The Living Room Times

Last night, while chit-chatting prior to an Alan Doyle concert (above) in Denver’s Lowry neighborhood — our first such event since the Before Times — my beloved and her bestie touched on the always popular topic of Denver’s insane housing market. They traded 👀 tales of Zillow estimates, and wondered aloud who the heck is buying all these average-seeming houses at sky-high prices.

The pandemic-era surge in housing unaffordability (“We’re #5! We’re #5!“) is great for the Mile High Household’s net worth: our house’s putative value is two and a half times what we paid for it 13 years ago — with roughly half of that increase happening in just the last 18 months! But, needless to say, it’s super shitty for anyone trying to buy a first home. (Also for our property tax bill. Heh.) And it feels uncomfortably unstable & unsustainable, in a late-2000s-deja-vu sort of way, y’know?

Anyway, this morning, inspired by Becky & V’s conversation, I posted a couple of tweets — followed by some lively back-and-forth with Twitter friends — asking if we’re in a(nother) housing bubble. I thought I’d post the resulting thread here, both for posterity (in case it ends up being another one of my Cassandra moments), and also because I want it all collected in one place so I can ask Planet Money about it. 🙂

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The other day, in a thread replying to a Joe Remi tweet about the latest deadly lies about COVID on Tucker Carlson’s disinformation show, I found myself saying this:

Demagogic lies are stronger than nuanced facts. Simplistic fantasies are stronger than inconvenient, complex realities. In a wholly unfettered marketplace of ideas—without even informal guardrails—evil outcompetes good; lies trump the truth.

I was sort of shocked to read those words after I wrote them, and to realize: Yup. I said what I said. That’s what I think now.

This morning, the topic came up again, in reference to the ongoing controversy around Joe Rogan, Spotify, Neil Young, and now Joni Mitchell. In response to Bryan O’Nolan tweeting, “The antidote to misinformation is truth,” I repeated my “lies trump the truth” thesis, and elaborated:

I used to believe—at my very core—that “the antidote to misinformation is truth.” But I think it’s been catastrophically disproven. . . . I can’t overstate what a colossal shift this is for me. I hate it. HATE it. But the two Big Lies of 2020 & 21 — “COVID is an overblown hoax” and “the election was stolen” — have flourished no matter how loudly & irrefutably they’re disproven.

Because this is such a profound shift in my thinking — and a key part of where I’ve landed after my worldview was shattered* in 2016 and the years that followed — it seemed worthy of a blog post.

*See also here: “Anyway, if 2016 shattered my previous worldview (it did), I guess this is the extremely depressing new worldview that I think I’m settling into: for a huge variety of interconnected reasons, America’s national politics has stumbled into a perfect shitstorm, and the cavalry ain’t coming. The problems have become structural and fundamental, as well as cultural and moral, and at some level even spiritual, for lack of a better term. The cancer has metastasized into the very marrow of our civic life, and there is no cure.” (Cheery and uplifting, I know!)

Anyway, after the jump, I collect a whole bunch of Twitter threads that I’ve done on this topic (some of which I had forgotten, but unearthed thanks to Twitter Search) over the past ~1½ years, showing my evolving thought process on this issue.

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After a two-year hiatus due to procrastination in 2019, then COVID in 2020 (because c’mon, last year’s CFB season was bulls***), the Living Room Times Bowl Pick ‘Em Contest is back!

You can enter the contest here. It’s free to enter. The prize, as always, is ETERNAL GLORY.

The entry deadline is tomorrow morning, Saturday 12/18, at 9:00 AM MST (8am Pacific, 11am Eastern), when the Boca Raton Bowl kicks off.

Alas, I started the contest too late to include today’s (Friday 12/17) pair of games, so there are “only” 42 bowls to pick. This year’s total number of available points is 69 (nice), broken down as follows: 5 points for the title game; 4 for each semifinal; 3 for the other “New Year’s Six” bowls; 2 for an octet of non-NY6 bowls that I chose*; and 1 for all other bowls. Also, 7 for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone; 9 for mortal men doomed to die; 1 for the dark lord on his dark throne.

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t/w: discussion of how toxic lawless police culture, and the GOP’s weaponization thereof, might just be the proximate cause of downfall of representative democracy in America.

(Also, how we should have listened to Black people about this, years ago. FFS.)

Portland’s entire police crowd-control unit, 50 officers in all, have resigned en masse from their assignment, in protest over a fellow officer being indicted for assault. The “whole bunch” is sticking up for the “bad apple” who physically attacked a photographer at a Black Lives Matter protest last year:

But although they resigned from the assignment, those 50 cops will remain employed: “The assignment is voluntary and the officers will remain on the force and continue their regular assignments.”

Fuck that. They should all be fired. All 50 of them. Immediately. For insubordination, and for encouraging lawless violence against the public they are sworn to protect and serve. (“Can’t do that because the police union will go apeshit,” you say? Cool. Disband it. I’m anti-“abolish the police,” but pro-“abolish police unions.”)

We CANNOT keep coddling this culture of entitled impunity and grievance-mongering lawlessness among armed agents of state power.

“ACAB” is wrong (and deeply unhelpful). Most cops aren’t bastards, individually. But police culture is utterly rotten, broken, and lawless at its core. It encourages a sense of aggrieved entitlement, a tolerance of unnecessary violence, and a toxic type of camaraderie that views basic accountability as an unfair attack by an ungrateful public.

This a BIG fucking problem. Far bigger, I fear, than most people have fully grasped yet. I believe it may be the most problematic of all the (many) problems threatening our Republic right now, when you think the worst-case scenarios all the way through. Our failure to rein this shit in might be what ultimately dooms America:

And Black people will be like pic.twitter.com/vseWp4oUQg

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) May 28, 2021

Police culture, broadly speaking, is so rotten that good people who try to improve it are powerless to do so. And worse, culture molds people. Peer pressure doesn’t just affect kids! Even a basically good person, if their workplace culture is a toxic shithole of lawless entitlement, impunity, and me-against-the-world grievance, is likely to start exhibiting more & more shitty, entitled, grievance-fueled, lawless behavior, as time goes on.

Of the 50 cops who resigned, how many do you think are routinely assholes in their everyday lives? How many regularly act lawlessly on the job? I bet it’s a minority. Probably a quite small minority. Yet they ALL went along with this stupid-ass “protest.” And it’s easy to understand why. Imagine you’re an officer in that group, and you secretly think the indictment was justified, but your 49 colleagues are all acting pissed about it. Are you gonna be the one guy who defies the herd, and risks being ostracized and mocked and hated? Or do you go along to get along? This is what a rotten culture does to people.

I feel fairly hopeless about this problem, because I don’t know how to fix it without a cross-partisan civilian political consensus, and we have the exact opposite: we have one major party that’s weaponizing the problem for political advantage, thereby worsening it. And I fear “weaponizing” may eventually not just be a metaphor.

In a future hellscape scenario where state or national legislators (and/or armed insurrectionists) try to outright steal an election, and America’s pro-democracy faction (i.e., Democrats + horrified principled ex-Republicans) takes to the streets by the millions in armed peaceful protest, a la Belarus or Tahrir Square or Hong Kong or [insert your preferred example of recent mass protests by pro-democracy factions in other countries; bonus points if you can think of one that was *successful*], and force the authoritarians to either (1) restore democracy, or (2) reveal their true colors by going Full Tiananmen on us…

To be very, very, VERY clear: we *don’t* threaten violence. We *don’t* promote “civil war.” We definitely do NOT mimic 1/6. We merely promise that, if they try to steal our democracy, we will rise up and reject — nonviolently but absolutely — their false claim to power.

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) May 28, 2021

…in that awful scenario, I have a fairly high degree of faith that the military will always follow & honor the constitutional order to the best of its ability. But I have no such faith in random state & local police departments with military-grade weapons and a longstanding culture of entitled, lawless grievance that happens to align perfectly with Trumpism, and that increasingly views Democrats as the enemy because we’re the only ones trying to rein in that toxic culture.

And because I know I can’t trust the police, writ large*, to act within the confines of the law in that situation (*obviously this doesn’t apply to every police department, still less every police officer, but broadly speaking it’s true), I know beforehand that taking to the streets en masse if there’s a stolen election, even in totally peaceful protest, carries a lot more chaotic risk than it should. And that knowledge will affect decision-making, at all levels.

The potential risk of police violence won’t stop me from protesting like hell on behalf of the Republic, if (heaven forbid) a true election-theft scenario unfolds. But that’s easy for me to say, as a white dude in a blue state. Truth is, it’ll make a lot of people hesitate, understandably so. And it’ll make a lot of politicians hesitate. And make a lot of military leaders hestitate, in certain scenarios where that would be at issue.

It’ll also worsen the temptation, in a lot of bad scenarios that I can imagine, for pundits and opinion-makers to call for “calm” and “cooler heads,” instead of calling plainly for the restoration of democracy, because of the fear that comes with the knowledge that there’s a well-trained group of heavily armed people, cloaked with a veneer of authority, who basically answer to no one, and who have a frighteningly high potential to become (or at least to turn a blind eye toward) a rogue quasi-paramilitary element that’s willing to escalate things toward a bloodbath.

In other words, a top-down order may not be necessary for the “Tienanmen” scenario to materialize. And that knowledge changes the incentives for everyone — and may prevent the pro-democracy faction from having, in the first place, the support needed to be as (nonviolent but) unyielding as we would need to be.

I’ve been worried about this police thing since last June, around the same time I realized that America’s guardrails were gone. I do sometimes worry that I sound like some the-end-is-near lunatic when I say this stuff out loud, but ultimately I think my lack of normalcy bias is an asset to clear thinking in these strange and menacing times.

I initially thought/hoped we’d dodged the bullet when Trump lost, and then when January 6 failed. But now, with the GOP acting like more of an authoritarian party every damn day, I’m more worried than ever about the future of the Republic. And I think the intersection of the GOP’s draft into authoritarianism, and police culture’s drift into violent, aggrieved impunity, is a critical aspect of the threat.

Future doomsaying aside: in the here & now, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, because anything Democrats do to chip away at the lawless entitlement in police culture worsens the sense of grievance (and targets it more and more at one particular political faction, namely…us), but catering to the grievance culture worsens the sense of entitled impunity!

What we need is a responsible cross-partisan consensus to fix this, but obviously that ain’t happening, and so we’re stuck….which is a very bad place to be, what with the looming possibility of massive civil unrest if an election is genuinely stolen.

This issue scares me, and I have no answers. Just worries.

2011

Ten years ago, I made my first-ever #GiantBracket, inspired by the Mid-Majority:

I think I'll make a blown-up xerox of the @midmajority/@ballybasketball bracket, pin it to the wall & have an As-You-Go Bracket Live Webcam.

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) March 2, 2011

Picked up my 3' x 5' #SuperGiantBracket from Kinko's (blown up from @midmajority AYG bracket) this morning. Oh, yes, it's gonna be awesome.

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) March 9, 2011

A historical relic from the Twitter archives: the first-ever tweeted photo of the first-ever #GiantBracket, in 2011. https://t.co/c02Dviakmb pic.twitter.com/XtBkEzBkwM

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) April 2, 2021

And what a year for it, as it turned out!

2012

I couldn’t find one photo showing the 2012 #GiantBracket in its final, post-championship form, but here are a few photos that collectively show most of it.

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It’s been…

One week since Joe solemnly
swore an oath to the best of his ability
Two weeks since the House agreed
to impeach Trump again for his seditious treachery
Three weeks since Pence had to flee
saying, “Get that mob outta here before they hang me”
Yesterday, you cried “unity”
But you can’t be forgiven without saying sorry

Hold it now and watch the hoodwink
The crazy groupthink
You’ll say I can’t believe QAnon
Could summon fools and racist tools who really think a Storm is coming that will somehow change who won the damn election

Hot like that poet when she bust rhymes
Big like those Trump crimes, and his mafioso values
Joe Biden’s got the mad grit
He’s seen some bad shit
He knows ’bout grief and how to pull through

Gonna need a break from all your fake
outrage and snowflake-y heartbreak
Because you lost, and now it’s your tears that I savor
Now Sue’s concerned and Josh got burned
And Mitch is bitching he got spurned
By Georgia voters who view treason with disfavor

How can I help it if a fair election makes you mad?
There’s no “steal” to be “stopped,” you just lost.
(Sad!)
I’m the kind of guy who usually backs “unity”
But understand, you attacked the damn country
I have a tendency to see sedition as a peeve
So go to prison in your stupid Q shirt

It’s been…
One week since a cold Bernie
Heralded the beginning of a new presidency
Three weeks since Steve Kornacki
Showed us maps of blue Georgia, a glorious Dem victory
Twelve weeks since November 3
When Trump said “I won” with Goebbels-esque mendacity
Yesterday, you cried “unity”
But you can’t be forgiven without saying sorry

Chickety-China, the “China Virus”
Cannonballin’ in like it’s Miley Cyrus
Gathering indoors with no mask on
Now COVID’s passed on
Your dumbass drove R-naught up past 1

Like NYC, SoCal’s getting frantic
Death toll’s gigantic
And these new variants are disquieting
Like seriously, we need to masks
But you won’t wear masks
You’d rather super-spread while rioting

Gotta threaten Dems with angry mobs
Riled up by Hannity and Dobbs
To sate Trump’s ego, always lying to the right-wing
“We got more votes,
I know we did,
Cuz we had boats
And a boom boat parade, yeah
Is practically the same thing”

How can I help it if Black people voting makes you sad?
Throwing out Philly votes is fucked up, Chad
I’m the kind of guy who tries to see good faith
But Josh Hawley is practically a Ringwraith
I have a tendency to care about the Republic
That fascist MAGA bastards tried to subvert

It’s been…
One week since Trump left D.C.
A fucking loser whose shame will live in infamy
Three weeks since I looked at Q and said,
“You just did just what I thought you were gonna do”
Four weeks since, on New Year’s Eve,
We hoped to leave this shit behind in 2020
You say you want unity
I say renounce your lies, convict, and say sorry

(Spineless G.O.P. assholes will never say sorry)
(U.S. politics sucks now, I need a new hobby)
(Mar-a-Lago in Florida, home of the blobby)

The House of Representatives is right now debating the second impeachment of Donald Trump, this time for inciting a mob of armed insurrectionists who, a week ago today, violently stormed the United States Capitol and besieged the legislative branch of our nation’s government in a premeditated putsch attempt, aiming to seditiously — and, some of them hoped, murderously — disrupt the constitutional vote-counting process that affirms the (until now) peaceful transfer of power.

In these final hours before a U.S. President is impeached for Incitement of Insurrection, it’s worth reflecting on precisely what “incitement” means, in this context — and why, in my view, we shouldn’t get too bogged down in semantic parsing of his speech to the mob last Wednesday. That speech matters, but it’s hardly the only thing that matters. I don’t even think it’s the most important thing.

The most important thing is the Big Lie.

Because fundamentally, when you lie to people in a democratic republic that their right to effect change by voting has been “stolen,” and no further nonviolent legal recourse exists, the logical conclusion of your lie, if believed, is violent revolution. You own that consequence.

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 3, 2021

Before continuing in that vein, let me clarify what “incitement” doesn’t mean in the present context.

Whether it’s used in a New York Times headline or an article of impeachment (which, per the Founders’ intent, need not be based on a criminal offense), “incitement” does not necessarily mean criminal incitement, which is an exceedingly narrow crime under Supreme Court free-speech precedents. As I tweeted the other day in a seven-tweet thread (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7):

I’m a lawyer, and have always said “words have meanings.” But people need to stop obsessing over — and hiding behind — the always-more-stringent-than-common-usage *criminal law* definitions of words, in rebuttal to proper usage of those words’ broader meanings outside of the courtroom.

When I say Trump incited a riot, I don’t mean he is necessarily guilty of the *crime* of incitement. . . . Criminal-law definitions are uniquely narrow because people must not be deprived of physical liberty unless they have, beyond a reasonable doubt, committed an undeniable offense defined in advance with crystal clarity. That does not apply to everyday (including political) word usage.

We don’t want jurors making ad-hoc judgment calls about “ehhh, does this sort of conduct feel like it ought to be criminal?” But outside the courtroom, when physical liberty isn’t at stake, we do want citizens to make judgment calls about politicians’ misdeeds. And the same goes for legislators making judgments about impeachment.

I emphasize again: Words mean things. I’m NOT advocating bad-faith definitional expansion, for partisan convenience, of words that connote very serious misconduct. But applying criminal-court standards to non-criminal political accountability is (often) a bad-faith contraction of definitions. That’s wrong too. Let’s stop doing it.

So, let me be clear: what I’m saying here is not a commentary on the crime of incitement. In deeming Trump, and many other Republicans, guilty of inciting post-election violence, I mean only that they are morally guilty of the misdeed (not crime) of incitement. The same applies when I use words like “treason” or “sedition.” I’m talking about moral, ethical and patriotic precepts, not crimes. (Whether there’s criminal liability is a separate issue, one that I am not addressing one way or the other.)

With that caveat out of the way, allow me to quote a series of ten tweets about elections, incitement, violence, and moral responsibility (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), which I posted on Sunday, January 3 — the weekend before the attempted Capitol Hill putsch.

I’ve long felt that we’re too quick to blame politicians we dislike for the actions of violent crazies. Sarah Palin didn’t shoot Gabby Giffords; the #Resistance didn’t attack that GOP baseball game.

But this is different. The coup supporters are responsible for what comes after.

If people believe your abject lie that a valid, untainted election result is a “steal” that must be “stopped,” violence at some point becomes a rational response from their perspective. We often call such political extremists “the crazies,” but it stops being “crazy” when it’s the logical conclusion of your cynical claims, if believed.

This is especially true if you don’t offer them another means of “stopping” the “steal.” Which, after January 6, you can’t, because of course there is no “steal” to “stop.” The election is over; Biden won; he’ll be POTUS in 17 days. After January 6, only violent revolution could “stop” that.

This is something I’m acutely aware of—because I worry about it with my own “coup” talk. Of course, there are huge differences: (1) I’m not lying. (2) I’m just some guy, not a person in power. (3) There ARE nonviolent means to prevent this type of coup. Still, I worry about it. One thing I hate about the Trump era is how it has made extreme rhetoric necessary to accurately describe what’s happening. I feel deeply uncomfortable using the language of “coup,” “fascism,” “destroying the Republic,” and so forth. I hate talking this way. I do it out of necessity.

If, God forbid, we someday run out of nonviolent means to oppose a fascist coup, such rhetoric will be very weighty because of what it implies. Thank God we’re not there yet.

But these Cruz/Hawley assholes are inventing a TOTALLY FAKE version of that scenario, for shits and giggles.

So yes. If, God forbid, there is violence on or after Jan. 6 by people who believe the lie that a “steal” is underway, which (logically) can only be “stopped” by violence, I will hold Hawley, Cruz & co. personally responsible for those people’s actions, and whatever harm they cause.

Because fundamentally, when you lie to people in a democratic republic that their right to effect change by voting has been “stolen,” and no further nonviolent legal recourse exists, the logical conclusion of your lie, if believed, is violent revolution. You own that consequence.

What sets this lie apart from other irresponsible-but-not-quite-incitement falsehoods is its (false) premise that the usual means of righting wrongs in a democratic republic — voting — has been rendered ineffective by a successful “steal.” That particular lie makes you culpable for the resulting violence. Because if people believe your lie that ballots are being flatly ignored, they will resort to bullets. They will do so not because they’re “crazy” but because the logic of your lie compels that conclusion. This is why such claims should never be made lightly, let alone falsely.

Hat tip to Timothy Synder, whose ballots/bullets tweet inspired that last point (and indeed, the whole thread).

After my fears were realized and the Captiol was stormed, I retweeted part of my pre-putsch thread, and reiterated its point in a pair of new tweets (1, 2):

This isn’t a typical incitement situation. The central issue, morally, isn’t whether Trump and other Republicans said “go break windows” or “storm the Capitol” or “be violent” or “kill ’em.” They didn’t need to. Their utterly baseless stolen-election lie INHERENTLY ENCOURAGES VIOLENCE.

Telling people, falsely, that elections are rigged and their votes systematically stolen, *is* incitement to violence. Because **if that was true** (which it’s not), and if legal recourse to fix it was exhausted, violent revolution would be justified, by the Founders’ own logic!!

The next day, I reiterated the point again:

.@BillKristol Agreed.

I think it’s important to emphasize that the primary incitement to violent insurrection was *THE ELECTION-THEFT LIE ITSELF*, not any specific fighting words that may be subject to semantic debates & dumb arguments about intent, literally vs. seriously, etc. https://t.co/cRpZOgwad3

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 8, 2021

I added: “The baseless lie that the election was irretrievably stolen — by a (wholly fabricated) conspiracy spanning the whole government and legal system — inherently incites violence because if that were true, revolt would be rational.”

I also praised Gabriel Malor for making this point in his own ten-tweet thread (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Malor wrote:

Many GOP officeholders are grappling—poorly—with the problem that they told their constituents that the election was getting stolen and patriots could stop it. Now they’re backtracking: “we didn’t mean actual action, patriot fam!”

This is the problem with the Flight 93 rhetoric. If it were true what GOP officeholders and their enablers in right-wing media were saying, then a desperate act of patriotic defiance wasn’t just necessary; it was *mandatory*. The problem is it wasn’t true.

But now all their stirred up “patriots” are standing around confused, asking “but you told me the fate of the country was at stake!” And today we’re seeing GOP officeholders trapped between their own words and the consequences they asked for.

Yes. Indeed.

The Big Lie is the incitement. Yes, there’s also the explicit talk of “fighting” and showing “strength” and “trial by combat” and the rest. And yeah, that makes it even worse. But the primary incitement to violence is the Big Lie itself: the utterly false, fabricated fiction that the election was stolen. That particular lie is uniquely dangerous, and necessarily invites violence.

That is why I utterly reject calls for “unity” from any officeholder who participated or acquiesced in the Big Lie, and has yet to renounce it. Quoting again from Gabriel Malor:

[The responsibility is] not just on Trump. It’s on the 126 House Republicans who signed on to a brief arguing that Vice Presidents have inherent power to overturn election results they don’t like. It’s on the Levins and Limbaughs who spent two months telling listeners the election was stolen.

The message to these wannabe patriots at this point should be unequivocal:
(1) The claims that the election was stolen are false, and utterly without support.
(2) All of the legal authorities to look into this have said so.
(3) I misled you about that, and I am sorry.

But today the message I’m seeing from GOP officials is:
(1) You were misled, but not by me. It was totally someone else.
(2) We have to do something about fraud in elections so people have faith in the process.

The first one here is typical weaselly politician bullshit. But the second one just perpetuates the dangerous delusion that led to Wednesday’s attack. Shameful.

Quite so.

(Malor added: “The fact is that we have extensive protections in every state to deal with voter fraud. And while it is true that there’s always a fraudulent vote or two, the states typically catch most of it, and there isn’t enough to change election outcomes.” Yup.)

This reality — i.e., the dangerousness of these Republicans’ cynical lies about the election — is why, despite being the sort of squishy moderate Dem who usually embraces calls for “unity,” I utterly reject the GOP’s both-sides bullshit about “turning down the temperature.” What Republicans did is far worse than mere “incendiary” language:

Yup. And baseless claims of election theft go beyond even normal “incendiary” speech. That particular lie is, morally, inherently an incitement to violence. I did a whole thread about this back on Sunday, anticipating the possibility of January 6 violence: https://t.co/eWo4CnlCb2

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 8, 2021

Nor can I take seriously congressional coup plotters’ empty condemnations of the “horrific” insurrection, when insurrection is the logical conclusion of their own lies, from the perspective of people who believed those lies.

If you tell people the lie that the usual means of righting wrongs in a democratic republic — voting — has been made ineffective by a “steal” that must be (but isn’t being) “stopped,” the logical conclusion of that lie, if believed, is violent revolution.

You did this, @tedcruz. https://t.co/u3rnPjcjic

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 8, 2021

Trump should be impeached and convicted, and the bastards who joined his Big Lie should be driven from public life in disgrace and ignominy. Any hope of earning redemption would have to begin with acknowledging their grave error, and trying to make amends by publicly correcting and atoning for it:

It’ll never happen, but how powerful it would be if a GOP pol who coddled Trump’s lie were to come out & tell the truth:

“Trump has been lying to you, and so have I. We know Biden won fairly. We’ve always known. There was no steal. No fraud. It’s all a lie. I’m sorry. I resign.”

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 8, 2021

P.S. About the whole “Big Lie” thing… President-elect Biden is right to cite Goebbels. Trump routinely employs the tactic that Goebbels made famous, as I’ve been pointing out for literally four years. We mustn’t shy away from saying so. It isn’t offensive to tell the truth about this; it’s necessary. And the fact is, with their deadly post-election lies, Trump and his party of sycophants went Full Goebbels. You never go Full Goebbels. But they did:

Citing the very existence of the Big Lie as the explicit justification for further spreading the Big Lie is a clever twist on Goebbels. I imagine ol’ Joe would be proud of America’s fascist party for keeping the flame alive. Very fine people. https://t.co/qFBpj1DjVJ

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) December 5, 2020

TIME’s Person of the Year should’ve been Joseph Goebbels.

Dude’s been dead 75 years, but he’s having one helluva resurgence.

“When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” https://t.co/6cS1DzWH8Y #TheBigLie https://t.co/VCfGDMdsO6

— @MileHighBrendan was here (and still is sometimes) (@MileHightheGrey) January 8, 2021

So yes, let’s have “unity” — by uniting in favor of something that all intellectually honest people, acting in good faith, must surely agree is necessary: accountability, both for the Inciter-in-Chief and for his Big Lie accomplices.

This post is not meant to shame anyone. But as an honest expression of emotion, I confess I was somewhat disheartened this morning to realize that, out of my core group of co-workers — all of whom I respect as decent, sensible, intelligent people — I’m the only one who will be spending Thanksgiving with ONLY members of my own household.

To be sure, others are scaling back their plans from what they would do in a normal year. Nobody is planning a giant, extended-family feast. Several are taking precautions: gathering outside, or opening windows, eating at separate tables, etc. And I’m grateful for that. Every precaution helps.

But the fact is, the number of COVID patients in Colorado hospitals, which only reached 1,000 just two weeks ago, is already poised to hit 3,000 the weekend after Thanksgiving — and that’s without a post-Thanksgiving surge.

Becky’s E.R. shifts on Thursday, Friday & Saturday of the holiday weekend will be chaotic enough; the hospital is already well into its crisis contingency plans (and indeed, she’ll be working a different shift than usual, at the hospital’s request, to fill a staffing gap as things get worse). But it’s the next set of shifts, and the ones after that, that I really worry about.

If many thousands of additional Coloradans get sick, all at the same time, in the aftermath of Thanksgiving gatherings, the hospitals — and their heroic nurses and docs — simply won’t have the beds, the resources, or the people to handle it. They just won’t. And so there will be a significant degradation in the level of care, and an escalating level of hell for the staff who have to manage the chaos, and make the impossible, wrenching decisions about who lives and who dies, otherwise antiseptically known as “crisis standards of care.”

And unfortunately, it’s a numbers game. If you have a multi-household Thanksgiving with modest levels of precaution, you’ll probably be fine. The odds are in your favor, and your family’s. But — and here I feel like the guy in “Titanic” talking about the mathematical certainty of doom — the inevitable reality is that some percentage of people who do the same thing you did, won’t be fine. The percentage will be small, but if the denominator is big enough, that small not-fine percentage will amount to enough people that my wife’s workplace will become even more of a hellscape in December than is already guaranteed by the present high level of community spread.

So, yeah, it probably won’t be you, or a member of your family, whose hospital “room” is actually a hallway or closet, or whose bed is at an understaffed convention center. But it’ll be a member of somebody’s family. And likewise, the nurses caring for all those patients, holding down the fort as more patients arrive and more co-workers get sick, will be members of somebody’s family too. And some of them will ultimately be assigned to help palliate the final days & hours of patients stuck in a place like that “pit” in El Paso you may have read about in a viral tweet, which some misinterpreted as whistleblowing about a shocking hospital failure, rather than simply an accurate description of what “crisis standards of care” really means: people, who could otherwise have survived, left to die because of an acute lack of resources, because too many folks took too many risks (in some cases, reckless risks, but other cases, modest, reasonable-seeming risks), at a time when the overall risk to the community is astronomical, and we need to take this even more seriously than we ever have before, including back in March/April.

As I said, I’m not here to shame anyone. I’m not perfect, I haven’t always made the right choices, and I respect all the conflicting emotions at play here. I’ll just say this. Close your eyes and imagine a world where every hospital in Colorado is overrun; there are no beds in the E.R. for heart attack or car accident victims; dozens of refrigerated trucks are serving as mobile morgues all over the state; and the daily nationwide death toll is greater than the number who died on 9/11 (and still rising). And then ask yourself: if I lived in that world, what would I do for Thanksgiving? And then do that. Because that world is our immediate future, unless we very, very seriously buckle down & lock down, right now, today.