The US election is like a train wreck, it’s impossible to tear your eyes away.
But we made a conscious effort not to get sucked into the maelstrom. There’s nothing we can do to influence the outcome and we have our own issues right here in Alberta and Canada that need our attention
That worked until Oct 30 when Mr Soapbox received an email from the Orange Oompa Loompa himself. Trump.
The subject line was: “I’m not supposed to share this with you.” Oooh, a secret!
Trump sent Roy his team’s final PATH TO VICTORY memo because “I know I can trust you to keep it confidential.” Wow! Roy’s part of Trump’s inner circle!
The memo, entitled SECURE MEMO FROM TRUMP, sets out a 3 step plan:
- Reach every potential Trump voter before Election Day by ramping up the ground game.
- Win every key battleground state. Polls shows the race is a DEAD HEAT. Need more boots on the ground to get it done.
- CRUSH fundraising goals
What can I say, it’s a game-changing strategy. Kudo’s to Trump’s brain trust.
Then Trump asked Roy to donate $6.
The confidential Trump memo was followed by a flurry of emails from not-so-prominent Republicans.
Lisa McClain, congresswoman from Michigan (and a self described pro-life, pro-Trump, Catholic politician) said her state will determine the election. She praised Roy as a patriot and said he should know the truth: the Democrats crushed jobs, the middle class, and cities, to make a quick buck. All Roy had to do was donate to the Trump campaign and “we will finally rid our country of the Democrat party once and for all.
Autocracy? Sure, why not?
Elise Stefanik, congresswoman from New York state linked Biden’s “garbage” comment with Hillary’s “deplorables” comment and said no matter what they call us, Roy, as one of the 75 million patriots, should donate to the greatest political movement in history and donate.
Gavin Wax, the 30 year old president of the New York Republican Club told Roy not to believe the Kamala bump. The fact Harris is “SURGING” in the polls and Trump will be down by 2, 4, 6, or even 8 is “NORMAL.” He warned Roy the Left Media will lie and say Trump can never RECOVER.
Not true, said Gavin, then he asked Roy to donate.
Is there a reason why these people talk in CAPITALS???
Then, on Nov 2, Roy heard from the Orange Oompa Loompa again.
The subject line was: 3 days until victory!
Trump set out 3 reasons to donate $3: (1) to send a get-out-the-vote message, (2) to fund the final ad blitz and (3) to break every fundraising record. This must have been a very important message because there were exclamation points all over the place!
Then the final sweetener. There was a “bonus reason” to donate. A donation “will automatically enter you in the contest to win the only SIGNED GOLD DARK MAGA HAT!”
A signed hat? Cool!
What the hell is going on?
We have questions, lots of questions.
For starters: how did Trump and his acolytes from New York, Michigan, and God knows where, get Roy’s email address?
We lived in the US from 2000 to 2007. We were citizens for a brief time during which we were registered Democrats and voted accordingly. We returned home and are no longer American citizens, we don’t reside in the US and we’d vote for a tree stump before we voted for a Republican. So tell me, how did Trump’s team get their grubby little paws on Roy’s email address?
And another thing, don’t American political parties spend billions on sophisticated computer programs that can identify potential supporters based on the magazines they read and the burgers they eat? Even a cursory glance at Roy’s data (he doesn’t belong to the NRA) would tell Trump he’s not their guy.
Or is it simply this: In the dying days of the US election the Republican’s strategy is falling apart.*
Like I said, we’re fed up to the teeth with the US Election, but a part of me says that despite all the crap everyone has had to endure, it just might turn out all right.
*Recently, they accused 55 Benedictine nuns in Erie, Pennsylvania—all registered voters—of voter fraud.
Susan on the Soapbox 
It’s crazy down there all right. But if we read our own Jeremy Appel on the UCP convention of this last weekend………we Albertans have nothing to feel too secure about. So far, I haven’t heard the Trump campaign claim that CO2 have never been lower in the atmosphere in the last 1000 years………and we need more of it to keep the plants growing…….not less.
We’ve got our hands full up here in Canada…and it feels we’re a long way from the days when my plain spoken dad could retort simply….”that’s a GD lie, and you’re a GD liar”.
For a lot of things there is an objective reality…..both the Trumpsters and our own UCP don’t seem to believe that.
Couldn’t agree more. We are avoiding reality if we think we are doing better in Alberta. The signs are right in front of us and interestingly enough the reactions have been almost non existing.
As someone who taught high school in this province, I can tell you the right has always been here. A large part of their legacy has been to keep most of us quiet. At some of my posts there were conservatives who felt threatened if more than one interpretation of a literary work was allowed!
That sense that there’s only two available answers, one of them wrong, has kept many good Albertans quiet….and we can see that they likely knew what they were doing when we look at their idea of a curriculum: mostly knowledge based…where there are a lot of ‘answers’ to be memorized, and not much time or instruction in asking good questions, critical thinking or framing alternative perspectives.
In this beautiful province, thinking outside of a very small box, can be dangerous. Unfortunately, believing that atmospheric CO2 is an unlimited good will be catastrophic………looks like in our lifetime. Science can now tell us pretty definitively where continued fossil fuel extraction is taking us. A disaster a day takes the fantasy away….but unfortunately, not for true believers in Alberta’s advantage.
noklebym and Carlos: you’re absolutely right. I know a wonderful young man who was sent to a Christian school from grades 1 to 12. He asked a lot of questions as he got older, the answer was always “because it’s in the Bible”. The world didn’t make sense to him until he finally went away for university. Can you imagine how horrible it must be for intelligent youngsters to be fed religious dogma that they know can’t possibly be right. It’s bad for our youth and it’s bad for our society.
Yes. But in good old Albaturda, you’ll not be seeing any laws crafted against it.
I thought it was horrible when I was forced to have religious classes in the 60s and 70s and we are still doing the same in 2024.
Using a book that somehow we adopted as sacred although we have no idea where it came from or who wrote it. Hopefully we will not use Harry Potter in the year 3000.
I do not care and it is none of my business if people believe in it, but it is time that if you do not, you are respected the same way.
The idea that a world without religion has no morals is ridiculous. I was raised by an atheist father and I certainly have higher moral and ethical standards than most people I know. Never mind new fascists like Trump and Pierre Poilievre that claim to respect family and society. What they all are good at is their ego and their bank accounts.
Let’s not leave out their facility for stoking grievances in the general body politic…so that Canadians turn on each other rather than collaborate to tackle some of the very real problems we face. My fear is that if we let these hate mongers win, there may well be no future for my grandkids. Not because they alone can destroy everything…but their ties to fossil fuels and fools could mean Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph gets ignored and we pass a climate tipping point that guarantees hot house earth.
Humans won’t survive that.
Could not share your concern more. We are playing high stakes games and unfortunately people like Danielle Smith think that she owns the truth that probably came from David Parker who probably believes God will take care of it.
She just made this big fuss last night accusing Justin Trudeau as if he is some kind of criminal that wants to shut down Alberta. All because she does not believe in climate change and she does not believe in vaccinations and she uses everything that science created for us but that she does not believe in science either.
Like you say, this is very concerning and somehow the UCP thinks that we are just a bunch of idiots who represent at least half of the Alberta population. Again because of the voting system we have and the lack of interest in changing a decrepit political system we are now subject to the other 50% as if we have no say in anything.
There are better democratic systems but we need real politicians that believe in society rather than the size of their bank accounts offshore.
We can blame this right on our lack of will to take society and politics seriously. We can go out there and stop this lunacy but it is way easier to just let it go.
Yes. Less bitching and more organizing would be nice….but that too is hard. Too many lecturers and far too many who’ve never been anything but an audience. We need a real grass roots and we need it active.
Exactly – something in the lines of a citizens council that could kind of keep politicians doing what they are supposed to do. For example fact checking in the legislature and enforcement when it is a lie.
Politicians now lie all the time and as many times as they choose and use it as a political propaganda tool.
Polling in Canada of Conservative voters asking if they would vote for Trump if they were able to…..70 percent said they would. This tells us that the Conservative Party of Canada has been taken over by the anti vax, anti science, convoy loving extremists. The old time Tories like Joe Clarke and even Lyin’ Brian Mulroney are long gone.
Jaundiced Eye: That is a shocking statistic. Noklebym mentioned the corrosive impact of an education system based on right wing conservative ideology. Surely nothing is worse than crippling young minds. I follow a French podcaster who said that in France critical thinking is highly valued and all students are taught critical thinking in junior high. Time will tell whether this foundation will protect them for the likes of Marie Le Pen, but at least it gives the people some tools with which to analyze what the politicians are telling them.
n some year or other, might have been summer of 1968, I shared a political science or political philosophy class delivered by a self-proclaimed very leftie originating from the USA, Dr. John Warnock. Actually a brilliant guy happy to engage seriously on anything philosophical or political. One of the other students was a young, clean-cut (This was 1968, clean. cut stood out!) fellow for whom
George Wallace was the man to be the next president. in case I had not noticed it before, it was obvious then that there were a lot of students moving between the USA and Canada to pursue political adventures.
This seemed to intensify as the partisanship sharpened, both for liberal/social democrats and Nixon/Reagan Republicans. It has increased to a sort of dichotomy of cross border madness now.
I think it arises because of the anxiety among the population, which leads to conformity within partisan groups. Political colours and logos take the form of DNA and the population looks more and more like phutbol hooligans, not we love soccer, but we love us and we hate you.
That tends to make Trump’s remarks about someone being before a MAGA firing squad normalised.
We’ve got a mess. We gotta exercise wisdom to get society out of this while we still have a living biosphere within which to operate.
Sorry I cut and paste and dropped the first “I”.
When last I looked (10 years ago) Calgary had the largest number of American x-patriots in the world. In Stevey Harpers riding over 10% and we know how that went.
Mikegklein: I agree. The only thing I’d add is Canada used to follow in the US of A’s footsteps only about 10 years later. This 10 year lag has become shorter as a result of social media. As others have said, we need to be realistic, to recognize how our politics and our society is changing and address it.
I was urged to watch this video by/about Rick Steeves. It is totally appropriate to our discussions. Also, I had occasion to be in a waiting room yesterday. I happened to be sitting beside a man reading “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” by Mattias Desmet 2022. This man expressed concern over the issues of factuality, defining evidence on which to base decision-making as he was thinking about what he is reading. He expressed concern over this great societal problem. We agreed we need a lotta smart, hard-working people, to be working on this and related issues. Some of these people are among Susan’s reading group. That;d be we! But what and how do we do this?
Its probably not a good sign if Trump is sending emails to people in Canada now, although I realize there are a significant number of dual or US citizens here. As for his secret strategy, we know how good he is with handling confidential documents, so now I guess his secret strategy is safe with all of us too.
I would hesitate to predict the outcome of the US election, as the country is very divided and it seems close in some important places, but I feel people are tiring of the Trump show, which while still entertaining for some, is the same act from 2016. And all the anger and divisiveness is exhausting.
This isn’t to say there are no problems and frustrations, but maybe the tear or burn down everything approach isn’t the best way to deal with them. I’m glad I am not on Trump’s email list, as a Canadian only I am of course just a concerned and at times worried spectator to what is happening in the US. At times I can only take what is happening in the US in small doses, hope that everything will work out ok and better reason will prevail.
‘At times I can only take what is happening in the US in small doses, hope that everything will work out ok and better reason will prevail.’
I agree Dave but deep inside I do not believe in a better reason. When Trump won the first election we all thought it was a fluke. Soon we realized that was not the case and now I truly believe people really are trading the poor democracy they have for a Putin’s style run country with of course their prophet at the top. It is not surprising that in the US that would be a bankrupt billionaire.
The US may have the biggest military on the planet but that is about it. They are now a war machine, demoralized country. The fascist cycle seems to be on the upswing and it is quite likely that we will have to fight it again soon, except this time democracies may not have a chance. Without the US there will be no contest. Europe never really had an appetite to fight it.
Carlos, I follow an American historian called Heather Cox Richardson who’s been reporting on the election. Today she posted an article in which she said she still retains hope, based on history. She descried how in 1853 the “elite enslavers” ruled America even though they were but a small minority of the US population by taking control of the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court. (They were Democrats).
In 1854 the Democratic president Franklin Pierce pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act which would have supported the expansion of slavery into the territories that would become new states. When it became clear that Congress was going to pass this reprehensible piece of legislation 30 congressmen (from different parties) decided to fight back The word spread and the anti-slavery Republican party (led by Abraham Lincoln) was born. We know the rest.
It’s hard to imagine that the Republican party of Lincoln has fallen so far, however, the point of HCR’s article was that in less than 10 years the US went from a government dominated by a few super rich men despots to a more democratic government.
She says democracy has been tested in the US in the 1860s, the 1890s and the 1930s when Americans had to fight to preserve democracy “against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power” and succeeded. She ends by saying “Now it is our turn.”
It’s a message we should take to heart, here in Canada as well.
Dave, my husband got another email today. This one from Speaker Mike Johnson addressed to Patriot urging my husband to “strike back like NEVER BEFORE.” Mr Johnson says “I need your help crafting the strategy we’re going to use to DEFEAT Kamala and Democrat allies in the House.” (isn’t it a little late in the day for that?) He also asked “Patriot” to take a 1 minute Speaker’s Election Year Audit (which ‘Patriot’ refused to take for fear he’d unleash a horrible virus in his system).
As you said, it’s not as if we don’t have problems and frustrations, but burning the whole place down isn’t the solution.
Is it possible that Trump is somehow facing bankruptcy … again?
Has he ever not been bankrupt?
Trump is a felon. The most morally bankrupt politician in The US.
I am lost for words about this election in the US but one thing I have learned – I now fully understand how Hitler got Germany behind him. I thought it would be way more difficult but it turns out people are not as educated as we think. The US is on the decline stretch of a full cycle in this life of ours. The consequences will be catastrophic for most of the world.
I agree with you Susan, we have our own problems here in Alberta where the leader is already at the level of the great dictators like North Korea. They are the only ones who get 90% plus support in elections. The transition in Alberta to a one party petrol state is almost complete. Everything now rests on what the rest of us do.
Mike and Carlos: Indeed, when has Trump never been bankrupt. The real reason he wants to be president (in my opinion) is he wants to be rich and he wants to stay out of jail. He’s in it for himself, not for anyone else. If he wins his supporters will learn this the hard way. Tariffs and no taxes for the rich and corporations will gut social services, health, safety and environment regulations and financial regulations will be lifted allowing corporations to plunder human and natural resources, undocumented people will be incarcerated and deported by the millions, and social unrest will rise. Jan 6 was just a taste of what Trump supporters are capable of.
Meanwhile Putin and Xi Jinping will laugh as the US runs itself into the ground.
If Mr. Soapbox’s email address is with an American ISP, the Trump campaign would be clueless in regards to citizenship of the owner (they are obviously clueless in other areas too).
Best bet is to report the emails as spam. Desired result would be further emails going direct to spam folder.
Trump wants our water. If he wins the election, how long until Smith floats a trial balloon on selling our water in bulk to the U.S.?
Yes Jaundiced we have to continue filling the pools down in the U S of A.
After all we have to keep them comfortable, that is our job as slaves. I am sure Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre will be more than happy to serve their landlords.
With Justin Trudeau soon gone, little Pierre will finally open his environmental program and it will be just like the rest of them ‘Driving Innovation’ , ‘We are working non stop to fuel your life’, ‘The black gold that fuels your life’ and many others and all is good. The consequences are not real and we do not need to worry about.
This excellent video is a great part to the beginning to understand and address these issues: (1 hour long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUImQoF0FH0
Cascadia Daily News carrying a Rick Steeves Q & A on Fascism
Thank you Mikegklein – I watched the video and I am glad that Cascadia is taking such an important issue seriously. I have seen many videos and documentaries on the second World War (netflix has a couple of very good ones) and it is strange how they talk the same way and use the same gestures and it still works. Unfortunately there are still people that also are willing to join the cult. When it comes to violence and blaming others we are always ready. Instead of religion and stories that blow any brain to pieces, it would serve us better to teach real morals, respect and ethics.
As always David posted another great article this morning that maybe I should not be posting here but they are important to read along with the ones from Susan.
https://albertapolitics.ca/2024/11/here-in-alberta-if-the-oilpatch-aint-happy-aint-nobody-happy-and-profitable-fossil-fuel-corporations-hate-ottawas-emissions-cap-plan/
What a dark day for all of us. The world the way we all knew it and that has been disappearing slowly in the last 10 years, is over.
No one knows what this felon is going to do. I certainly hope that he cannot enter Canada. We do not need him here, we already have one of them who is soon going to also be prime minister.
The end of reality and fact is here and navigating this kind of world will not be for me. I am so glad I am an older person.
Danielle Smith is smiling today and they are all excited but thank God there is always a decline. The problem is, what will be left by the time these egomaniacs are done.
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/11/06/UCP-Members-More-CO2-Help-Plants/
Yep! No need for Canada to get all smug about what happened down south. We’ll most likely have our own crass imitation of the Orange Marvel taking over the show here within a couple years. I guess this is some kink that needs to get collectively worked out of the world? The timing couldn’t be worse, sadly.
Jason: you mentioned the “kink”. I wish I could figure out what that kink is, because it is driving too many people into very ark places. .
Those Canadians surprised with Trump’s victory that are going to vote for Pierre Poilievre – here is your platform
“Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, Fix the Budget, Stop the Crime” tweet on X. “
He calls it the ‘Common Sense Revolution’
WOW how smart can this species be?
Carlos, I’m just listening to the Tom Nichols link Jason provided. Nichols is making the point that this fascination with autocracy isn’t ideological but rather about feelings and emotions and resentment and status envy. It’s an interesting perspective. Well worth a listen.