I have MS and use a cane to walk around so it’s clear I’m disabled. I know that primary targets are the pride community and people of color but do they consider disabled “undesirable” as well?

(Copypasta from the Washington Post that I thought the group might find interesting.)

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.

Opinion by Jon Grinspan
May 14, 2024 at 5:30 a.m. CT
Washington Post Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and author of “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.”

They called themselves the Wide Awakes: one of America’s largest, weirdest and most consequential political organizations, now nearly forgotten. In Boston, many had escaped slavery. In St. Louis, many were radical German immigrants. In D.C., their rallies mixed Yankee federal clerks with sons of Southern families. In Connecticut, where they got started, they were working-class kids with shady political backstories. And in 1860, this diverse coalition of young Americans drew the line against slavery and help to elect Abraham Lincoln.

Their success can tell us a lot about cobbling together a coalition in a fractured, tribal, distrustful age.Clad in militaristic black capes, marching by torchlight through America’s cities, the Wide Awakes alarmed the Southern aristocracy of enslavers — which was exactly what they hoped to do. The movement drew its mammoth size and unnerving force from the resentment many Americans felt toward “Slave Power”: the wealthy planters who pushed to expand slavery and brutally suppressed opposition.

Started by a few kids barely old enough to vote in February 1860, the Wide Awakes were believed to be half a million strong by August of that year, with companies from Maine to California, Virginia to Kansas.

To understand how shocking this coalition was, we need to rethink the politics of antebellum America.

Instead of a nation split between the absolutes of Slavery and Freedom, most Americans fell somewhere on a spectrum between the two. Just 2 percent of the population in 1860 actually enslaved anyone, and those Americans trapped in slavery made up another 12 percent of the nation’s men, women and children. That left 86 percent of Americans who were neither enslavers nor enslaved. Some enthusiastically supported slavery, while others prayed for the practice to end. But most — especially among the large northern majority — found slavery distasteful while also objecting to what they saw as the radicalism of Abolition.

Caught in the middle, this majority bounced from party to party, explaining much of the tumult of mid-19th-century politics. Enslavers skillfully exploited the unsettled situation and spent the 1850s demanding more slave states, the right to keep enslaved people even in free states, the prohibition of speech and writing against slavery, and a requirement that free states assist in hunting fugitives.

This outsize influence was backed by real and threatened violence, from the plains of Kansas to the halls of Congress. “I have no objection to the liberty of speech,” sneered Alexander Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy, so long as “the liberty of the cudgel is free to combat it.”

The moderate majority began to feel as though slavery was at war with democracy, trampling upon their own rights along with the rights of the enslaved. Young people decided they’d had enough.

A gawky 19-year-old textile clerk, Edgar Yergason, started it all. “Fastidious” about his clothes, Eddie prepared for a torch-lit rally of the anti-slavery Republican Party on Feb. 25, 1860, by fashioning a shiny black cape to protect his new coat from dripping torch-oil. Yergason’s fellow clerks made capes, too. This oddly uniformed corps led a march through Hartford that night, while their friends beat back a mob of proslavery Democrats. Proud of their costumes and their fighting skills, Eddie’s friends met in a dingy third-floor apartment to formalize their association. After selecting a brawny 27-year-old leader for their “captain,” they cast about for a name. One fellow shouted: “Why not name it ‘Republican Wide Awakes?’” It was time that they wake up to the threat slavery posed to democracy.Their “army” of young civilians — clerks and farm boys and apprentice blacksmiths — spread from coast to coast. Uniting in “companies” drilled by “captains,” young people joined together, energized by this militaristic sense of awakening. In an age of rowdy, boozy politics, the Wide Awakes stood out for their stoic, silent midnight marches, not exactly fun but stirring and spectacular. In an age of chaos, their discipline sent a political message.

Wide Awake companies fought as bodyguards for Republican anti-slavery speakers, escorting Lincoln and many others. Bloodied young men, still in their signature capes and caps, sat onstage at rallies as proof of the antidemocratic forces aligned against them.

This anger joined strange bedfellows. Before 1860, teetotaling Yankee abolitionists disliked beer-drinking German radicals, who hated Know Nothing gang members, who shunned African American fugitives, who distrusted antislavery Southerners. But a shared enmity toward the Slave Power united them all, what historian Henry Adams later called “the systemic organization of hatreds” at the root of politics. Lewis Hayden, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky, led a company of Black Wide Awakes in Boston in the same movement as the nastily racist Frank Blair Jr. in St. Louis. Some Wide Awakes were truly admirable, others quite distasteful, but all were united under Yergason’s cape design.

The Wide Awakes claimed to have “no warlike intentions,” but Democrats were skeptical. In the North, Democratic newspapers legitimately worried that “politico-military” clubs would mean “our elections will become pitched battles.” Across the South, panicked newspapers spread wild, violent rumors. One ex-governor told Virginians that they would soon be “cut to pieces by the Wide Awakes.”

On Election Day, club members woke up communities with 5 a.m. fireworks, then marched to the polls. Turnout was high: 81 percent. By the end of the day, Lincoln had won an unusual victory, taking nearly 60 percent of the electoral vote but less than 40 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race. This awkward mandate meant that for all the Republicans talk of “majority rule,” no one could really bring unity, or even basic agreement, in such a fractured land. But the Wide Awakes lit Lincoln’s plurality with torchlight, until the movement’s shadow loomed larger than the actual Republican Party.

Many agreed with the New York Tribune’s assessment that the Wide Awakes were “the most imposing, influential and potent political organization, which ever existed in this country.”

As the nation spiraled toward the Civil War, Wide Awake clubs armed as paramilitary forces, who did some of the first fighting in the conflict. And their members enlisted in huge numbers in the Union Army that finally killed slavery.

Today, progressive activists online sometimes name-check the Wide Awakes, styling them as woke heroes from the past. But they were really something more complex — and more thrilling: a genuine coalition of people who couldn’t agree on much but who marched side-by-side against the greatest threat to democracy.

In August 2023, West Virginia University cut around 10 percent of their study programs, specifically the fields of world languages, history, creative writing, and education. Two months later, Gettysburg College would get rid of their award winning Review without ever consulting the English department nor the editors of the Review. Though these cuts were made in the veil of austerity measures and enrollment problems, yet the signal that has been sent by these cuts, which have effected the humanities more than any other field, is clear: There is a growing conflict between college administrations and the humanities. Why do I bring this up on a platform discussing Project 2025? I believe that these cuts are part of a larger Republican attack against higher education and more specifically, free thinking.

Colleges, ever since their inception in the Medieval period, have been as bastions of not just education, but as a facility of new ideas which challenge the status quo. However, this idea of college being a liberal bastion would only truly begin in the 1900s, specifically when it came to topics such as integration and the Vietnam War. However, there was no attack from American Conservatives. It should be noted that despite the long present signs of authoritarianism seeping its way into the Republican party, up until recently, the Republicans did not aspire to truly authoritarian policies, and had no reason to attack colleges, a pillar of American strength. However, ever since the 2016 election and the autocratic revolution that shook the Republican party, there was now sufficient reason to topple the pillars of higher education.

The first warning signs could be seen with the aftershock of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has caused the bright and the educated to leave colleges stuck in Red states, most fleeing North to Liberal bastions of the Northeast, the Northwest, and parts of the former Rust Belt. In Florida, the public New College of Florida was decimated by DeSantis, leading to students and faculty alike fleeing North to states like New Hampshire. When viewed in combination of the de-racifying of American history in Florida and nationwide book banning, one motive stands clear in these courses of action: A conspiracy to make the American people think less. Why would the Republican party want to do this, especially in a country which attracts the world's talent because of it's higher education? Its because, as mentioned before, colleges are a bastion of liberal ideals. To a Liberal Republican, there is nothing wrong with that, but to the reactionary Republican of today, that is a threat to their very way of being.

Its become clear that as the Republican party has swayed the opinions of the old and uneducated that the educated have become less of a friend to the Republicans and more as a threat to the new reactionary Republican, spewing ideas of free will and the values of democratic rights. It's this autocratic view of education, combined with an anti-international populace who had been displaced by the free global market, and a bastardized view of Christianity which calls upon its supporters to tie down any form of secularism which has led to a tidal wave against higher education and education in general across this nation. It seems that the goal of the new Republican party is to make, as George Carlin put it best, "obedient workers.", people who are intelligent enough to hold a job or position within private or public industry, but too dumb to facilitate any philosophical opinion offered outside of the state. In a sense, they want resourceful cattle.

I'm only 13 years old and a Catholic but I have spent the last 4 years learning and studying politics. And I have learned a lot. Much more than the average person. I'm heavily worried about Project 2025. I think it's a pure fascist manifesto. I'm a white boy from Michigan and I live in a majority Hispanic town. I'm all for Hispanic rights as I have spent my whole life living around Hispanics and Hispanic culture. And I'm really worried about Project 2025 attacking Hispanics and their culture. I'm also worried about Project 2025 turning the U.S. into a fascist dictatorship. My parents are also hardcore Trump supporters and whenever I try and tell them about Project 2025 they say that it's either not true or that Trump being a dictator would be a "good thing".

Basically, I just want to know what all I can do to join the fight against this threat. I know with my age there isn't a lot but I just want to know if there is anything I can do to help. Thank you.

I just became aware of Brave's AI Based Search Engine. Had been looking for. a "Privacy Based AI" helper and Stumbled onto it.

Thought I would share.

Be safe friends!

https://search.brave.com/

Another person with good content to share with anyone who is not going to vote for Biden over Gaza:

For anyone not voting for Biden (voting 3rd party) because of a belief that he is no different, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRwoGNaF/

https://accountable.us/daines-pro-big-oil-cra-a-giveaway-to-large-producers/

I do voiceovers on trainings at work occasionally and have been told that people like them and want more by me. Its not my favorite thing to do, as I also have to edit and basically produce them because we are a small company, and my main responsibilities are funner. However, would it be something I can do to help more people get exposed to the primary source?

Some related questions that I am trying to figure out.

• Is there a version out there already?
• Would it immediately get a takedown request if it was published on YouTube or something like that?

I was pretty passive bout politics I have my own beliefs and views but u generally kept most to myself. But recently I read up on why project 2025 is and it has literally shaken me up to the point where it’s the only thing on my mind. I feel a constant weight on my shoulders and politics is pretty much on my mind 24/7 for the last 2 weeks. Is there anyway to get this off my mind is there any useful tips to get this out my head. It’s genuinely bringing me down

How are they actually going to handle the sale if these things? Because my father (who's a straight guy) uses testosterone for a deficiency? And I've heard of others needing estrogen as well.

I somewhat doubt they'll have reasonable restrictions. Are people like my father (and the reverse of him) just fucked? Because having hormone imbalances literally raise your risk of things like heart issues and general health and energy levels.

I don’t know if this exists, but is there a like bullet point list of everything Project 2025 wants to do?

I know a majority of people aren’t going to read the 900 pages. I am trying to talk more about Project 2025 on my FB for all my friends and family who either aren’t going to vote because of Gaza stuff, or who still want to vote for Trump. But I only know a few talking points so I wanted to see if there was a list made.

This is worth a watch. I think she is right. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRwE12Db/

The “great” America the far right desires is already here, where racist murderers are pardoned, women are denied full rights of citizenship, and billionaires are allowed to buy Congress, a president and a Supreme Court. https://factkeepers.com/this-is-the-country-the-far-right-wants-us-to-live-in/