Jessica Hische has kicked off an amazing campaign to help elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The posters are inspiring. I couldn’t decide which one to place on my website; therefore, I made my own using David Jonathan Ross’s Fit. Feel free to use it to spread the message. Here’s the PNG version. If you are inspired to create your own, however, you can download the template to get started. Let’s rise up, show up, unite, and vote the motherfucker out.

Of course he knew about the seriousness of the pandemic. He is just too incompetent to do anything about it. He doesn’t give a fuck that people died from the coronavirus. It is what it is.

Unfortunately, the Republicans are too weak and too scared to hold him accountable. His supporters don’t see anything wrong with their God. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.

Four more years and he will have more control of the country. With his power, he can make the presses, the dissidents, and the scientists disappear. He can shoot somebody without losing his voters.

I don’t know how people can vote for him. Maybe they just want to see democracy burn down to the ground? Maybe they want to live under a totalitarian system of government?

An excellent piece from Ibram X. Kendi for The Atlantic. Kendi writes:

White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.

Kendi concludes:

Those who embrace Trumpism demand, like police officers, qualified immunity for their racism and sexism. When they hear “Me too,” when they hear “Impeach him,” when they hear “Black lives matter,” when they hear “No justice, no peace”—they hear the sounds of violent attacks on their supremacy, they envision their property burning, they see their America under attack. In their minds, slavery did not end.

Scary time in America, particularly for Black Americans.

Americans who sacrifice their lives for our country are losers and suckers. Americans who sacrifice their lives for Trump are winners and patriots. Let’s face it. We are heading toward totalitarianism if we don’t vote him out.

I wake up every morning and ask myself, “Is it November yet?” I am waiting for November like my life is depending on it. My life does depends on it. America is getting crazier and crazier each day just because of one individual. I don’t know how I am going to live with four more years of chaos under this fascist.

American politics is becoming like gangster rap in the 90s but in a much bigger scale. The rival between East and West started words, but quickly escalated with the gun down of 2pac and Biggie. The divisiveness in American politics started with words, but it has quickly spilled out to the streets. Americans are being killed and yet the fascist is doing nothing to stop it. Instead of taking responsibility for his incompetent leadership, he blames on his opponent. The lies are just getting ridiculously absurd each day.

If he gets re-elected, democracy will die. No one will stop him from doing anything. The Republicans can’t do anything now. Once he has absolute power, they will just follow his order. The ones who speak out against him will be punished or vanished. It will become reality if he wins again.

I am terrified. I am losing sleep. I am stressed the fuck out. We need decency. We need empathy. We need unity. We need democracy. We need to put an end to this madness. We need to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Don Windslow’s #OpenLetterToRepublicans video is powerful. It’s a must-watch. I hope there are still sensible Republicans who can see the danger of this authoritarian regime. We need to unite to put an end to this American tragedy.

George Packer writes in The Atlantic:

Two days after the shooting, with her son fighting for his life, [Julia Jackson] begins her public remarks softly, almost inaudibly, but her own words seem to give her growing strength, and finally a profound resonance. She says that her son would not be happy with the damage to his community. “As I have prayed for my son’s healing, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I also have been praying, even before this, for the healing of our country,” Jackson says, and she goes on: “We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what’s going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. To all of the police officers, I’m praying for you and your families. To all of the citizens, my Black and brown sisters and brothers, I’m praying for you. I believe that you are an intelligent being just like the rest of us. Everybody, let’s use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other. America is great when we behave greatly.”

Packer concludes:

[Biden] should speak for justice and for safety, for reform and against riots, for the crying need to bring the country together. If he says these things half as well as Julia Jackson did, we might not have to live with four more years of Trump.

The headline is an unfortunate clickbait, but the article is worth reading.

Susan B. Glasser writes in The New Yorker:

Even for a salesman like Trump, it was never going to be an easy deal to close, what with a deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, nationwide protests over racial injustice, and even a killer hurricane smashing into the Gulf Coast hours before his speech. Some seventy per cent of Americans currently believe that the country is on the wrong track, according to recent polls. Who can blame them?

This should be devastating context for a President, any President, seeking reëlection, a true picture of American carnage to replace the false one that Trump conjured four years ago. Yet the strategy of Trump and his team is now clear: to talk about how bad things would be in Joe Biden’s America, a violent socialist ruin in which freedom itself will no longer exist and rampaging protesters, like those now committing “rioting, looting, arson, and violence” in “Democrat-run cities,” will be coming soon to a suburb near you. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Vice-President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said on Thursday night. To say this sounded a bit off in actual America, Trump’s America, does not do justice to the bizarre dissonance of this year’s Republican Convention.

If he gets reelected, not even democracy will be safe in Trump’s America. We need to vote for Biden.

The Republicans and their incompetent-in-chief applied the same fear tactics they used four years ago. They sounded like someone has been running our country instead of the orange idiot. They didn’t mention any progress in the last four years because they have failed to make America greater or safer.

They have no plan or vision in the next four years. They promised that he would bring back the economy he himself has driven to the ground. They said nothing about the unemployment numbers under his watch. They ignored the pandemic because they have failed to keep America safe. They made it seem like our country is in deep shit and he’s the only one that can pull us out of the shithole, in which he is currently in charge of.

The lies are beyond comprehensible, but they seem to work for his base. If you lie repeatedly, it will become the truth and that’s how fascism works. We are heading that direction if we won’t vote him out on November 3.

Một số bạn đọc đã gửi email đến tôi sau khi đọc blog post “Nên đi bỏ phiếu.” Có bạn cho rằng tuy giờ đây đã thấy được sự dối trá và vô tài của ông Trump như vẫn không bỏ phiếu cho ông Joe Biden. Bạn cho rằng bỏ phiếu cho đảng Dân chủ là làm ngược lại với lợi ích của bạn. Vì bạn là một người làm thương mại mà đảng Dân chủ thì tăng thuế.

Tôi hiểu được việc bạn kiếm ra tiền bằng mồ hôi và nước mắt của mình. Nhưng nếu như bạn bỏ phiếu cho đảng Dân chủ không có nghĩa bạn làm ngược lại với lợi ích cá nhân mà bạn làm theo đạo đức của chính mình. Giữa công việc đóng thêm một chút thuế hay để nền dân chủ (democracy) của đất nước tự do bị sụp đổ thì bạn chọn như thế nào?

Dĩ nhiên tôi không thể nào đứng nhìn nền dân chủ bị phá hoại trong tay một người không tôn trọng luật pháp. Không ai trên cả luật pháp và tổng thống Mỹ cũng không ngoại lệ. Nếu như đóng thêm thuế để giúp đỡ những người gặp khó khăn thì cũng nên.

Tôi nghĩ hoàn cảnh lúc mới đặt chân đến bến bờ tự do của bạn cũng giống như tôi. Nhờ có tiền trợ cấp của chính phủ Mỹ (tiền của những người đóng thuế) đã giúp đỡ dân tị nạn chúng ta lúc ban đầu gặp nhiều khó khăn. Nhờ đó mà bạn đã phấn đấu từ hai bàn tay trắng để có được ngày hôm nay. Giờ đây anh đã thành công thì tại sao không giúp đỡ người khác như mình ngày xưa? Người Việt Nam chúng ta có câu, “Đừng ăn cháo đái bát.”