Journal - 11.15.2024
I had a bad day yesterday.
Watching wholly unqualified and seemingly deliberately anti-qualified candidates being pitched to lead our nation has worn on me a bit. I can’t possibly see how someone like RFK JR can be good to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you? If you don’t know anything about him, and you think “oh, he’s a Kennedy,” then you’re falling for it. Would it do me any good to explain that genetics aren’t as strong as you think they are? Would it do you any good to tell you that the most qualified person to run any organization, out of 350 million, is rarely the offspring of someone who’s run that agency successfully in the past? This is not true. And Elon Musk as Department of Government Efficiency head is a bad joke. I won’t even mention that there are two folks heading that department—an even worse joke. I guess I just did.
Here’s what I’m really struggling with. As we watch these things unfold before our eyes, we’re so shocked that we’re not thinking strategically about the future. The Executive Branch is massive, you all. A lot of the information we get out of what the government is doing comes from Executive Branch functions, and this is what’s really at stake. Are we downloading and archiving those data? Because, when it comes to it, without reliable information, how can we make good decisions? We’ve seen what Trump did last time to “tweak” what he could of what comes out of the government. Are we ready for that again? Remember that research I’m also doing (posted the other day)? Guess how much data comes from the Executive Branch for that sort of project. A lot. And it’s typically good data because of the non-partisan nature of the civil servants that do that job.
If you know of an organization that’s pulling down federal data right now, please let me know. I’d love to help do that, and perhaps store it in a decentralized way so that we can be assured that we get access. I mean, for publicly available data anyway.
But what about government secrets that we’re not privvy to? There’s literally nothing I can do to help with that, so I’ve got to right now have a lot of faith that our feds are doing it.
Here’s the deal, folks. If running our country into the ground to gain power is what is happening (it is), then nothing is sacred to these people. And when, not if, Project 2025 get’s underway, guess what? Institutional non-partisans get replaced by lapdogs and lackeys, and any information that contradicts The Party’s message goes away. This isn’t me making stuff up. Read the document, and exactly why Project 2025 exists in the first place. Think about it. Even the bills maintained by Congress.gov may not survive with the Liar Party, which I will refer to the Trumpublicans as henceforth, when they take over Congress. If we think it’s hard to inform voters now, imagine what happens when that transparency evaporates.
This isn’t doom-and-gloom—it’s a call to action. There’s a lot of work to do to protect our democracy, and while our Federal Government structure is right now moving to do what they can, it’s a hefty task shoring up our institutions. I’m looking for a way to get involved, but I’m just one person. You need to as well. Even if it’s as little as, I don’t know, downloading demographic data from the last twenty years so that they can’t lie about the numbers, that’s a small thing that might help.
BTW, don’t let anyone convince you it was a mandate. That’s not what happened. What happened was that a lot of people who don’t really understand how government works, or why it should work that way, voting with their feelings. A lot of other people, who should understand how government works (looking at you, protest voters and equivocators) anti-voted with theirs. This was a repudiation, not a mandate. It was an endictment of our failing education system, and our profound, almost criminal, lack of understanding of history.
