Just Layin' it Out

-Guns are just plain bad.  Of course if you hunt, blah blah blah.  Military weapons should not be owned by civilians.  I can't believe I'm even writing this.  What the hell?!?  They shouldn't exist at all. They're pushbuttons designed to kill lots of human beings.  Just bad bad bad.  Necessary maybe for countries to defend their citizens, but I believe in the swords into ploughshares thing.   I've got friends and relatives with them, but I detest them (i.e. the guns).  Those who have promoted gun ownership will rot in hell, I'm sure of it.
-Toxic masculinity is the great cause of most of America's problems (and those of many other societies).  But toxic masculinity is not organic.  It's promoted by the rich and powerful to manipulate the weak for the sake of increasing and consolidating wealth and power.  It's why there is violence, environmental destruction, crime, rape, income inequality, you name it.  It all traces back to male insecurity and desperate attempts to soothe it by incredibly destructive means.
-Racism is likewise not organic.  Children don't naturally hate other people because of their skin color or facial features.  It's taught and learned and promoted by the rich and powerful to divide the weak and thus make it easier to control, defraud, subjugate and generally rip them off.
-The "left" in this country all but disappeared, starting with Dukakis (who famously shunned the word "liberal") and finishing with Clinton.  The democratic party has not been the left flank of American politics for a long time.  "Liberalism" has come to mean gradualism/incrementalism, which, in the face of the rapid destruction of the social contract by the right, actually has merely meant a somewhat slower degradation of the non-rich.
-Moreover, the democratic party has come under the control of rich people who have been hyper-focused on the loud promotion of personal liberties, but completely tone deaf to the needs of the non-rich, and especially of the poor.  This while simultaneously obsessed with somehow appeasing, or pleasing, or "compromising" with a force of evil that has no interest in facilitating any kind of success for them in the form of "compromise" or anything else.
-"Progressive" has come to be the only way to describe politicians who believe in the principles that guided American social policy from FDR to LBJ, and that facilitated the rapidly improving standard of living and opportunities our parents and grandparents enjoyed.
-Libertarianism is an idiotic, adolescent, evil (and literally Satanic) force that has infected our society at almost all levels.
-The republican part is a secret combination, likely the secret combination described in the end of the Book of Mormon.  One of the main messages of the Book of Mormon is that societies often move from idealism and egalitarianism to where greedy men create secret combinations to horde and to "grind upon the face of the poor", and protect one another.  The current republican party is hardly anything but this.  And it is controlled by the former KGB director and current dictator of Russia.
-The KGB has long used racial division to try to subvert America and thus weaken it.  Trump has simply been a Russian asset for a long time.  This was as clear as day during the presidential campaign and every day since.  Our lack of spine to just point this out and get rid of this bastard is an absolutely breathtaking act of cowardice, especially to those of us who lived through (and thought we had won) the Cold War.
-Back to the democrats. In the presidential sphere, we have seen a parade of corporate lackeys vying for and winning the democratic nomination. Before Sanders, the only exception was Edwards, who was literally the only candidate to even mention the poor.  Sanders was a genuinely transformative candidate.  Scrupulously honest, razor sharp focus on the screaming economic inequities that have been ignored by other dems, fearless, outwardly rough and not tv-ready, yet incredibly popular among swing and conservative voters, as well as intermittent voters.  Incredibly well-informed, courageous and ironically amazing at working with some of the most conservative lawmakers.  The democratic establishment made a terrible, terrible mistake in thumbing the scales for an unelectable technocrat who happened to be a woman, thus enabling the election of an unthinkably bad human specimen who is wholly owned by Russia, and who took the country out of the most important climate change initiative, and the most important peace initiative of the last decade.  These are actions which, in themselves will have baleful effects for decades.
-The "center", the "democratic establishment" has failed miserably, not just in the '16 election, but over the past 25 years since the '94 election.  They have consistently squandered majorities and super-majorities.  They have reneged on promises.  They have continually shown favor toward corporations and the rich with the justification that at least they're not criminal/racist right-wingers, i.e. slightly better than the republicans.
-They have been enablers.  Those who have been in abusive relationships, or even been bullied in the playground know what an enabler is.  They make the bully worse by trying to negotiate or compromise with them, rather than standing up to them or holding them accountable (as Gandhi/MLK did).  The big/strong playmate who you think will protect you from the bully, but who ends up sucking up to him instead.
-The "centrists" will tell us that if we'd been better at supporting they're crappy candidate in '16, we would have won, when in reality, we gave more than they did to help.  We're actually a lot better and scrappier in a fight.  And we have infinitely more at stake.  But we knew that their crappy candidate would likely do very little for us and likely continue to enable and facilitate the continued consolidation of the plutocracy.  It's very hard for us to comprehend the gall of "centrists" to blame us for their hideous and selfish blunder and to actually blame us in advance for their incomprehensible drive to nominate a doomed, greasy, dumb, fumbling, unelectable, usury-loving 80-year old, when there are so many incredibly inspiring, appealing, sincere fighters who could actually bring an end to the spectacular income inequality, climate change, and warmongering.