My father isn’t quite “Red Caesar,” but he recently told me that his dream ticket is Trump and RFK Jr. 🤦‍♂️

The sad part is that, when I carefully avoid buzzwords, he’ll actually agree with me on things. Say Medicare For All and he’ll rant about how that’s socialism. However, when he praises Medicare, he’ll sometimes wonder why more people can’t sign up for it. (Like, maybe allow All to get Medicare?)

If you say Defund the Police (a slogan I think is stupid), he’ll rant about lawlessness and crime. But talk about the specific issues and he’ll agree that the police unions have too much power, police officers who abuse their positions should be fired - not rehired one precinct over - and that police should have more training so that they don’t act like the first thing to do is whip out their gun and open fire.

It’s like he comes close to understanding why Progressiveism is good, but then immediately slides back into MAGA-land.

Part of it is projection. Part is them assuming that if they want to do X, then the other side must be doing it even more. (Which they also use to excuse doing X.)

I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90’s. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That’s never a good sign.)

We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn’t know how to sell it so they’re closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.

So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company’s other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites’ content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.

Needless to say, the whole “we’ll just repost what other people posted” plan didn’t go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn’t doing very well at all.