Dear Rick 14 – The Next 4 Years, Staying Informed
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
December 20, 2016
Scott: With fake news, with the Comey thing, with Trump, with Trumpism, and ethnic nationalism on the rise in America and elsewhere, how can we get through the next 4 years?
Rick: I live in California, which voted for Clinton 2 to 1. But many people that I talk to are thinking he may not make it through the full 4 years Just looking at comments, people think he will get the full 8 years.
So far, even though I hate hat is going on, he is good for our savings because the stock market is going crazy. I have one friend who listens to conservative news 24 hours a day.
Where said friend doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t want to let any Muslims into the country, he has the full hyper-conservative agenda.
Trump has given a lot of signs of being really, really bad, but it is hard to sort out what really, really bad will mean – or even hard to discern how conservative he is. He has shown a lot of signs of being inconsistent about his beliefs and policies, but he has put out a lot of conservative and anti-government elements with his appointments like Rick Perry.
It is still too early to tell what the effects will be, like telling whether the Democrats will be able to fight. Republicans have a monopoly on leadership. They own the Senate, the House, the Presidency, and pretty soon the Supreme Court.
So, the Democrats will have to fight from a position of weakness, but it is hard. How to get through the next 4 years? The word that keeps coming up both in private conversations and in news is vigilance, staying informed and understanding what’s going on.
You mentioned fake news. This election was at least in part due to the people believing the outcome was bullshit. A large segment of the population, more conservatives than liberals, will continue to embrace bullshit.
The truest believe on the conservative side, even investigative and fact-based reporting, is itself fake news. They will support anything that supports their side. Recently, 52% of Republicans believe that Trump won the popular because he said that he won the popular vote, even though Clinton won the popular vote by 2.84 million.
Step one is staying informed via actual news and trying to understand what that means and if we’re lucky and things don’t turn out to be that bad, and Trump is starting to backtrack on building the immigrant wall and putting Hillary Clinton on trial for the emails, so even if he did put her on trial I do not know how that would affect us personally or politically, except that the most qualified candidate is getting reamed over pretty trivial bullshit.
Author(s)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
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Rick Rosner 