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Friends,
Yesterday was another brutal reminder of the country we live in.
The one right-wing interests and the Republican Party have delivered to us. It was also a reminder of the country we could be if we have the courage to make it happen, and ignored pinheaded protocols and “traditions” to fight like hell for our kids’ lives.
While the assassination of Charlie Kirk dominated all the headlines, a school shooting in Colorado that left children bleeding in hospital beds was barely a blip on the news radar. And that contrast says everything about this uniquely American pandemic.
America’s Gun Plague
Cliff opened the show by laying the truth bare. We’re raising generations of kids traumatized by escaping school shootings and “active shooter drills,” hiding in closets while their teachers play human shield.
Colorado has lived through two of the worst mass shootings—Columbine and Aurora—and now more children were shot in their classrooms. Yet Republicans are owned by Big Gun, and chose to make this an identifying issue for alienated white men who vote heavily in primaries.
This has blocked even the simplest and most common-sense reforms.
Universal background checks, for example, consistently has 90% support in America.
But congressional gerrymanders, two Senators each from many states with more cows than people and a pasty, deranged, jibbering f*k named Mitch McConnell, who had the GOP filibuster even modest steps after Newtown, sealed many children’s fates.
Australia, after its Port Arthur massacre, said “enough” and enacted many of the exact reforms America needs. Gun deaths dropped from American to West European levels, which is to say by 70-80%.
We could do here in the United States tomorrow.
But they’ve made their message clear. Namely, your child’s life is not a priority, which these days they make crystal clear by cutting school lunches, trying to give your kids the measles in school, and protecting the files of a pedophile.
Because those files just may expose Trump as the loutish, rancid, rotting elephant-dung-heap we all already know him to be.
Republicans has also developed a love affair with the bro-niverse. So any incovenience white guys—who buy guns most often—may endure while suffering through the indignity of background checks to buy battlefield-ready weapons, simply must not be tolerated.
The Second Amendment Hoax
Cliff reminded us of Warren Burger. He was Nixon’s conservative Chief Justice, yet it was he who called the NRA’s individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment as “the greatest fraud ever perpetrated” by an interest group.
The Founders intended well-regulated militias—not a free-for-all where anyone can stockpile AR-15s. Many states you wouldn’t exect—Wyoming, Texas, Kentucky, Ohio, among them—banned concealed carry in the 19th Century.
Tombstone, Arizona, and many towns out West like it, literally confiscated guns at the edge of town (in fact, the infamous Battle at the OK Corral began because members of the Clanton Gang were illegally carrying guns in town).
They knew drunken guys with guns were what we might call “bad for business.”
The radical rewrite of the Constitution by this Supreme Court and its right-wing sponsors is nothing more than billionaire-funded extremism dressed up as law. (See, also, Trump immunity, voting rights destruction, abortion rights eliminated, money gushing into politics and so much this group of Opus Dei traitors have done to our country).
The Power of Images
David Schuster made a chilling but undeniable point. Americans won’t really get it until they see what these war scenes look like.
The video of Kirk’s death horrified millions.
Imagine if Sandy Hook or Parkland had released photos of what those rifles did to children (some parents wanted this, and I’m unclear why it didn’t happen. But we should do this with all sorts of shootings every day).
Parents especially would be innately horrified.
Many of the children were only identifiable by DNA. Just as Emmett Till’s open casket shocked a nation into action, maybe America needs to be forced to confront the carnage it has chosen to ignore while re-watching Sean Hannity’s spittle reaching new heights.
Fred Poag, our guest, a Marine veteran and new Blue Amp COO, drove the point home: assault rifles aren’t like the movies. They’re battlefield weapons that tear apart organs and bone like a bomb going off inside your body.
That’s what our kids are facing. That’s why teachers’ bodies can’t even shield them. And yet Republicans treat owning one as some sacred “masculine identity” ritual.
It’s madness.
Democracy or the Bullet Box
Finally, Cliff warned against those—even on the left—who are losing faith in democracy and flirting with violence. That path leads to ruination.
Our job is to argue, organize, protest, create the best content, use the courts and outvote them. Ballots still work. Democrats just flipped a Virginia seat with 75% of the vote, moving within one seat in the House of forcing the release of Epstein files.
We’ve recently won in Iowa, Florida, and have another special election on the 23rd for a U.S. House Seat, which a Democrat should win. Then we’ll have enough votes to force the release of the Epstein files in the House.
Every vote matters. Every victory matters.
The true danger isn’t that ballots have failed us—it’s that cynicism convinces us to stop using them. That’s when democracy truly dies.
Bottom line: We don’t need to repeal the Second Amendment. We need a sane, un-corrupted Supreme Court that actually believes in the law, and political leaders with the spine to say enough.
Until then, the gun lobby, billionaire extremists, a sickly, dementia-addled Donald Trump, and his MAGA enablers will continue to hold this country hostage.
But we’re not powerless. We can vote, we can organize, and we can tell the truth—loudly.
Let’s do it together.
—Cliff
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