Lots to talk about and do in this dangerous period.

1. What can we do to support impeachment?
2. How are the Virginia elections going? What can we still do to help our candidates win?
3. What is happening in the other November elections we should pay attention to?
4. What is our priority after Virginia turns blue?

Hurrah for us on leaving Facebook. Time to help others do so as well. It may seem impossible, but if you want to see how seemingly impossible social change is done, look at Hochschild’s book Bury the Chains where he points out that when the abolitionists started their campaign, slavery was as central to the British economy as cars are to ours. Replace the word cars with Facebook. We can break the chains.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/10/10/1891571/-How-to-create-the-Great-Facebook-Migration?utm_campaign=trending

Attendance

Naomi
Andy
Judy
Babette
Bruce
Mary
Noemi
Jeff
Bill

Education and General Discussion

Judy met with Nancy Skinner, trying to get her to sponsor a bill to repeal a provision requiring sheriff candidates to be police officers.

Naomi and Andy had coffee with Ammar Campa-Najjar. He’s the candidate who got 48.3% of the vote running against Duncan Hunter. This district is our best chance at flipping another California Congressional seat in 2020. Darrel Issa is thinking about running in this district because Hunter is weak. Ammar thinks he (the Democrat) has a good chance either way because Issa would be a carpetbagger, and Hunter wouldn’t benefit as much from the confusion with his father as he did the last time. Naomi told him to come back later because we’re prioritizing Virginia right now.

Andy talks about how and why Trump is pushing nonsensical consipiacy theories about Russian interference in the 2016 .

Bruce talks about the book “We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint For Democracy After Trump”. If they get enough pre-orders, it can get on the NYT best-seller list. The proceeds go to Indivisible’s new “Save Democracy Fund”. Info at https://book.indivisible.org/

Indivisible has a 5-minute ‘Impeachment Daily’ video on Twitter and YouTube. The first episode is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvxAX8eIT_I.

Indivisible has a 72-question questionnaire for presidential candidates. It’s currently a draft. Bruce suggested some questions about education.

Naomi put a new thermometer on our website because we reached the goal with the earlier one. The current goal is $1,000 for the Virginia candidates we’re supporting. If it gets to $1,000, we might raise it to $1,500.

Action Items

From Andy’s discussion:

1) Pressure the New York Times to improve their coverage of Trump’s disinformation campaign. They should present facts as facts and lies as lies rather than practicing both-siderism. We need a drumbeat of the facts. Information about letters to the editor is at https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014925288-How-to-Submit-a-Letter-to-the-Editor . Here is Andy’s suggested wording:

Experts in authoritarianism agree that rather than impose their own version of events as truth, today’s dictators are promulgating fake news in an attempt to make readers abandon any attempt to discern the truth, and to rely on the Strong Leader instead. Your recent headlines accept incorrect or even nonsensical claims uncritically, even when they are refuted in the stories themselves. This initial misimpression is not doing your readers a service.

2) Make sure we don’t help feed the beast. Media Matters made a list of companies advertising on Fox. This worked with Breitbart, but Fox is trickier. The list is at https://www.mediamatters.org/these-are-fox-news-leading-advertisers.

3) Talk it up with other Democrats. We need to keep the morale up.

Postcards

We completed postcards to 150 addresses for Agnew and Guy since the last meeting. We did 200 more for Guy at this meeting. That’s all we have right now for Virginia. Tony the Democrat is currently doing the slate of Kentucky statewide offices.

Next Meeting

The next meeting is Sunday, October 20.

We covered many topics at our meeting yesterday and Jeff will be posting complete notes soon, with info about how to contact the New York Times about weak both-siderism reporting complete with some Andy verbiage, how to avoid feeding the Fox beast and more. Meanwhile, our final Virginia fund-raising thermometer is posted and I wanted to report we FINISHED all the postcards. It means a great deal to me that we gather together to encourage each other in the face of the evils we are fighting. Thanks so much and onward!

Indivisible Book. In Thursday’s Indivisible national webinar Ezra Levin made a pitch for pre-ordering the new book We Are Indivisible: a blueprint for democracy after Trump, co-written by Ezra and Leah Greenberg.  It will be out Nov. 5; if there are 5,000 pre-orders it will immediately appear on best-sellers lists and generate national attention and reviews. It’s $27; proceeds from its sale go to Indivisible’s new Save Democracy Fund, a project to support Indivisible’s pro-democracy reform work at state, federal, and presidential levels.

Impeachment Daily. If you aren’t already swamped with impeachment news, you can now watch the Impeachment Daily on YouTube. The first episode is here, presented by Meagen Hatcher-Mayes, Indivisible’s Director of Democracy. During the webinar, Meagan stressed the role Indivisibles played in bringing more Democrats around to support for the impeachment inquiry and the importance of continuing grass-roots pressure as the process moves forward. Prepare for a national Day of Action when the articles of impeachment are finalized.

We have serious postcarding to do for Virginia, discussion about how to support the Democrats during the impeachment proceedings (and educate ourselves as per Andy’s post) and some talk about how to move forward with endorsements. Lots to talk about and do.

By Friday, all the mainstream news organizations will be explaining why Attorney General Barr is in Italy and has been in contact with Australia. They will probably be doing it in a way that maximizes credence in the bonkers conspiracy theory that the Trump regime is furthering as their counterattack against Congress and the Rule of Law.

The conspiracy theory begins with the assumption that the Deep State (that is, the intelligence community and the Civil Service) are executing a coup against the “duly elected President”. The specific purpose of Barr’s counterinvestigation is to prove that the Mueller Report was an unfair slander that should never have been inflicted on The Autocrat, from whom all blessings flow. To this end, they are trying to discredit the Australian intelligence operative who reported on George Papadopoulos. They are in Italy to meet the obscure academic Joseph Mifsud, a one-person think tank with no obvious source of support thought to be someone’s secret agent. Simplest to understand are two ways in which Ukraine is implicated. The first is that Ukraine faked the evidence that Putin-ally Yanukovych paid off Paul Manafort. Or, perhaps, the evidence is not fake, as the amounts correspond to sums he deposited offshore without paying taxes, but that given Manafort’s friendship with the Autocrat, it should have been suppressed. The second association with Ukraine, which may be the strangest claim of all, is that the compromised DNC server is in Ukraine. This is the server Trump mentioned on his phone call with Zelensky. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the server, or the hackers, were Ukrainian (Mueller indicted Russians for this act and laid out evidence).

Tying the loose ends together is the Steele Dossier. Much of the dossier has been proven to be true. Some still seems rather far-fetched, as its own redactor agreed. But in Trumpland, its very existence is an Original Sin, not yielding before the Autocrat. People who should know better insist it couldn’t be used as evidence for warrants because it was paid for by Trump’s opponents. If so, our prisons will soon be emptied when felons learn the police can no longer use evidence obtained from tips given by professional rivals, jilted lovers, and others who don’t like them.

The big hole in the theory is why this Deep State waited until after the election, while before the election their main accomplishments were (1) announcing an additional inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email server less than two weeks before the election; (2) letting Moscow Mitch McConnell bully them into silence about Russian interference in the election; and (3) keeping completely silent about the connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, involving Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and others, that they already knew about. But like other conspiracy theories, the point is not the plausibility, the point is the shared membership in the club. In fact, believing the impossible is a strong attraction (see also: miracles in religion). So, the question is how to fight the Trump counternarrative. We don’t need to persuade everyone: we just need to keep the believers to the irreducible minimum core. The floor is open.

We still have about 90 postcards left to write (addresses from Noemi), and not all postcards have been returned to us for sending. Election Day is coming… We need them by the next meeting.

By the way, we spent a good half-hour with Mr. Campa-Najjar. He is probably the most flippable of the seats still in Team Orange Red hands, especially if Hunter is the Republican candidate. Former Rep. Darrell Issa has also filed to run. (Ever notice how the DC swamp-hating Republicans all want to go back there after a brief stay at home? See also—Paul Ryan.) He will need both cash and postcarding.

You may recall, he ran against future jailbird Duncan Hunter in 2018, coming close but not quite. He will be at our house this Friday 9/27 at 9:00 am. We are supporting his second try as part of a non-Indivisible commitment we made to J Street. (By the way, Washington, DC does not have a J Street. The grid goes from I Street to K Street.)

RSVP to us if you would like to meet him here.