After Joe Biden officially stepped down from the 2024 US presidential race, many of you wrote in asking what I thought about it all, particularly how I felt about Vice President Kamala Harris stepping up. To recap, I was horrified by Joe Biden’s obvious decline in mental health, I never wanted him to be president in the first place, and I never really liked Kamala Harris either because, well, she’s a cop. I mean, metaphorically.
And yet! Guys, I’m so temporarily relieved. I’m so relatively happy! Yes, “relieved” and “happy” both have modifiers but it’s still better than my previous state of “researching which Canadian city is the least cold,” and I know that it’s a meme that libs bluff that they’re going to leave if Trump wins but the other day Instagram’s algorithm served me a real estate listing for a tackle shop in Tofino, which I think really says something. Fun fact: Tofino is the surfing capital of Canada because one time a surfer got in the water there and stayed for a full ten minutes. Sadly it was flat at the time.
Anyway, I assumed that if Biden stepped down, Harris would step up due to campaign finance laws and the terrible optics of Dems skipping over the VP to pick a possibly more popular white man. But I was apprehensive: if Harris did get her chance, would her team be able to launch? Would they be hamstrung by Dem moderates with latent bigotry against anyone not seen as “normal,” i.e., a white guy?
But honestly, when it all happened those fears were at least a little curbed. The enthusiasm for Harris has been great, the memes have been decent, and I gotta say, the “weird” talking point is glorious. I remember 20 years ago, seeing how Republicans all lined up behind whatever talking points the leadership put out and I always wondered if one day I’d see the Democrats do that, and it’s happening and it’s very fun. The far right is furious that they’re being called “weird,” and they have absolutely no response for it. Love it.
Anyway, I say all this because, well, a lot of you were asking, and also because I started working on this video before Biden stepped down and I basically had to rewrite it due to an overwhelming sense of optimism that we may actually avoid a Trump dictatorship in November. And it’s a candidate who progressives might be able to bully into instituting our little pet policies, like you know stopping the US from supporting that genocide that’s currently happening in Gaza.
Originally, this video was going to be pretty dark. The idea was this: we really need to prepare for a Trump dictatorship, and figure out how we will continue to fight regardless. Okay, yeah, I probably wasn’t actually going to move to Tofino to sell fishing gear. I’m too stubborn for that.
Anyway, NOW this video is basically that, but more optimistic: we DO need to be prepared for the possibility of a Trump dictatorship, and I want to highlight at least one way that some people are already doing that.
First, a quick reminder of what Trump did after taking office in 2017 only as it relates to the environment: according to research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protection rules, most of which were done through the Environmental Protection Agency, like removing “limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks; remov(ing) protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdr(awing) the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants.” This has led to a “significantly increase (in) greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade and…thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality each year.”
Trump’s choice to lead the EPA was Scott Pruitt, an oil and gas industry lobbyist whose previous work with the agency involved him repeatedly suing them to stop them from protecting the environment.
By the end of his first year in office, Trump had encouraged hundreds of EPA employees to quit, including at least 200 scientists, while Pruitt increased the number of political appointees.
If you’ll recall from my previous video, increasing political appointees is one of the many disturbing aspects of Project 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for Trump should he win in November. That’s because if you are an anti-science bigot president and you have to fill a position with the person most qualified to do the job, they may not go against all their training in order to do whatever you tell them to do, like announce that climate change is a Chinese hoax. But if you can fill positions with people based entirely on how much they can pretend to love the taste of your asshole, well, the possibilities are endless! Trump has vowed to institute the plan and move tens of thousands of employees into positions that would be “at-will,” meaning they can be fired whenever he wants.
If you’d like to know more reasons to get out and vote against Trump and every Republican on the ballot this November, please go watch my full video about Project 2025. But for now I’m going to move on to the good news.
Just a few weeks ago, employees at the EPA secured a huge win, approving a 4-year deal that replaces the contract that Trump forced on all of them when he took office. The new contracts increase the number of days they can work from home, from two days to eight days per 2-week period, and also stipulates that the organization must set up a number of pilot programs to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But most importantly, the new contracts establish a strict appeals process for any employee at the EPA who is fired or otherwise retaliated against for pursuing science-based work:
“If the agency is completely captured by an administration that is hostile to science, there would be nowhere for an employee to go if they’re retaliated against for speaking up for science or scientific integrity,” Cantello said. “What the [contract] article allows is for an independent arbiter to find whether or not the agency did that, and would order the agency to take certain actions to stop that from happening.”
And how did the EPA employees get this safeguard established? Via their union. EPA employees are represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, and that collective action allowed them to come together to get these essential protections put into place.
Because remember in that Project 2025 video, how I pointed out that Republicans hide the agenda because their policies are deeply unpopular? Well unions are the opposite. Unions can only work with the will of the people in them, which is why they are one important answer to how we topple lone, unpopular authoritarians. There are more of us than there are of them. They want you to work overtime for no more pay, to drink dirty tap water and breathe in pollutants. Unions want you to get paid a living wage and enjoy your weekend. I cannot stress this enough: whatever field you work in, if there’s a union you can join, you probably should. Unions are good for you and for society as a whole.
Oh except for cops. Police unions aren’t real unions but that’s another video for another day.
Anyway, I’m very happy the EPA employees secured this contract. But I do have to mention that it’s not a cure-all against a looming theocratic dictatorship. With the amount of power the US Supreme Court has handed the President of the United States, it’s entirely possible Trump will be able to get around these protections. But here’s the takeaway, in my opinion: even if Trump wins in November, we don’t have to make things easy for him. We can erect these barriers that will slow him down, we can use every tool we have to make his life, and the life of every person in his administration, absolutely miserable. We can join unions, we can set up ironclad contracts, and we can also support abortion funds and we can harass our Democratic representatives to expand the Supreme Court or to impose term limits and amend the constitution to overturn the immunity ruling.
I know despair is inevitable, because we live our lives steeped in every bit of bad news that flits through the Great Algorithm. But despair doesn’t help anyone. So I’m encouraging you to follow my lead: get off Canadian Zillow and get back in the game.
