Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.
They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.
I’ll vote Democrat but I won’t support them if they don’t do anything to deserve my support. Half the blame for the last loss is on the non and 3rd party voters (and the Republican voters of course) but the other half of the blame lands squarely on Harris and the DNC. When your own voters are screaming at you to take a position on something, and you take the opposite position it’s little surprise that you lose even if you’re “the lesser evil”. Continuing to run as diet Republicans is not a winning strategy as the last election demonstrated.
The one bit of good news going into the midterms and looking ahead to the next election is that there have been a number of actual progressive Democrat wins recently despite massive campaigns by both Republicans and old guard Democrats to smear them so there’s some hope that we won’t see a Harris or Biden 2.0 in the next couple elections. When the DNC gets out of its own way and lets popular candidates run on actually progressive campaigns they win. When they either refuse to take a stance or worse take the same stance as Republicans in order to not upset the billionaires and corporate donors they lose. You can blame the voters all you want, but the DNC is just as much at fault for failing to win those voters as the ones that sit out the elections in disgust.
Voting is by definition a show of support, arguably the most important show of support.
Yes but also no. There are people (like presumably lennybird) that think supporting a candidate means you aren’t allowed to criticize them. For instance back when everyone was criticizing Harris for sticking with Israel there were a bunch of people attacking those people saying that they need to STFU because Trump was worse. Harris was a terrible candidate, she was just better than Trump (by a lot) or Biden (marginally). The unfortunate reality of the US political system as it exists today is that you don’t vote for a candidate, you vote against the other one, because both the Democrats and the Republicans suck, it’s just a question of degree.
So yes, I voted for Harris because she was the least bad option between the two viable candidates, but I sure as hell complained about her and Trump every chance I got. Just once it would be really refreshing to see the DNC run a candidate that I actually want to vote for instead of making me vote against the Republican.