As we enter the President Trump era of political discourse, I am really starting to notice the drastic ramping up of fake news distribution. I am not one of those people who claim that fake news is the reason that Clinton lost the election. Clinton is the reason that Clinton lost the election, so this is not that kind of post. However, there is a problem when people are posting random fake news sources and completely failing to fact-check anything that they encounter on the internet. I hope people aren’t out here reading blogs and just taking everything at face value, but the power of confirmation bias is strong I see. So I felt like posting some educational information that may be universally useful, easy to verify, and as free of opinion as I can get. Maybe. Probably not.
There weren’t many good reasons to really support Clinton during the past campaign, so one of the primary selling points from her side was “you need to vote for Clinton because Trump will ruin the world, oh no!!!” This didn’t work well enough, as we can see. There is a Congress, regrettably terrible, but with opposition Democrats (and a few others) that now have the task of denying at least the worst of what the Republicans have in store. So what are their options?
- Filibuster – if Trump & the Congress Republicans are together on an issue, the Dems have the option to waste a bunch of time by talking a lot. Hey, that’s what I’m doing!
- Judicial challenge – if Trump is really trying to do something via executive order that would be terrible, they can call it to be denied by the court.
- States get checks and balances – Federal rules don’t always really affect every state equally. Those who live in states that align with their views are in better luck.
- Money – Congress controls the funding for everything, so Trump needs at least some agreement from the Congress so that they don’t deny his efforts by de-funding things.
So if it is truly the end of the world, whoever that was crying on camera during the election results, you will have to blame more people than Trump. Obviously, Trump should hold a lot of the blame, as he led the supposed nationalist uprising. I guess he would accordingly get credit if Republican ideas work. That would be pretty funny to see… like, if somehow, corporatism was the answer to fixing the corporatism that is currently ruining our society.
I’m not sure we can trust the Congress to do anything close to protecting us, though. So we better get active.
https://www.usa.gov/volunteer
http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Involved-in-Local-Politics
http://www.wolf-pac.com/
https://nextgenclimate.org/volunteer/