The Senate GOP wants to uninsure 23 million and wreck employer insurance by the end of June. Here’s how to stop helping them.
Republicans aren’t just ruthless. They’re good at being ruthless.
If they can, they will insure 23 million people by the end of June. They will end Medicaid as you know it. They will raise the uninsured rate of children by 50 percent. They will doom the sick and potentially wreck employer health insurance for tens of millions. And they’ll do it without the public having any idea that they’re just doing it to give rich people and profitable corporations a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
Mitch McConnell has figured out that all you need to achieve extraordinarily unpopular things — like steal a Supreme Court seat or block a bipartisan reaction to Russian hacking — is to keep them out of the headlines.
And Donald Trump knows that if you constantly throw your feces around, the press will be too busy trying to clean it to reveal how the guy who’s throwing the feces is defrauding the public.
It’s working.
The GOP plan to use sabotage, speed and secrecy to destroy the most important advances to U.S. heath care in 50 years are being ignored by almost every major new organization in the country. Because they don’t know how to do any better.
And the sad fact is we’re helping them. We fuel the distraction and spread the feces. And we do it with our good intentions.
You don’t have to believe that Donald Trump is strategic to believe that the chaos he sows helps Mitch McConnell, who is definitely strategic, achieve horrible things.
Republicans use our brains against ourselves, as George Lakoff has been telling us for decades. They know how we think and work. They know we can’t let lies go. And still all our fact checks do is spread their message and feed the distraction.
It’s time to test out a concept I’ve been calling “Election Time Rules” that I was going to push next year starting in October. The premise is we have to take our brains back and use the most precious thing we have — our focus.
The three rules are built on how our brains work. You should learn the science behind them, but it’s not necessary now. All you have to do now is decide not to be a GOP tool when it matters most.
Here’s what you need to do.
- Stop yourself from repeating or rebutting Trump, or any Republican.
Our liberal brains tell us that our fact checks solve the proof and set the record straight. Instead we just reinforce their messages. We love doing it and our followers love sharing your best Trump owns. But we’re just helping them. Do your best to ignore anything Trump or his GOP says at least until the end of June. And this also means avoid you should avoid using their language in any way possible. For instance, saying “Obamacare isn’t in a death spiral” is almost as bad as saying that it is. Instead, say something like “Obamacare is saving tens of thousands of lives and preventing hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies each year.” Make them debunk you! - Repetition matters. Repetition matters. Repetition matters.
Fill your feeds with the messages you want people to hear, primarily messages about the death and destructiveness promised by Trumpcare. Seek out the best sources and share and share and share. Assume that no one is getting any news about this because they probably aren’t. And if you annoy your friends, tell them it’s just until you can convince the GOP to stop punishing the sick to reward the rich in secret. - Focus on what you can do.
You can contact your Senator every day. You can recruit friends in key states to do the same. You may be able to join protests, sit-ins and rallies in favor of caring for our fellow Americans. You may be able to volunteer for and/or otherwise support candidates that oppose TrumpCare and will fight to expand coverage.
Think of the people who can’t fight because they’re too busy providing for themselves and their families. Think of how much better our health care system is now than it was eight years ago and how much better it can still be.
Most importantly think about how to take back your brain so you don’t help Trump and his GOP pull off the greatest legislative looting in modern American history.
