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Its not surprising that a lot of good and progressive people are inclined to cave in on the nomination of Donald Trumps nomination of a hard right-wing judge named Neil Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Especially for non-lawyers, Gorsuch can look and sound smart and respectable and, especially compared to the buffoon of a president who nominated him, even impressive. Add to this the fact that so many progressives dont really enjoy fighting with the Right and its understandable that folks are looking for excuses to duck this battle.

Youve heard some of the excuses. Theres Lets save our energy for the next fight and Kennedy will calm him down and Justices tend to get more moderate as they age. And then theres the tried and true We have to be better than the Republicans and not sink to their level.

Well, heres how all of those sentiments really and practically translate: We dont care enough about our country and its future to fight for whats right.

The simple truth is that Neil Gorsuch and the people behind him represent everything thats wrong with modern America. They (and he) are a threat to freedom, to progress, to diversity and equality and, ultimately when it comes to protection of the natural environment, the long-term survival of life on the planet as we know it.

Gorsuch may be a nice and handsome guy who loves his family and like to ski, but, in the end, that doesnt count for squat. The simple truth is that on vital matter after vital matter over the next severaldecades, a Justice Gorsuch will simply be another friend and ally to the dreadful Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Rather than helping to move our country forward, he will take it dramatically backwards.

Now add to this the utterly outrageous fact that Gorsuch is being allowed to glide into a seat that was out and out stolen from President Obama. This is just wrong and something that cant be allowed to take place without a knock-down, drag-out fight even if its an uphill battle.

As the excellent Eugene Robinson notes in the conclusion to a column in this mornings Washington Post:

The way McConnell, et al. treated the Garland nomination was indeed unforgivable. Senators who fail to remember that will get an earful from their constituents and, potentially, a challenge in the next primary. More importantly, those senators will be passing up a rare political opportunity.

With just 48 votes, all Senate Democrats can do is filibuster, denying McConnell the 60 votes he needs for a final vote on the nomination. In response, McConnell could employ the nuclear option changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations. In the end, Gorsuch would be approved anyway.

But I believe Democrats should wage, and lose, this fight. The 60-vote standard looks more and more like an anachronistic holdover from the time when senators prided themselves on putting the nation ahead of ideology. These days, so many votes hew strictly to party lines that it is difficult to get anything done. The Senate is supposed to be deliberative, not paralyzed.

And I cant help thinking back to 2009. Republicans made an all-out effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their motives were purely political; some GOP senators railed against policies they had favored in the past. Ultimately, they failed. Obamacare became law.

But this losing battle gave tremendous energy and passion to the tea party movement which propelled Republicans to a sweeping victory in the 2010 midterm election. It is hard not to see an analogous situation on the Democratic side right now.

Democrats cannot stop Gorsuch from being confirmed. But they can hearten and animate the partys base by fighting this nomination tooth and nail, even if it means giving up some of the backslapping comity of the Senate cloakroom. They can inspire grass-roots activists to fight just as hard to win back state legislatures and governorships. They can help make 2018 a Democratic year.

In other words: In this absurd new political world we inhabit, the old rules of comity and cooperation are gone. Whats more, they aint coming back until progressives learn to fight back relentlessly against the bullies who are responsible for their demise.

More here:
Why progressives must play hardball and not cave on the Gorsuch nomination - The Progressive Pulse

Race. Gender. Language. Religion. Politics.

Those are the subjects most worth talking about if you are looking to discuss something substantive and intellectual. They are the basis for our civics, our identities, and even our passions. Hot-button topics are supposed to be uncomfortable, the rising tensions emblematic of the magnitude these subjects carry.

A strange phenomenon has been happening over the past decade or so that has stifled great debates, great conversation. I did not truly understand the magnitude of the problem until I began receiving messages from people on Facebook after getting into debates with strangers about one of those hot-button topics. The messages are almost always identical; 'Hey James, just wanted to let you know that I agree with a lot of the points you made today. But I can't jump in because I don't want to get fired from my job.'

They sometimes don't want their families to give them a hard time, or they are afraid they will lose friends over their opinions. This is the aftermath of a recently polarized society where you must wave a flag for one side or the other, and by doing so you are required to parrot certain viewpoints or they will pull your card, no questions asked.

I know about this first hand. Most of my friends lean left on nearly everything. And that's fine, but many of them have opinions that are not in line with hard left ideology, and they are far too afraid to talk about those positions in public. Things like gender politics, for example. I would estimate that at least 80% of my female friends over the age of 30 refuse to call themselves feminists.

They feel infantilized by modern feminists, embarrassed that they are being told to constantly place themselves in the role of a victim. And just as an aside, I am fully aware that my last sentence has enraged many people reading this, and that is precisely the problem.

I don't know one person who doesn't believe in equality among the sexes. Not even one. But, for example, if you believe that there is more to the wage gap than basic misogyny, hardline progressives would rather try to reprogram you or place you into a box than politely discuss the issue like adults.

They feel that by denying the notion that there might be other reasons why women do not get paid as much as men you are denying something as ironclad as the colour of the sky, or where babies come from. This is not an exaggeration, it is the exact climate we are living in within our own discourse, and the lack of intellectual curiosity is dampening our ability to have real, robust discussions on issues vital to a modern society.

Deeply embedded in this ultra-progressive ideology is a profound hypocrisy, a sort of convenience lever that is pulled whenever the movement is being threatened. Hillary Clinton's candidacy is the easiest, most recent example. Many of her supporters were identity politics stalwarts who championed ideas like #believeallwomen, a slogan that supports the notion that every woman who accuses a man of assault or rape should be believed, no questions asked.

Obviously this idea is wrought with potential pitfalls, but activists who support the notion are unapologetically rigid in their stance. However, if you had rightfully reminded them that Bill Clinton had been accused of rape by more than one woman, your reminder was deflected as they pivoted to a lecture about how Hillary's husband was not running for office, or how Hillary was the victim of her own husband's philandering.

Consistently, almost pathologically, these activists would completely ignore the actual alleged victims of Bill Clinton, betraying their own philosophy of believing all women as they worked to get the first woman elected as president. And let's not even bother pondering what they would have said if Todd Palin was an accused rapist.

You will find the same rigidness inside every hardline movement, a kind of stubbornness that probably prevents certain causes from gaining wider appeal from rationalists and moderates alike. Like hardline conservatives and their cult-like faith in free market capitalism, there is no room for negotiation.

Both sides engage like this, by the way. It's a type of echo chamber activism born out of polarization that defines the other side as the enemy while branding their own side as unerring. There is never any compromising, never any debate to water down the dogma. Facts that undermine the radical positions of either side are off-limits, viewed through a lens tinted with the notion that the ends always justify the means, especially when those ends are all about justice.

So if both sides do it, why am I mostly focusing on the progressive side? Well, it's because up until a few years ago, I considered myself a true progressive. I am on the left side of every issue I can think of...except for one: political correctness. I know, even that term carries with it a meaning that causes both sides to roll their eyes. The left believe the right uses the term to scoff at basic politeness and civility, and the right believes the term is the label the left uses to police people's thoughts and words.

Both sides have it wrong, in my view. Political correctness is a required practice for certain things like not using the N word, or not engaging in threatening speech. It becomes problematic when comedians are being sued for jokes, or when college campuses force the cafeteria to change their menus due to alleged cultural appropriation.

We are coddling the new generation of progressives, enabling them and propping up ideas that are not sustainable in the real world. Things like trigger warnings and safe spaces might seem like examples of sensitivity and understanding, but often these ideas are associated with listening to different political views or hearing keywords that remind people of a bad memory.

Not to say that hearing certain speech isn't sometimes annoying or even upsetting, but an entire generation is being taught that coddling a hypersensitive reaction to certain speech is not just a new way of dealing with problems, but also the only ethical or moral way.

This righteous indignation is self-defeating, however, as it works to alienate people who do not subscribe to the rigid ideology of radical progressives, leaving rational progressives unwilling to join the fight.

Also on HuffPost:

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North America And The Decline Of Rational Progressives - Huffington Post Canada

(Photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA via AP)

People attend the opening of the "We the People" exhibit hosted by Wieden Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, on February 2, 2017. The exhibit features protest signs from recent social justice marches.

When youre in the midst of multiple constitutional crises, its hard to focus on the future. But without that focus on the part of progressives and liberals, the fate of the republic looks bleak.

Donald Trump may not have been the dream candidate of right-wing leaders, but in the end, they deemed him close enough. For that, theyre being richly rewarded. In the course of a week, the religious right has gotten nearly everything its leaders ever longed for, short of overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. But they seem confident, given the presidents pick of Neil Gorsuch to the high court bench, that its just a matter of timefour, maybe eight, years before that aim is achieved.

The people around Trump know that the reality stars ascent to the highest office in the land could not have happened without the political infrastructure built by the right over the course of the last 40 years. The Tea Party movement was subsumed and partly driven by Americans for Prosperity, a ground-organizing operation funded by the Koch brothers. The churches of the religious right have been networked for years by right-wing leaders to effect significant voter-turnout efforts. These two strains of the right enjoy significant overlap.

Much discussion is now taking place in liberal and progressive circles about the need for a liberal/progressive infrastructure thats comparable in strength to the that of the right. Youll get no argument from me there. But when I hear people enthusiastically cheering models that simply replicate those on the right, I see a flow of donor cash going to efforts that will ultimately fail, while progressive media starve and the work of existing grassroots organizations are never leveraged at the national level.

Our people are not their people. Our movement is a coalition of many partsdifferent kinds of people with a range of concerns and policy priorities. You cannot create a structure built on that of the rights and expect progressives to sign up for whatever youve built. We dont roll like that.

What we need is a structure based on needs identified by real activists, not people who barely venture outside the Beltway, or people who want to build a Breitbart of the left. And we need spacesphysical spaces.

Im no expert on political strategy, but I have spent much of my career reporting on the right as it built its infrastructure. While the shape of the rights political infrastructure is not amenable to the needs of the left, one important characteristic of right-wing infrastructure that is transportableand necessaryto liberal and progressive organizing is that of interlocking parts. Look at the Koch network: Its parts are entirely interlockingthe get-out-the-vote groups, the think tanks, the events. For progressives, interlocking might yield to something less rigid, given the nature of the base. We need physical spaces designed to encourage cross-pollination between the constituencies of the left. To achieve that, the kind of donor cash that flooded certain election-based efforts could, when redirected at building progressive spaces in the cities where theyre needed, help locally based organizations amp up their efforts while encouraging interaction and collaboration between the various constituencies that form the progressive coalition.

If donors would fund strategically placed facilities for use by progressive groupsfacilities that included meeting and event spaces, and were each staffed with a full-time manager and scheduler, you might greatly increase collaborative work among various groups. With collaboration, creativity is catalyzed. And right now, we need all the creativity we can muster.

In an interview with Michael Tomasky in Democracy, Theda Skocpol, a scholar of right-wing movements, introduces a promising idea that could be turbo-charged through the use of shared spaces. Working from the sister city model used in the 1980s to establish partnerships with the besieged towns of Latin America, she suggests forming partnerships with the progressive elements of cities in purple statesthose that have populations that are a mix of left and right, but that went red in the 2016 Electoral College vote.

Id like to add a thought to that idea for donors looking to invest in something innovative. It wont be cheap, but if it worked, it would be awesome. Why not seed some of those purple-state cities with progressive young people by creating incentives for them to move there? Silicon Valley is reportedly finding itself frightened by Trump. Maybe they could plunk down some offshoot of their businesses in these places and attract talent, but do so with a plan for integrating into the surrounding community. Yes, theres a gentrification risk. But for some of these cities, theres also a death risk in allowing things to drift as they are.

The left doesnt need its own version of Breitbart News. It has no shortage of pugilistic political websites that present the news through a progressive lens. It doesnt need another organization focused solely on the election cycle. What the hundreds of thousands of engaged progressives throughout America really need are ways to connect and incubate place-based communities. An influx of cash to build a structure that will support and encourage community would be extraordinarily helpful in this moment of great consequence.

In the meantime, we cant wait for the money. As shown by the success of the Womens March, progressives know how to marshal scarce resources to launch an opposition. Its time for an epic barn-raising.

See more here:
How to Build a Winning Progressive Infrastructure - The American Prospect

The CPC gathering at Baltimore's Inner Harbor is an annual event designed to rally Congress's most liberal bloc behind a strategy for pushing its policy agenda. But after November's elections put Republicans in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress, liberals see themselves as the last line of defense against the GOP's promised attacks on President Obama's legislative achievements.

"In a year when many progressive issues hang in the balance, this will be a vital opportunity for progressive leaders on and off the Hill to come together, build power collectively, and strengthen the resistance against hatred, bigotry and discriminatory policies," reads an introduction to the retreat.

"American values of liberty and inclusivity are under threat."

She hasn't said what topics she'll broach, but the event arrives just a day after Trump signed an executive order rolling back parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which established many consumer protections championed by Warren.

Other speakers slated to address the CPC conference include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); Rep. Ral Grijalva (D-Ariz.), a co-chairman of the CPC; Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters; Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of liberal Jewish group J Street; and Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

The retreat arrives as one of the leaders of the Progressive Caucus, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), is in the midst of a fierce contest to take the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Read this article:
Warren to address liberals at weekend retreat - The Hill

There is an enormous amount of crazy-sounding news right now.

President Donald Trump really did set off a diplomatic crisis with Australia, possibly out of personal exhaustion. The White House really did fail to mention Jews in their statement commemorating the Holocaustand then, bizarrely, refuse to even recognize the error in the following days. And the president somehow incited a feud with Arnold Schwarzenegger during the National Prayer Breakfast.

If progressives are looking to be shocked, terrified, or incensed, they have plenty of options. Yet in the past two weeks, many have turned to a different avenue: They have shared fake news, online stories that look like real journalism but are full of fables and falsehoods.

Its a funny reversal of the situation from November. In the weeks after the election, the press chastised conservative Facebook users for sharing stories that had nothing to do with reality. Hundreds of thousands of people shared stories asserting incorrectly that President Obama had banned the pledge of allegiance in public schools, that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, and that Trump had dispatched his personal plane to save 200 starving marines.

The phenomenon seemed to confirm theorists worst fears about the internet. Given the choice, democratic citizens will not seek out news that challenges their beliefs; instead, they will opt for content that confirms their suspicions. A BuzzFeed News investigation found that more people shared these fake stories than shared real news in the three months before the election. A follow-up survey suggested that most Americans believed fake news after seeing it on Facebook. When held to the laissez faire editorial standards of Facebook, the market of ideas fails.

Now the left has its own panoply of wishful thinking. Twitter accounts purportedly operated by disgruntled government employees@AltNatParSer, @RogueNASA, and the extra dubious @RoguePOTUSStaffhave swelled in number to become a shadow bureaucracy. Conspiratorially minded Medium posts insist to anyone who will read them that the real story of the Trump administration is even more layered and nefarious than it seems. And satirical news of poor quality has gotten passed around as a weird story more than once. (Queen Elizabeth II didnt actually say she could kill Donald Trump with a sword.)

Or at least thats how it seems to me. Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes, the English-speaking internets most important rumor-debunking site. It is her job to sit around and look at some of the most popular falsehoods on the web all day. Earlier this week, I asked her if she had seen a spike in the amount and popularity of fake news aimed at liberals.

She immediately replied: Of course yes!

Theres a lot of confusion, and people are profiting from the confusion on all sides of the continuum, she told me. She said she had seen a concerted spike in fake news aimed at liberals since the inauguration.

She emphasized that theres no equivalence between the falsehoods coming from the American left and the right in the past two weeks. Individual Democrats on Facebook may cling to pleasant stories and wishful thinking, but the Republican White House press secretary spouts off lies beneath the presidential seal. On Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to the president, referenced a terrorist attack that never happened.

But a preponderance of fake information ultimately harms the political cause that absorbs it. Its also bad strategy: Michael Walzer writes that the lefts task at this moment in history is to help hold the center. A polluted information environment does little to preserve the consensus reality that permits democracy to work.

My conversation with Binkowski, edited for clarity and readability, follows below.

Meyer: First things first. Have you been seeing more fake news or hoaxes aimed at the left lately?

Binkowski: Yes, there has been more coming from the left. A lot of dubious news, a lot of wishful thinking-type stuff. Its not as filthy as the stuff I saw that was purportedly coming from the rightI dont think a lot of it was actually coming from the right, I think it was coming from outside sources, like Macedonian teenagers, for examplebut there has been more from the left.

Its more wish-fulfillment stuff. Trump About to be Arrested! Well, yeah, whens that gonna happen? And we know its coming from the left because I know its coming from known players. Bill Palmer used to run the Daily News Bin, and it was basically a pro-Hillary Clinton news site. It was out there to counter misinformation. Which, okay, fair enough. But then he started to reinvent it as a news site, more and more, and he changed the name to the Palmer Report. The stuff that he puts out there, its nominally true. When you click on it, its some innocuous story [with an outlandish headline]. That is very harmful, I think.

The right-wing stuff often has this element of racial fear, even if it is subtle. One of the best examples I can think of was from this otherwise innocuous hoax news website. They make themselves look like a legitimate local news site, although they dont specify where, of course, and then they steal mugshots from one of those sites that host mugshots, and then they write a story around them that has nothing to do with reality. I saw a steady drumbeat of that over the past year or so, preying on racial fears.

Meyer: You saw the number of stories like that go up over the past year?

Binkowski: Yeah. Big time. I saw that pick up a lot last year.

Meyer: Is there advice you have for readers about how to recognize fake news?

If it arouses an emotional response is youif you see the headline and go, I cant believe this, Im so angrythen its probably something you need to check against something else. News is going to be rage-inducing, its going to be terrifying, it will make you happy. But if you have that visceral a response to something, then it is written specifically to arouse that response so youll share it. Just say no.

But I really dont want to make this the responsibility of the person reading the news, when there are so many things that have been broken down and atomized and made into individual responsibility that should be a collective responsibility. [News] should be a public service, and that is how public services exist and maintain themselves. And it should be seen as such.

Meyer: Do you have a fairly dim view of human gullibility, because you sit around and look at this stuff all day?

Binkowski: You know, I actually dont. Sometimes my faith in humanity is severely challenged. I actually think that people in the aggregate, even now, are smart. I think humans are smart. I really do. I realize that were in a generally discouraging moment in history, but I dont think people are stupid, and I dont think people are necessarily gullible.

Have you ever read The Gift of Fear? The gist of it is, trust your instincts because normally theyre picking up on things that you arent consciously noticing. Its an interesting book, and its generally about crime and rape and violence.

Ive always wondered why we slow down for car accidents. And the author of the book, [Gavin de Becker,] says, We always slow down for car accidents out of an ancient impulse, which is that humans want to learn. Thats why we developed these enormous brains. People always want to learn.

And I thought, you know what, thats true. Even people who are sending around these stupid stories that are complete BS, they would latch onto actual news, not conspiracy theories, if there was more actual news out there. I think that people are going about the fake news issue the wrong way. Pinching off fake news isnt the answer. The answer is flooding it with actual news. And that way, people will continue looking for information, and they will find vetted, nuanced, contextual, in-depth information.

There will always be a subset of people who reject it. I think 10 percent of the population either way. But I really do believe that humanity, although we may destroy ourselvesI really do have a lot of faith in us as a species.

Meyer: That ties to another thread in the left wishful thinking, which is the fake Twitter account from the government insiders who are rebelling against Trump. The most-followed example is @RoguePOTUSStaff.

Binkowski: Isnt that a fun read? Its gotta be BS, but its such a fun read. Ive messaged them several times at this point, saying, I dont want to know who you are, but can you at least prove that what youre saying is true somehow? We can use the encryption tool of your choiceI dont care who you are, as long as you are who you say you are. Theyve never replied, but they havent blocked me like theyve blocked some of our writers.

Meyer: Is there any other kind of fake news that youre regularly seeing?

Binkowski: I think weve temporarily lost our ability to enjoy satire in the United States. Theres a few satire stories that have made their way to us. I mean, most people usually mistake satire for real stories, but now its really bad. I think the left has collectively completely lost its sense of humor for nowalthough, I mean, the left maybe never had one in the beginning.

I just edited a story an hour ago about how Trump allegedly replaced a portrait of George Washington with a picture of a character from Ghostbusters 2. People are like, Is this true? Is this actually true!? No, its not. Its supposed to be satire.

Meyer: It is funny to me that, just a few months after attributing the election result in part to conservative-leaning fake news, there has been a surge of it among the party thats newly out of power.

Binkowski: Its so disappointing. I know I keep saying that. But we have also always had this misinformation, weve always had propaganda, weve always had disinformation, and weve always had BS. This has been part of American media forever. Weekly World News, if people remember that. National Enquirer is still doing whatever it is theyre doing. I do think fake news is always going to be part of the media and information ecosystem. I just think it needs to be balanced out by actual news.

We have to bolster the immune system of journalism, because thats going to be the only way out of this possible authoritarianism and inundation with fake news. People are so fearful, and thats whats driving this. People are afraid. The world is changing. It has changed. Theres all kinds of people around with different looks and different names and they look different and they talk different and it doesnt help when you get this constant line of BS.

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The Rise of Progressive 'Fake News' - The Atlantic