eric e. hetzel 🇺🇸🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦🇵🇸

You accuse me of arrogance because I’m somehow getting in the way of baby steps yet you deride me for acknowledging the baby step of Biden finally ending the war in Afghanistan.

I’m only one voice and I know I speak from a place of straight cis white male privilege. It’s not arrogant to propose your vision of the future, it’s arrogant to blindly live in your privilege and not think or speak of ways to make life better for everyone.

Having a personal vision for a better future isn’t arrogance unless it’s compelled through anti-democratic means, as the MAGA agenda is being pursued.

I support Democratic candidates financially, volunteer for them and vote for them even though I disagree with the worldview of most Democrats. In our two party system, they remain the only viable option.

If you inferred that from my posts, it’s unfortunate. I believe in democracy and support any and every baby step change we can get through the democratic process, to the degree that we have democracy in this country.

Hint for Democratic lawmakers from your voters:

We want you to vote NAY on everything the GOP wants.

E V E R Y T H I N G

The words “witch hunt” should be banished from the English language. They never burned witches. They burns women.

Referring to Russian soldiers as orcs is disgusting. Dehumanizing anyone is an act of depravity that leads to more violence, never more peace.

Democratic Party electeds are going to be standing outside the gates of death camps watching smoke billow out of crematoria, and they'll still be saying "We demand answers!"

Tucker Carlson is not, under any circumstances, “the voice of reason”

The majority of California wildfires burn forests on federal land. If the idiot-in-chief wants to rake the floor or whatever dumb shit he spouts, he should hand everyone in ICE a rake and have them get to it.

Corporations should be abolished and replaced with democratic worker coops. This would be true equity for workers.

As you noted, Americans have been propagandized to think modern corporations are the only way.

The work starts now and begins again everyday to begin unwinding that myth.

IMHO, democracy and equality are the essential core values of America. Capitalism is anti-democratic since its core notion is accumulating all wealth in the hands of the few - the many can never be equal when the few steal the fruits of their labor.

Money isn’t speech but it is power.

As long as we have capitalism, in which a large group of people (the workforce) hand over the profits of their labor to a small group of people (the owner class), capitalism will always succeed in undoing the achievements of social democracy.

Taking inspiration from social democracy as it is practiced in many European countries is an obvious place to start this evolution.

However, the end-goal must be the abolition of capitalism - a democratic socialist society in which every worker owns their own labor.

Great thread. Thank you.

We need a new way to talk about socialism and frame it as “American socialism” - a socialism that evolves from the socialist-influenced institutions that Americans have come to rely on.

All lies.

That said, Joe opposed staying in Iraq before it was fashionable, got us out of Afghanistan and effectively ended our global drone war.

So it’s possible the psychopath Netanyahu’s latest war wouldn’t be supported by Kamala but we just don’t know.

I don’t know what evidence you have for this claim. Joe Biden did nothing to prevent genocide in Gaza and Kamala (for whom I enthusiastically voted) said she wouldn’t do anything different than Joe.

He was complicit in genocide, too. But hey, no American president is perfect.

#AOC2028

Today is the real Independence Day.

On Juneteenth, we celebrate freedom and recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone. We remember that even in the darkest hours, there is cause to hope for tomorrow’s light.

Smart people are Marxists, myself excluded.

Netanyahu is the biggest psycho on the world stage. He has manipulated Israeli politics to have a longer regime than Putin. He had a secret nuke program long before N. Korea. And he’s been doing ethnic cleansing for as long as anyone can remember.

Our Constitution is clear: Only Congress has the power to declare war.

Yet, administrations too often bypass this fundamental check, plunging us into conflicts that cost countless lives, drain our resources, and destabilize entire regions.

We cannot allow this to happen again.

Truth.

Does it matter? It’s true whether it’s real or not.

No offense but this meme sucks. Congress has the sole authority to declare war. In this situation, it doesn’t matter that they hold the purse strings.

We can live without competition.

We cannot live without cooperation.