backgrounds. The Center is jointly sponsored by the CUNY School for Labor and Urban Studies and the Colin Powell School at City College. Applications for the inaugural cohort of early-career fellows are being accepted right now (until September 10th), and we hope you’ll spread the word, or apply yourself (application materials below). We’re also hiring! See the job announcement below.
The catastrophe facing thousands of Afghans seeking refuge from violence and terror demands a response. Below we offer two recommendations of groups to support to help bring people to safety (and pressure the U.S. government to get its act together and save people’s lives).
Rogue Democrats are blocking filibuster reform and voting rights. Are you puzzled about how to get them back in line? A previous issue suggested that a primary challenge against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in purple Arizona might change her voting behavior on crucial upcoming bills, including for voting rights. In this issue, we spotlight an important effort ripening to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin’s political machine, built on deep organizing over many years by progressive West Virginians. The new campaign, ReplaceJoeManchin.com, by West Virginia Can’t Wait deserves our support.
In our Delights section, we give you the hilarious 4-minute “carrot in a box” contest, a legendary soul group that we’re obsessed with, and the best novel Deepak has read in years.
Best Essays (and a few interviews), Part 2
Robert Crawford’s “The Politics of Belonging: Refugees, Islam and Germany’s Far Right” published by Political Research Associates is a must-read for those concerned about the relationship between nativism and rising authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world.
. . . the U.S. is not alone in witnessing how far-right movements and parties exploit the global crisis of forced migration, as tens of millions of people flee violence, persecution, and extreme hardship, with millions seeking refuge and a livable life in the Global North. Over the past five years, Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has made dramatic gains, thanks largely to exploiting these tensions. . . . While far-right parties now contest power across Europe—and have won it in some Eastern European countries—what happens in Germany is a critical warning for the world about how migration can be exploited to rapidly shift the balance of power in a democratic state. . . .
Compared to other center parties, the Greens have taken a more confrontational stance against the Far Right. In stark contrast to the CSU and the conservative faction of the CDU, the Greens have campaigned against the AfD’s anti-migrant, anti-Muslim vision of a purified German nation. “People are tired of the hate and the fear mongering,” said the Greens’ Bavarian co-leader Katherina Schulze.[89] A prominent party slogan reads, “Give courage instead of spreading fear.”[90] By challenging the AfD directly, the party aims to become an “alternative to the Alternative.”[91]…
Over the past five years, acts of solidarity with migrants and grassroots organizing against the Far Right merged in German society and politics. From the initial outpouring of help as refugees streamed into Germany to the sustained advocacy and support provided by NGOs such as Pro Asyl (Germany’s largest pro-immigrant advocacy organization), religious congregations, neighborhood groups, and city administrations, Germans have responded to the refugee crisis with moral purpose and political activism. By one estimate, over nine million Germans have volunteered to help.[101]
At the same time, far-right anti-migrant protests and violence, and the electoral triumphs of the AfD, prompted hundreds of thousands of Germans to demonstrate against what many feared was a return of fascism. . . .
Despite significant challenges, the solidarity movement remains strong. Demonstrations[114] involving thousands protested a proposed law[115] that would expand deportation and criminalize some pro-migrant activism. Other demonstrations protested deportation flights to supposedly safe countries of origin such as Afghanistan.[116]
Germany, the United States and other destination countries will have to choose. Either meet the moral and political challenge with its enormous difficulties or give their countries over to anti-migrant nationalist closure. In opting for a version of the latter, center politicians might fall back on proclamations like “if liberals won’t control the borders, fascists will.”[156] By hoping to fend off the Far Right by moving Right themselves, they risk, as one observer put it, “becoming the beast they are fighting against.”[157]
The twin crises of forced migration and anti-migrant, far-right, nationalist movements are defining events of our times. How they are understood and responded to will determine Germany’s and America’s political, cultural, and moral futures, and those of destination countries everywhere. Not least, the fates of the world’s forcibly displaced people are at stake.
On a recent episode of the Strength and Soldiary podcast, Akwe Amosu and Chris Stone interviewed Indian social justice campaigner Harsh Mander, who claims that the xenophobic autocracy of Narendra Modi has given birth to “a new politics of resistance, which is founded on love, on fraternity, on solidarity”
Just before [the pandemic hit], there was a massive countrywide revolt, in fact, the largest peaceful revolt that we’ve seen since independence, against discriminatory, citizenship laws. The citizenship law actually for the first time brought into law that Muslims will not have the rights to citizenship that Hindus would have. It was the thin edge of the wedge in a sense, and they thought they would get away with it. I feared they would get away with it. I, in fact, in the spirit of civil disobedience, I said that if the government goes ahead with this. I will register myself as Muslim and demand that I should be excluded also from citizenship. But I thought I’d be completely alone, and suddenly the country burst out into the largest protests that we’ve seen, since independence, very much around the very values of the freedom struggle, where non-Muslims came out in large numbers, protesting peacefully, but very determinedly against the discrimination of Muslims.
In fact, there were a hundred days of glorious protest. . . . And the government had calculated that only Muslims will protest and we’ll crush them. And nothing had prepared them for the way that the Hindu community and other communities came out. And they found their own ways of expressing this solidarity. So you had, uh, Christian weddings where they wore skull caps, etcetera. I mean, there were many ways that they just wanted to show that we stand together. . . . people who were not discriminated felt that pain and stood up — the posters that students put up all over the country, you know, “you divide we multiply” was one of them.
The Modi regime responded to the protests by using the pandemic as a pretext for locking down the country. Mander says that India, like many governments, “converted what was a health emergency into a law and order emergency,” but the rapidity and callousness of India’s lockdown led to suffering on a unique scale, with some 30 million jobless, migrant workers unable to return home. At the conclusion of his interview, Mander describes how he and other activists confronted an epidemic of lynchings, mostly targeting Muslims, by launching a “Caravan of Love” campaign, making “30 journeys to the far corners of the country.” For us, the story evoked Ida B. Wells, the Freedom Rides, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s work to raise awareness about the history of lynching in our country — and it raised hope that the tactics applied in India might inspire our own struggle against racial terror and authoritarianism.
Spencer Ackerman has a new book out: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. We were blown away by his insights in an interview with Ezra Klein.
Spencer Ackerman: Trump understands that what’s right below the surface of all the policies and operations that make up the war on terror is this aggrieved, vengeful patriotism that opens a doorway to power to all of the ugliest currents in American history, all of the most brutal currents, the forms that say we should not only confront an enemy, we should dominate that enemy. And that enemy is defined not by what they do, but by what they look like, by what they believe, by what people who seem in superficial ways like the people we say are enemies also operate as.
So there isn’t any binding specificity there in terms of the operative level of the war on terrorism. But in terms of the culture of the war on terror, Trump understands exactly what that is. He understands that it’s not what elites who architect and then maintain and carry out the war on terror say it is.
It is, in fact, the impulse that says immigration is a national security threat, that says the people who have come inside the United States on a civil misdemeanor are, in fact, threatening the United States, not only in a direct material way, but in a larger spiritual way. That long before we get white supremacists marching in the streets of Charlottesville saying that white replacement is underway, we have powerful figures, both in power in the Republican Party and on the margins of it, that say that Shariah law, Islamic law is replacing American law and American identity.
Very often throughout the last 20 years that I’ve been a national security reporter, the people who husband national security — the intelligence agencies, the military, law enforcement, and then kind of beyond that, State Department, White House and Justice Department officials — never want to confront that subtext, even as the operations of the war on terror inevitably fuel it. They want to talk only about operations that occur overseas or specific law enforcement practices that occur at home, and rarely ever surveillance practices that occur in both places. Never do they want to confront that another cost of the war on terror is this slow, but urgent unraveling of American democracy and also the rise of nativism that seeks to sort real Americans from conditional Americans and act against them accordingly. . . .
Well, the way I put it in the book is that the War on Terror doesn’t create anything. In, perhaps, the banal technological sense, it certainly does in terms of surveillance. But really what the war on terror is is a door. It’s a door into American history to allow the forces that Trump harnessed to not only run through and seize power but do so at a moment of national urgency, at a moment of sustained emergency, at a moment of sustained disaster. . . .
Klein: How would you describe Barack Obama’s relationship to the policy architecture of the war on terror?
Spencer Ackerman: A deeply tragic missed opportunity that put millions of people in peril, that entrenched lawlessness in American national security, and then from their American government, that told itself that it was lawful. And what I mean by that is it’s, as you mentioned, it’s eight years between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. And in those eight years, Barack Obama really makes the forever war forever, even as, like Donald Trump will do subsequently, posture as an alternative to the war on terror. Now, of course, there are many, many differences.
Trump does so cynically. And Barack Obama does so, shall we say, contemplatively, trying to, as he would describe it and many of his administration officials would describe it, find a way toward what I call in the book the “sustainable war on terror,” which is a borrowed term, a term that everyone in good upper middle class liberal circles is probably familiar with in terms of sustaining something so that it doesn’t go beyond its designated limits and then reach a point of destabilization. Well, in fact, under Barack Obama, the opposite occurs.
The N.S.A. grows more powerful, often by inertia, by allowing its tools not only to develop in sophistication, but now after a 2008 surveillance law that Barack Obama votes for knowing that he will very likely soon be president, the suite of tools for the N.S.A. expands and grows, as we see in a program called Prism, to become symbiotic with the social media and data giants that arise at that point in history. . .
And the point I’m trying to drive at is that throughout all of this, not only does Obama expand the aperture and the operations of the war on terror while viewing himself as winding all of this down, but he does so through a particularly perilous way, which is to say that he empowers a lot of lawyers to set up belts of process that the previous administration, as well as the subsequent administration, don’t bother with. . . . I think that’s a profound legacy that I think a lot of people, particularly liberals, have yet to reckon with about the Obama administration.
In an essay for The Nation, “The Party of White Grievance Has Never Cared About Democracy,” Steve Phillips offers a valuable perspective on the alarming extremism of today’s Republican party:
Viewed through the lens of history, however, none of this is new. The hard truth is that whichever United States political party has been most rooted in the fears, anxieties, and resentments of white people has never cared much about democracy or the Constitution designed to preserve it. Those who do want to make America a multi-racial democracy must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and values.
Contemporary analysis of domestic politics is obscured by the historical fact that white Americans fearful of the ramifications of equality for people of color have moved their political home from the Democratic Party, which was their preferred vehicle at the time of the Civil War, to the Republican Party, where they reside today. . . .
Whatever the label, the party that prioritized protecting white rights has always been more willing to destroy the country than accept a situation where people of color are equal and can participate in the democratic process.
In The New York Review of Books, Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson ask the crucial question, “How Can We Neutralize the Militias?”
The substantial neutralization, if not the actual disarmament, of domestic militias is required to ensure that the US remains a stable democracy. While the country obviously has not descended to the level of present-day Iraq or Lebanon or Troubles-era Northern Ireland, these are ominously suggestive examples. Lebanon has no functioning state, and Northern Irish governance was effectively militarized for a generation. In all of these cases, privatized armed forces competed and sometimes colluded with state authorities and perpetuated instability. Once unleashed, armed pro-state groups are notoriously difficult to suppress. . . .
The most urgent concerns are militia infiltration and gun availability. Militias have penetrated some military organizations and law enforcement agencies, and need to be purged from them. For example, about 10,000 current and former employees of the US Border Patrol are members of a Facebook group that has shared racist and anti-immigrant memes. The Oath Keepers boast that tens of thousands of its members are current and former law enforcement officers and military veterans. . . .
The overarching lesson for America is to stick to criminalization and strictly civilian law enforcement, both to preserve civil liberties and to avoid provoking even more extreme reactions. A small core of far-right extremists may survive counterterrorism enforcement efforts in the medium term. If US law enforcement can substantially stop infiltration and generate better intelligence for tactical warnings, though, the right-wing threat is not likely to be more resistant than that of other lethal groups—mafia families, spy rings, the Hell’s Angels—that have been dismantled one search warrant, wiretap, and indictment at a time.
Laura Nelson’s piece “California’s yoga, wellness and spirituality community has a QAnon problem” in the LA Times is eye-opening and troubling.
A world that has long embraced love, light and acceptance is now making room for something else: QAnon.
More commonly associated with right-wing groups, the conspiracy theory is spreading through yoga, meditation and other wellness circles. Friends and colleagues have watched with alarm as Instagram influencers and their New Age peers — yogis, energy healers, sound bathers, crystal practitioners, psychics, quantum magicians — embraced QAnon’s conspiratorial worldview and sprayed it across social media.
The health, wellness and spirituality world has always been primed for that worldview, followers say. Though largely filled with well-meaning people seeking spiritual or physical comfort, the $1.5-trillion industry can also be a hotbed for conspiracies, magical thinking, dietary supplements with dubious scientific claims and distrust of institutional healthcare, including vaccines. . . .
Vocal QAnon support has dwindled since the insurrection, New Age watchers say, but some of the extremism is calcifying into something equally concerning: long-term conspiratorial thinking that encourages radical autonomy and sows distrust in vaccinations, elected officials and institutions woven into the fabric of American life.
On Ezra Klein’s podcast, political scientist Liliana Mason talked about a crucial new study that we featured in a previous issue. Mason and her fellow researcher, Julie Wronski and John Kane, show that Trump’s support, unlike that for other Republicans, has mobilized resentment among a bloc of voters that are more defined by their animus than their party affiliation.
. . . we used this data set called the Voter Study Group, which is publicly available. It’s online. Anybody can get this data. And they interviewed like 8,000 people in 2011. And then when Trump was elected, they thought, you know, if we reinterview these people, we can maybe learn a lot about what’s going on in politics.
So they reinterviewed them in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. They’re doing it basically every year. But because they had interviewed these people in 2011, these data became sort of a time machine for us, where we could go back to 2011, before Trump was a major political figure, and try to see what types of people are drawn to Trump in the future. Before Trump existed, what were their characteristics that then predicted they would really like him in 2018.
So one of the things that we found, obviously being a Republican, being a conservative, that predicted that they would like Trump in 2018. And it also predicted that they would like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and the Republican Party in general. However, for Trump himself, and Trump alone, the other thing that predicted whether they would like him was that they disliked Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Any mix of those, but largely all of them. And that animosity towards those marginalized groups did not predict support for the Republican Party. It did not predict support for Mitch McConnell or for Paul Ryan. It just predicted support for Trump.
And also, these people were coming not just from the Republican Party. Democrats who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. Independents who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. So it’s almost like Trump acted as a lightning rod for people who held these attitudes. He was extremely attractive to them, regardless of party, regardless of ideology. Trump attracted and really kind of corralled this group of people from across the spectrum, and really empowered this faction of Americans who held these attitudes.
And I think it’s important to say that this is not about the Republican Party, because it’s not true — these attitudes don’t predict support for the Republican Party. Trump was really kind of crystallizing or collecting all of these people into one political movement. And they happened to take over the Republican Party, but it’s not that every Republican holds these attitudes. It’s that people who hold these attitudes really love Trump, and Trump is now the figurehead, became the figurehead of the Republican Party. So it’s important to kind of keep them separate, to some degree.
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t highly recommend two older, brilliantly reported pieces by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker that profile the role of the 1% in driving our authoritarian politics, “How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump” and “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.”
Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice launches!
The Platypus is super excited to report that the Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice, which has been in the works for the past year, is launching now and recruiting for the fall! The initiative is designed to recruit and support early and mid-career social change makers, especially people of color, women, and people from working-class backgrounds, to pursue careers in social justice. There will be national programming for mid-career practitioners that will go live in the spring. The inaugural early-career cohort is launching this fall (attendance in the weekend sessions in New York is required), and we’d love your help to spread the word about the opportunity! Applications close on September 10. We’re also hiring for a Director of Social Justice Mentoring and Careers. Details here.
The new Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice at the Colin Powell School and CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies invites applications for the inaugural cohort of Social Change Fellows, a program to support folks interested in careers in social justice organizing, activism, and leadership.
Social Change Fellows is for anyone interested in careers as organizers, activists, policy advocates, and community-based leaders. Fellows might be interested in work on any social justice issue—climate and sustainability, racial justice, health inequities, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive health, voting rights, just to name a few. The program, which begins this fall, will include four intensive weekends of programming in NYC throughout the 2021-22 academic year with organizers and leaders from different fields; mentoring; career support; and summer internship stipends. There are no tuition costs to participants; fellows should be able to participate in person in New York City during the four weekend programs.
Please use this link to find out more about the program and how to apply. Please share with anyone who would benefit from this exciting opportunity: https://forms.gle/ue4P9mM2LwhQsybv5.
Anyone with questions should be in touch with Tiffany Traille, Program Manager for the Leadership Center (ttraille@ccny.cuny.edu), or Ricardo Anez Carrasquel, Program Coordinator for the Leadership Center (ranezcarrasquel@ccny.cuny.edu).
Provocation 1: Welcome Afghan Refugees
The war in Afghanistan has cost so much in lives and money, and the War on Terror after 9/11, started by Bush, continued by Obama, and embraced by both parties, has done incalculable harm to our domestic politics: serving up the racialized fear-mongering and hate that Trump weaponized and building up the surveillance and carceral state that demobilizes political participation by people of color.
The response of the Biden administration to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan has been pathetic. As Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post reported:
As soon as President Biden announced a full military withdrawal, resettling Afghan allies became even more urgent. Around the time of Biden’s declaration this spring, roughly 18,000 people who had assisted the U.S. government — and 53,000 family members — were still in the backlog for Afghan special immigrant visas. That doesn’t count the thousands more Afghan journalists, human rights activists and others at risk.
Groups that assist refugees and other immigrants urged the Biden administration to begin humanitarian evacuations right away, while U.S. troops could assist in the effort. One advocate coalition even gift-wrapped a ready-made evacuation plan.
Their proposals included airlifting allies to Guam. On this isolated U.S. territory in the Pacific, vulnerable Afghans could wait — out of harm’s way and in a controlled environment — to be screened and processed for eventual relocation. This strategy has precedent: After the fall of Saigon, the U.S. government sent Vietnamese refugees to Guam for initial processing; it did so again in the 1990s with Iraqi Kurds targeted by Saddam Hussein. Guam officials said they were ready and waiting to accept Afghan evacuees.
But the White House dragged its feet. It took until mid-July to announce plans to send a mere 2,500 Afghan interpreters and other allies to Fort Lee, Va.; and it sought to dump the rest of our Afghan allies onto a “third country” while they await screening.
“We trusted these people enough to put the lives of troops in their hands but apparently not enough to send them to Guam,” said Becca Heller, executive director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “This is a historically unprecedented type of political cowardice to not bring them to U.S. soil.”
As Ali Noorani rightly points out in this tweet, Biden fatally misunderstood the politics of the issue.
Being outraged isn’t enough. The Platypus is contributing to the International Refugee Assistance Project and Women for Afghan Women, both of which are doing vital humanitarian and advocacy work. And we encourage everyone to demand that the Biden administration and members of Congress implement a generous and welcoming policy for Afghan refugees. The No Muslim Ban Ever coalition has put out a great statement that points to the necessary policy fixes.
Provocation 2: ReplaceJoeManchin.com
We love the guts and strategic savvy of West Virginians Can’t Wait, who launched a new campaign called ReplaceJoeManchin.com this week. Nice piece in The Nation profiling the effort here. We support them, and you should, too. Fear is a necessary motivator for intransigent politicians, in this case one whose choices threaten the future of democracy in this country. From their press release:
West Virginians Launch ReplaceJoeManchin.Com to Do Just That”
West Virginia Can’t Wait Movement Raising Money to Challenge ‘The Manchin Machine’ in 2022, 2024, and Beyond
West Virginia - In recent weeks, the national press has called Sen. Joe Manchin a “kingmaker,” “the most valuable Democrat,” and the “king of the Senate.” Today, a bi-partisan coalition of West Virginia voters are instead calling for his ouster.
WV Can’t Wait is “a movement to win a people’s government in the Mountain State.” Launched in 2019, the group recruited, trained, and backed 101 candidates for office in West Virginia. They supported Democrats, Independents, Republicans, and third party candidates -- so long as they refused corporate donations, promised never to cross a picket line, and signed on to their New Deal for West Virginia -- a comprehensive policy platform that was crowdsourced at 197 Town Halls. Read more about WV Can’t Wait’s track record in The Forge, The Intercept, and Newsweek.
Now the group has launched the website ReplaceJoeManchin.Com to raise money to replace Senator Joe Manchin and his statewide political “machine.”
“The only hope to persuade a West Virginia politician is to fight like hell to replace them,” said WV Can’t Wait Co-Chair Katey Lauer. “Manchin’s network of corporate lawyers, financiers, coal and gas executives, lobbyists, and party bosses will not be defeated in one election, or in one race. This is a guy who has weekly check-in calls with Exxon. It took a generation for his machine to rise to power. It may take a generation for us to replace it. The threat we build must be fearless, homegrown, and permanent. We have to start at the root. And we have to start now.”
In addition to recruiting, vetting, and supporting a candidate to run for Manchin’s Senate seat in 2024, WV Can’t Wait will use the funds they raise to build local political infrastructure that lasts beyond one election cycle. That includes:
Going “deep” - running slates of pro-labor, no-corporate-cash candidates in key municipal and county elections in 2022
Statewide support - organizing candidate trainings and direct support for dozens more individual rural candidates across the state, up and down the ballot
Defending the 14 seats won by WV Can’t Wait candidates in 2020 & 2021 and offering those elected officials the policy, communications, and basic support they need to govern.
Providing ongoing training and funding for mutual aid organizers and citizen journalists who are challenging the political and media establishment in their own communities.
Recent polls have suggested that Manchin’s positions (on minimum wage, voting rights, etc.) are out of step with his constituents. His popularity in-state has also hovered below 50 percent. That’s no surprise to WV Can’t Wait organizers. Manchin is a long-time member of ALEC, whose top donors are corporate lawyers and banking interests.
“You don’t win high office in West Virginia because you’re a servant of the people,” said WV Can’t Wait Co-Chair and former Gubernatorial Candidate Stephen Smith. “You win by being rich, or because your daddy was a politician. We’re out to change that.”
The website will launch on Tuesday, August 17th at 9:00 am. On the site, people can take action by making a donation OR by nominating someone in their community to run for office. WV Can’t Wait staff will follow up with each of those potential candidates -- offering individual coaching and an invitation to upcoming candidate info sessions and trainings.
We encourage press to speak with WV Can’t Wait elected officials, candidates, media makers, and leaders who can further articulate what the movement means to them and the work they see ahead. Contact WV Can’t Wait Co-Chair Stephen Smith (stephen@wvcantwait.com) to set up those interviews.
Delights
Just to lighten the load of this heavy issue, the 4-minute video “Carrot in a Box” is hilarious.
And The Platypus has happily not recovered from Summer of Soul (maybe the best music documentary of all time), which inspired us to listen obsessively to The Staple Singers this week — soulful, political, inspiring genius.
The best novel Deepak has read in years? Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi, an extraordinary novel that follows the descendants of two-half sisters in Ghana through generations.