Dem politicians and candidates need to consider Thomas Paine, and should be saying things l: “If we were in charge this is what you’d be seeing, this is what we would be doing.”
And Democratic politicians should be articulating an alternative explicitly in practical terms and plain language, NOT short-hand or buzzwords or ambiguous terms where nobody knows what anyone else is really saying and can’t trust it.
White House Historian Ed Lengel Says Trump Slaps Founders in Face with East Wing Demolition plus Reed Galen on Threat of Trump Third Term Jim Acosta and Reed Galen Oct 23, 2025 (40 minutes in) Reed Galen “(Democrats) will be the alternative. But that’s the question. You asked the perfect question. Is that enough? And i think that if they’re going to be enough they’re going to have to say… not ‘we’re not in charge it’s not our fault’ – that’s you could say that as step one, and you can blame trump but how often does that work anymore? but what you can say is ‘if we were in charge, this is what you’d be seeing, if we were in charge this is what we would be doing’ it can’t be some sort of warmed over status quo old wine in a new bottle.”
This is very much like the shadow government idea that I’ve been pushing since the get-go, and many of us have been clamouring for this. And to some extent some politicians in the Democratic Party, and some organizations have tried some of this, but it’s not been enough, and not been promoted enough, so that the general public is hearing about it.
Chicago Sun Times – House Democrats highlight impact of Trump’s Chicago deportations during emotional ‘shadow hearing’ – The hearing happened as ICE enforcement was reported across several Chicago neighborhoods, including Lincoln Park, Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village. The Department of Homeland Security on Friday wrote on social media that agents are “making America safe again—one criminal illegal alien removal at a time.” By Tina Sfondeles Oct 24, 2025, 3:15pm EDT Led by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., Democrats have held a series of “shadow hearings” — unofficial public meetings — across the country to highlight the impact of Trump’s policies. Nineteen Democrats attended the Chicago hearing, including most of the Illinois congressional delegation.
It should become standard. In other countries this is actually normal and expected in fact.
I think we need to do this ourselves if the so-called leadership won’t. As I always say, don’t wait for everybody.
In the rest of Jim Acosta’s broadcast, Reed Galen‘s interview also covers constitutional sheriffs deputizing randos (something that’s already been well documented as happening) and the potential problems facing elections, and the bonkers plans Steve Bannon is talking about. Steven Bannon is a weirdo whackadoo, but people also dismissed Project 2025 as “liberal conspiracy”, I was hearing that for a year or more. I would tell people about it and they would say “Oh that’s conspiracy theory” and then I’d show them the actual Project 2025 document, and they would say “Oh this is a real thing the conservatives published publicly? I had no idea. I thought it was a made up conspiracy theory by Democrats.” And there was no way for me to find all these people individually and disabuse them of this, there were many people out there trying to tell people what was in that book. And then I finally found out one of the sources of this misinformation, a so-called progressive news outlet helped minimize this. People downplayed and pooh-poohed people saying Trump wouldn’t want to leave office the first time, and then January 6th. There haven’t been enough mea culpas even on that. People said the pandemic was over and we didn’t need people to worry about covid anymore or “fear monger” about public health, then covid vaccine uptake went into the toilet, people are still dying, people have politicized masks and criminalized masks, to the point where cancer patients and disabled children are maligned with propaganda to this day, and now all the anti-vaxxers and wackadoodle covid contrarians are in charge of healthcare for everybody. So I would say that it’s a really bad idea to minimize or downplay threats.
People really need to just talk about these things plainly and out in the open and be specific.
We already know things that are popular to get behind, like universal healthcare. And of course the big one, always popular especially in places like Northeastern Pennsylvania: anti-corruption. Of course that’s why people are trying to convince us that corruption is fine. Have you noticed that lately? I have.
What’s funny is that I heard Mike Flynn say very similar things to right-wing MAGA supporters at his civic engagement pep talk at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival 2025. This event is local to me, held in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. It was smaller than usual, without the big names of previous years. He was talking about transparency and being brutally honest. Mike Flynn’s talk was really like a wellness influencer presentation but for right-wing kooky fringe politics. He even advised people to “Stop worrying about what you cannot control” and attributed this piece of wisdom to his military experience. But Mike Flynn has been revving people up for engagement for years now and apparently it has worked. (A variety of engagement, and he has an interesting history in influence that has quite clearly been deployed domestically). Just look at what’s happened. I remember the 2016 election when at my city polling place it was pretty quiet compared to the Obama elections, and the day after my friends and coworkers in the rural areas told me they never ever saw such voter turnout at their rural polling places ever, and they knew right then Trump would win the election. And Mike Flynn’s not giving up, because he was talking about voter turnout too. And this is why I think turnout is key. Not swaying the purple squirrel mythical swing voters, but getting out the vote among, for example, government assistance recipients, who for about 7 years of my life as part of a job I was offering people voter registration, and they routinely turned down voter registration saying things like that no politicians cared about them, or that politics was nothing to do with them, or that politics was too upsetting and ugly, or that they didn’t understand policy issues anyway to be able to vote sensibly. Mike Flynn says that anyone who pays taxes is involved in politics, like it or not. Well, I’d expand that, because the truth is that the government is where the rules come from for every single thing you do in the marketplace, yes even in the private marketplace, government sets the law for land ownership, and the regulations for businesses and public behaviour — so no matter what, politics involves all of us. And it’s supposed to be a government for the people by the people, after all. The people need to engage. I can agree with Mike Flynn on that, even if I think he’s a weirdo. And I agree that more people need to read about Thomas Paine too. Yeah, Mike Flynn invoked Thomas Paine.
Ronald Reagan, Thomas Paine & The Right’s War On American History ft. Harvey Kaye & Daniel Bessner The Michael Brooks Show Mar 21, 2019 Harvey Kaye explains how Reagan attempted to co-opt Thomas Paine to erase his progressive contributions to American history.
Rod of Iron Freedom Festival 2025 VIDEO: Lt General Flynn expands idea of “the deep state” to include local school boards and town councils Bucks County Beacon Oct 22, 2025
Mike Flynn:
“It’s this it’s this axis of resistance inside of our government and it’s not you guys know this it’s not just in Washington DC right it’s not it’s right here in our school boards it’s right here in our town councils it’s right here in our city councils it’s right here in our county you know our county commissioners”
“Because this is not about Democrats or Republicans. This is about you know it’s about leaders who decide to get involved in our country and say look something is wrong. Something is wrong. There is a set of conditions in our country – threats now that are are that we’re having to deal with. Like it or not it’s the way it is. So you know what we want is we want those we want these things to kind of go away. Well, they’re not going to go away cuz I you know the stats for voting. The stats for voting in this country are abysmal. They are abysmal. Okay? Even for the president, even for elections to president of the United States in presidential election years. We have not broken nationally for like the last 10 presidential elections we have not broken 70%. Okay. So that means that it’s actually more than 30% of people who can vote who are registered to vote and who are legitimately voters. It’s actually about 33% do not vote, right? And that’s for that’s during a presidential year. That’s during a presidential year. Never mind these off cycle elections which we got one coming up in 2026. You have school board races that are not even in the normal cycle sometimes, you have these special elections going on around the country. You know, I don’t know if you got anything going on in Pennsylvania right now. I was just down in uh in Tennessee a week ago for a special election for a guy running for Congress, you know, and like I think there’s over a million people in this district that could vote and they had like 40,000 that came out. It’s terrible, folks. Okay. So when somebody says, “Man, I those guys are those people there.” I’m like, “Did you vote?” You know, and they’re like, “Well, I don’t do that, I don’t do that politics stuff.” No. Our entire life, everybody, when somebody says to me, now I’m going to get a little emotional and passionate about it. When somebody says to me that I don’t do politics, I don’t get involved in politics. Do you pay your taxes? Okay. If you pay taxes, you know, maybe you don’t. Ha, maybe you don’t get involved with politics right? But if you pay taxes and you’re paying a tax when you go buy a pack of cigarettes or when you go buy a gallon of gas, you’re paying taxes. So whether you pay your taxes once a year, you’re paying taxes at some point. And when you’re paying taxes, you are involved in politics. So every single of age person in this country, every adult in this country is in politics, like it or not. And so if you’re in politics, which you are, then how are you participating in that discourse, right? In that discourse. I’m thinking of a guy by the name of Thomas Paine, okay? Who today or certainly under the Biden of the former administration would have been declared a domestic terrorist. Okay. Seriously, cuz Thomas Paine, the British were after him desperately because he was writing and putting things out to the populations at the time. Right? If you ever read Common Sense, go read it. Right? George Washington took a document that Thomas Paine wrote because it was so powerful of a document and he said to all of his leaders, you know, in the colonies, we didn’t have a country under George Washington until we finally had one, right? So these are guys that said enough is enough, right? And he took a document from Thomas Paine because it was so powerful. And he said to all his leaders, I want every single person who’s part of our team, part of our militia, I want you to read it to them. Cuz most of them couldn’t read. I want you to read it to them because it talked about summer soldiers, right? Fair weather friends, right? And you all know what I’m talking about. I know exactly what summer soldiers are. I know exactly what fair weather friends are. You know, when you’re in the lowest of lows, that’s when you know who your friends are. Hey, not when everything’s going great. You have all these people coming to you going, “Oh man, I got all kinds of things, you know, can you can you do this? Can you do that?” That’s what Thomas Paine, most people don’t know who he is. Some do. Everybody knows George Washington. George Washington was smart enough to know his weaknesses. He was smart enough to know when he had challenges that he was facing. And he realized that the that primarily the men that he had that he had to deal with or he had to use in his militia up and down colonies where he didn’t have this, you know, he didn’t have the ability to, you know, hey Paul or hey John or hey Thomas, you know, can you guys move to the sound of the guns, right? His intent was clear enough and his intent was we are no longer going to be subdued by tyranny and we are going to fight for freedom. today we want to do that in a different way. We want to fight for freedom. We want to dismiss tyranny by standing up for our beliefs. But like get getting back to voting, right? You have a duty to vote. It’s not like ah. There’s people that have given their lives so you can go and pull a lever or or maybe sign your name on something that says I vote for whoever.”