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[Miles Archer]

32. I see JPR as more of an ongoing identity crisis and less of a "fake Russian news" site

It started off as a largely pro-Sanders site, and when Clinton won the Primary and the "contested convention" thing didn't happen, there was a "Season of Stein," and then, in the post-Trump election wake of no real game plan for 2020, it lost any real focus.

There was no way that a "revolution" was going to supersede Clinton v Trump. The voters who went for a third choice or didn't vote at all handed us what we have right now (and that is an over-simplification, but it represents at least part of the truth), and while anything is possible between now and the 2020 election, we have no strong reason on November 26, 2016, to say with complete authority that the 2020 election will not come down to a 2-party race.

So JPR has become a site filled with people who don't know, but have strong opinions, so they express their opinions in the absence of facts.

We have no idea what's going to happen after four years of Trump, whether he makes it or quits or is impeached. As i have said in many DU threads, I am personally more wary of Paul Ryan having four years to make his "dreams" come true.

As a result, I have no idea of what is to become of JPR. Is it a "progressive" site? Yes...but it's a mix of a lot of other things the average "progressive" may or may not want to align themselves with as well.

Are they a pro-Trump Putin mouthpiece? Yeah, they did go through some of that, and they attempted to distance themselves from it. It's bound to happen on any "membership" site. DU has a higher level of awareness when it comes to "moles" or "disruptors" and so they are less welcome and their stays here are briefer.

But I still call it an identity crisis. They went all in for Sanders and that didn't happen, so they lacked a viable "Plan B." And while it's fair and accurate to say that Clinton was the "Plan B" that would have kept Trump out of the White House, they weren't going to go for it. That's the "postmortem" we're dealing with now.

I'm neither trying to defend the site nor attack it. There's no shortage of negativity, bile, hatred there...call it what you will...when it comes to Clinton. They will either work through that and find a more common, positive voice between now and the next election, or they won't.

I don't want to insult anyone who strongly believes in the possibility of a third party candidate in 2020 who is capable of winning. The pragmatic side of me can't see past a Democrat / Republican race, and if we are able to identify and support a Democrat in the next couple of years capable of going the distance, I...for one...will back that candidate. If we can't do that, Stein and Johnson and a lot of other politicians mainstream America hasn't heard of will be sending out their resumes.

Think of it this way...Ryan and McConnell are two 10-year olds who have been feed a lot of sugar and turned loose for a shopping spree in the toy store.

If that's not reason enough to...paraphrasing McConnell himself here...make one term for Trump the primary goal of the next four years...I'm at a loss. I just don't know what to say. My guess is that if a 1%-er is somehow reading what I've written here, they might think "FUCK yeah...TRUMP."

But for everyone else, by the time Medicaid and Social Security no longer exist, and by the time Ryan succeeds in making tax cuts that skew by 47% to the 1%-ers in year one and 99.6% to them at the end of a decade...by the time anyone reading this who depends on food stamps to survive no longer has them...it will be Democrat versus Republican, and if another Bernie Sanders emerges, he/she had goddamned well better be, as Jimi put it, a Voodoo Child. They goddamned well better be able to stand up next to a mountain and chop it down with the edge of their hand.

Because anything else would be masturbation.

Ideas that are not actionable ideas are masturbation. They're the guy rolling joints talking about how he's going to put a band together and go out on the road and rock the nation who wakes up in a pile of Taco Bell wrappers and just rolls another joint.

It would be that joke on "The Simpsons" about Homer losing out on the employee of the month to "Inanimate Carbon Rod" and Bart asking breathlessly "Did you actually get to SEE the rod?"

This is the year in which we witnessed the biggest con man of all time win over voters with a baseball cap, xenophobia, racism, and a carrot dangled in the face of people so far beneath his extreme level of contempt that he must laugh himself silly every time they echo his "make America great again" mantra. This is an asshole who just ate a 24 course Thanksgiving dinner at Mar-A-Lago in which half the dishes were named after him. He shits on a golden toilet. We are going to be paying millions of dollars a day so that he can "work" from Trump Towers. And you thought you were pissed off by all of George W. Bush's visits to the pig farm?

JPR, by necessity, has to re-invent itself for the journey ahead. Will they become a Reddit-styled shithole (some would say they have already become exactly that) or a voice worth hearing?

I don't know.

You don't know.

They don't know.