Trump, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott & the entire MAGA crowd are stoking outrage & fear. It won't work.

They are all betting against our common decency, our commitment to democracy, our faith in each other, and our determination to move the country forward.

This week Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, gave ownership of that company to a pair of trusts dedicated to fighting climate change. It was an act of love for the planet, and a vote of confidence in our shared future.

Chouinard told the New York Times, “Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people.” 

I share that dream and feel nothing but gratitude to him for this amazing gift. But from where I sit, our future depends on the courage of those of us without companies to give away. 

Here in Chicago, the reclusive billionaire Barre Seid gave his company to Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo, as some of you may know, has already done our country untold damage as the leader of the Federalist Society. That’s a political organization masquerading as a conservative law group. Nothing in America is more responsible for corrupting our judiciary.

The news this week has focused on one judge, Aileen Cannon, whose continued disregard for legal norms now threatens our national security. She’s so determined to protect Donald Trump and his stolen documents that she has held up the national security review of the threat posed by Trump’s illegal and outrageous theft of government classified documents.

But it is wrong to focus on her being a Trump appointee. The threat predates Trump and is bigger than he is. Cannon was a lawyer with no relevant experience save youth and fealty to the federalist society. Those two qualities met the test of necessary and sufficient for Leo to put her on a list that Mitch McConnell used to pack the courts. 

Over time, the Federalist Society and their allies in the Republican Party have given us not a conservative court, something we have had many times in the past. They have instead created a political court, something that America has long avoided. Something Alexander Hamilton describes as a certain path to tyranny in the Federalist papers. 

The damage is already considerable. They and their partisan court corrupted our politics by striking down campaign finance laws, gutting the voting rights act, and turning a blind eye towards radical gerrymandering. They made it harder for the government to regulate companies that contribute to climate change. Then they went after reproductive choice, allowing states to force women to carry dead fetuses to term- and Republican states wasted no time in doing just that.

Mr. Leo now has another $1.6 billion to further corrupt our democracy. Since the judges on his list allowed unlimited dark money into politics, you can bet he uses his new windfall to move beyond the partisan capture of the courts to further erode our way of life. 

I love what the founder of Patagonia did. I loathe what Barre Seid did. But the real question is: what will you do?

This week Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, sent an agent to Texas to lie to new immigrants in order to get them to board a plane. He paid someone to pretend to be an immigration advocate and told them he could fly them to Boston where they would be given housing and jobs. But the whole thing was a campaign stunt paid for by Florida taxpayers. The trusting souls who accepted the governor’s offer of help landed on Martha’s Vineyard- an island with only a summer tourist economy wholly unsuited to be a port for immigrants. Unlike Gov DeSantis, the people on the island were not so cruel. They did their best to care for the strangers in their midst. 

These MAGA stunts do nothing to fix our broken immigration system. Nor are they meant to fix it. Instead, they are happy to keep it broken as long as it can be useful as a partisan stunt, however cruel. 

Their crowd is so morally bankrupt that they are not content to keep problems alive for their own political use, but they are also eager to create new problems if they think they can scare us into submission. There are lots of examples: They ban books that offer solace to young people who feel frighteningly alone. They create so-called election integrity units that claim to look for voter fraud but are really used as intimidating demonstrations of partisan power.

Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Abbot, the entire MAGA crowd suffers from a sickness of the soul. They cannot see the humanity in others. They see only danger. They cannot love their neighbors because they are trained to fear. They search the country for outrages to stoke more of this fear. That is why 95 percent of Republicans think the country is moving in the wrong direction. The rest of us think we are making progress but worry that the MAGA forces are going to drag us back.

And so, right on cue, Donald Trump and Lindsay Graham have told us that there will be blood in the streets, an uprising like we have never seen- I guess January 6th was a minor offense- if we continue to investigate the criminal behavior of the former President. They are giving license to political violence on a scale we have never seen.

Let’s just call it like it is: these guys are angry they got caught. They are doing everything they can to get ordinary Americans to shield them from accountability for their crimes. 

It will not work. Americans have already once thrown them out of power- Donald Trump lost the House, he lost the Senate, he was booted from the White House. He lost every court case about the election. 

Democrats took over and went to work for Americans. They started to repair the nation’s infrastructure. They created millions of new jobs. They ended the pandemic. They worked with the business community to on-shore the production of high end computer chips. They began the real work of tackling climate change. This week, with the intervention of the Biden Administration, they averted, at least for now, a rail strike that would have crippled supply chains and helped win some concession for workers. 

And in doing the hard work, Democrats are showing Americans that the future is not something to fear. That we can control our destiny and lift each other up. There is no greater antidote to the politics of fear than this. 

But Trump and MAGA crowd, and Leonard Leo and his corrupting influence, are still hard at work. In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson protects them. In Michigan, Tudor Dixon keeps their hopes alive. In Ohio, J.D. Vance calls them heroes. They are all betting against our common decency, our commitment to democracy, our faith in each other, and our determination to move the country forward.

History is littered with losers like these who bet against us. But that’s only because history is full of ordinary citizen patriots who rose to meet the threats in their time.

It is our time, America. The campaign season is here. Uncle Sam needs you.