#meidastouch

from Heather Cox Richardson:

Speaking of nutcases… RFK Jr. lecturing a health minister in Germany - gotta love the response.

… RFK Jr: “Reports coming out of Germany show a government sidelining patient autonomy and limiting people's abilities to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions. That is why I sent a letter to Germany's Federal Minister of Health, Nina Warken. In my letter, I made it clear that Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the rights that anchor every democratic nation.”

… German historian Rob Schafer responded: “You seem to be laboring under the delusion that Germany is a colony for your conspiracy theories. Let me be blunt: Your brand of 'freedom'—the freedom to die of preventable 19th-century diseases—is an export we have no interest in buying. ​We established the world's first universal social healthcare system under Bismarck in 1883. You still do not have anything comparable.”

Republican Town Hall PLAN BACKFIRES in their FACE

Jun 20, 2025 The MeidasTouch Podcast

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas report on how the decision by Republicans to avoid town halls has backfired in their faces as Democrats go into their congressional districts and receive huge applause.

It's good to see a positive response to Democratic members of Congress in Republican districts!

Below is a gif from the video of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) getting applauded at the town hall he attended in California's 20th Congressional District. That district is represented by Republican Rep. Young Kim, who has avoided holding a town hall in her district.

Michael Cohen at MeidasTouch:

What’s happening now isn’t about negotiation, and it’s not about shared governance. It’s about bending the entire machinery of government — every institution, every lever of influence — to serve one ideology: Trumpism. Not Republicanism. Not conservatism. Trumpism. That’s an entirely different beast. It’s not a political philosophy; it’s a loyalty test. And in Trump’s America, you’re either a loyalist or you’re an enemy.

The MAGA-fied GOP isn’t just aiming at the usual suspects — the “woke” universities, the environmental agencies, the media. Now, the crosshairs are on places most Americans assumed were apolitical sanctuaries. The Smithsonian. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Institutions dedicated to preserving our history and culture are suddenly “too liberal,” “too woke” for the Trump crowd and must be remade in the leader’s image. Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics — yes, the people who count jobs — is seen as a dangerous, left-leaning hive that needs to be “corrected.” And don’t even get me started on law enforcement. The Trump playbook is simple: federal law enforcement must be gutted, defanged, and reconstituted as a political weapon. First, it was the FBI and DOJ under constant attack. Then, D.C. police authority came into question. Next stop? Your town. If you think local sheriffs, state police, and prosecutors are immune to this takeover, you haven’t been paying attention. The endgame is a system where law enforcement doesn’t just enforce the law; it enforces Trump’s law.

[...]

The Washington Post recently laid out the stakes in brutal detail — even better than I did. Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps has set off a redistricting arms race. Both parties are in the fight, but it’s an uneven match. Republicans have more states under their control, more opportunities to shift the map, and fewer pesky independent commissions standing in the way. In short: they have the ammo, the battlefield advantage, and no hesitation about pulling the trigger.

In Texas, they’re already moving to add as many as five new red seats. Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana — all ripe for partisan surgery to carve out more MAGA districts. The plan is to stack the House so deep in Trump’s favor ahead of the 2026 midterms that even a blue wave couldn’t dislodge them. And the Republicans are playing the long game. Redraw now, lock in power for a decade. Democrats? They’re scrambling. Sure, there are moves in California, Maryland, New York, Illinois, maybe Oregon. But let’s be honest; Democrats have already squeezed most of the juice from their controlled states. The GOP has more raw territory to work with, and the math isn’t on our side. Even Maryland’s lone red district and Illinois’s few remaining Republicans are more about symbolism than game-changing seat grabs. One Republican strategist put it bluntly: “There is no scenario where we don’t have more seats to go get than they do.” Translation: We’ve already beaten you on the battlefield map; now we’re just deciding how big the victory will be.

And here’s the real kick in the ass: this isn’t just a numbers game. Gerrymandering isn’t some abstract civics class issue. It’s the foundation for everything else. If you control the House, you control committee chairs, investigations, budgets — the levers that determine what gets done and what gets buried. It’s how you stack the courts, starve agencies, and pump money into pet projects that serve the ideology. If the Republicans lock in the House through redistricting, they can block anything that doesn’t pass the Trump loyalty test. Forever.

[...] The bigger picture? This isn’t just about winning elections. It’s about total institutional control — the kind that can’t be undone by one cycle or one president. Think about it: a Smithsonian reimagined to celebrate “patriotic” history, purged of anything uncomfortable; a Kennedy Center programming season that reads like the entertainment lineup at Mar-a-Lago; a Bureau of Labor Statistics that magically produces economic numbers that flatter the leader. And a law enforcement apparatus that enforces political loyalty above the actual law. That’s the America Trump and his loyalists are building.