Contradicting reality  

In the Dec. 7 Reader, the first two pieces, a letter from Peter W. Johnson & Ed Raymond's "The Nazis are Coming," both suffer from the logical failure of making claims which assume facts not in evidence & contradict reality. Specifically, both claim that the 2024 return of the great Orange Satan will end US "democracy" forever, when there has clearly been no such thing in years.  

The current 2-party duopoly we have is entirely corporate-owned and right wing. The D's are center right and the R's are extreme right (except for a very few libertarians on their fringes on a few issues) and have been for years. Starting fully with Clinton's term the Neoliberal ideology that only the sacred Market matters (& that human beings don't) became explicit with both parties. Subsequently the cruelty, promotion of economic inequality & the Financial Sector (along with Big Pharma, Big Ag, etc.), war on the poor (War on some drugs, & non-whites) and endless regime change wars installing right-wing austerity governments worldwide became the norm.

I was a Democrat before I could vote (worked to get Jimmy Carter elected when I was in high school), but I exited the Dem party after the 2nd primary was openly stolen from Bernie Sanders in 2020 by the party elites. Both parties have the same donors & cater only to them & not to the majority. Money has been shoveled up to the rich non-stop since the Reagan admin (that's 42 + years if you're counting), & while Mr. Raymond praises the Dem. platform in other columns, they have never remotely even tried to fulfill the platform once elected.

Some obvious examples: Obama claimed he wouldn't bail out the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy in 2008 & then did bail them all out. Additionally after voting against the Iraq War, he continued it as if running a Bush Jr. 3rd and 4th term, did not withdraw from Afghanistan as he'd claimed he would, let all the Bush torture crew off scot-free, etc.

And Biden as president has followed the trajectory of his reactionary, war-loving and anti-worker instincts since launching his political career. Jim Crow Joe who opposed letting black & minority children attend better white schools is now known to those of us on the actual Left as Genocide Joe for abetting an open genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, providing Israel 90% of the bombs being dropped Dresden style on entire neighborhoods, with 40% of the dead being children, the current count as I write this is at least 16,000 dead – far more civilians killed by Israel in the first 2 months than the "evil Putin" did in 22 months fighting a US proxy war we funded to the tune of $11 billion and counting.

Oh, & the "Liberal" millionaire talking heads of the MSM tell us (James Carville, Paul Krugman e.g.) that we're stupid and the inflation we see at the grocery store is imaginary. My health care costs go up 15% every year, I spend over $12,000 annually for coverage and pay $100s more for every visit, even a basic check-up, that I make. It matters little (if at all) which of the oligarch-funded "choice" we are given by the duopoly parties we vote for. We are going to get the same thing. Unless we are in the millionaire class (I'm not) we will get further economically squeezed, the US under Biden now is waging 2 wars in Palestine & in the Slavic hinterlands and the Pentagon announced we should be ready to start a 3rd one over Taiwan in 2024.

Trump is awful, Biden & his Neocon cabal are awful, & the 'Murican people are screwed either way. I will vote 3rd party as I have since I naively voted for Obama (non) "Change" in 2008. I would only vote for Trump or Biden (or Newsom) if someone put a gun to my head, I know that they have contempt for the majority of us and are not on our side. I’ll give Joe a bit of credit though, he kept one promise to his donors, “Fundamentally, nothing will change.”

Mark Schneider – Duluth, Minnesota