There was a time, when the nights were for sleeping.

And then came the war, a war for truth. And there would be no more sleep.

The first time I slept in during the Deception Wars was when Manafort was indicted.

It was the first glimmer that truth was alive and fighting for sunlight.

Staying close to reality—that all Trump’s men are cons—and chronicling that truth would give me momentary peace of mind. https://twitter.com/Heidi_Cuda/status/1200475621383499776

DETRUMPIFICATION: As we stand on the precipice of a new day for America, we must look to history to see how we can move forward whole.

I wrote this in 2018: detrumpification starts with a recommitment to truth.
https://millennialpolitics.co/the-detrumpification-of-america/

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

My “Detrumpification” article, 11/27/2018:

1/ In 1943, the Pentagon was thinking ahead. Our military leaders created the term denazification, with the goal to enact a plan to denazify Germany’s legal system.

2/ The term grew to include the removal of Nazi leaders and enablers and to disband the organizations that made the SS rise to power possible.

3/ Ultimately, the term came to define an Allied initiative to purge Germany and Austria of their National Socialist ideology in press, culture, economy, the judiciary and any lingering remnants within the political sphere.

4/ In addition, denazification was aimed at ridding the countries of the symbols of the SS; virulent, hateful reminders of crimes against humanity enabled by relentless propaganda.

5/ As the chill of the Cold War set in, it became increasingly difficult to root out the millions who’d supported, been duped or were members of the Nazi regime.

6/ And yet, the people of Germany managed to emerge from those dark days more soulful, and clearly better stewards of humanity and this planet. It wasn’t an easy path. But there is, after all, no quick fix to changing a culture.

7/ As we suffer the fallout of the ugly, corrupt 2016 election, I look to history for clues on how to recover from America’s current low.

8/ I’ve enlisted legal, political and psychological experts to assist with the detrumpification of America, a plan to educate and integrate supporters in a post-Trump America.

9/ “In terms of moving society in a different direction, there must be a re-commitment to honesty; about the past, about the present, and about the problems we face,” says @DMRDynamics “Honest people can have very different ideas as to how to address problems.”

10/ “We must do away with the worship of ‘infallible’ leaders, in politics, in business, in social situations.  This does not mean disrespecting expertise.”- @DMRDynamics

11/ “It means searching for expertise, but disqualifying from positions of expertise or power anyone who cannot be humble as a person when presenting ideas and knowledge, even knowledge of which they are very certain.”- @DMRDynamics

12/ Reiss says honesty and humility will be key to a recovering America.

“We must return politics to civil debate, honestly, between humble people, regarding different ideas and philosophies for addressing problems,” says Reiss, co-author of ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’.

13/ According to @KenLevy2020 “It will be very difficult to convert Trump’s loyal 38% for two reasons. The first reason is that Trumpism is like a religion.”

14/ “And it is almost impossible to persuade people to abandon their religion, whatever religion it may be, for another religion or for no religion at all.”- @KenLevy2020

15/ “The second, and related reason, is that Trumpists live in a very tight information bubble, which makes it very hard for the rest of us outside the bubble to enlighten them with facts, evidence, and reason.”- @KenLevy2020

16/ “So I really don’t think that there is much that the rest of us can do to help the 38% see the light, no less vote Democratic in 2019 and 2020.”- @KenLevy2020

17/ We are, however, witnessing a continuous slide in the polls, as Trump remains number one on all the wrong lists. He’s the first president* in modern history to never break a 50 percent approval rating.

18/ REPUDIATING TRUMPISM: And a new NBC poll this week show the Democrats won the House with the largest margin of victory for either party, a direct result in the majority repudiating Trumpism.

19/ HOLD THE LINE: “The good news is, if only 38% support Trump, then the remaining 62%, the vast majority, do not,” says @KenLevy2020. “In my view, then, our attention should be focused on sustaining this 62% rather than growing it.”

20/ “We should all do our best, politicians and the media, to ensure that their (our) views are represented and that their (our) interests are maximized. If we try to peel off Trumpists, the very opposite will happen: the 38% will only grow, and the 62% will shrink.”- @KenLevy2020

21/ Millennial Politics legal analyst @tracygreen, a white collar crime expert, says the detrumpification of America must take place in the halls of justice, which Mitch McConnell has been hurriedly mutating.

22/ “We’ve had conservative presidents before, Reagan, Bush, George W. Bush, etc., and that is not what has troubled me with Trump’s presidency,” she says.

23/ BLATANT CORRUPTION: “What has changed is the corruption, the presidential disregard of financial and ethical conflicts, the partisan appointments and blatant ignoring of the Constitution’s emolument’s clause.”- @tracygreen

24/ “The first step to resolving the issues that have arisen during the Trump presidency* are enacting new laws and regulations that (1) require the release of a presidential candidate’s personal and business returns within a certain number of days of announcing.”- @tracygreen

25/ “(2) set clear limits on the emoluments clause when a president has businesses that continue to operate and accept money from foreign governments.”- @tracygreen

26/ “And (3) give the Office of Government Ethics subpoena power in order to ensure compliance with conflict of interest laws. This is just a start so we can return to being a land of laws and not of a partisan political leader.”- @tracygreen

27/ GLIMMER OF HOPE: The latest filing from Mueller details Manafort’s crimes and lies..For those just tuning in, Manafort built a career on rehabbing the images of some of the world’s most vile dictators, who then were forced to flee their countries for crimes against humanity.

28/ As we ponder myriad ways to detrumpify America, some of the obvious opportunities include re-educating Americans on the difference between propaganda and facts, offering classes in critical thinking, jobs training programs, free community college tuition...

29/ And a thorough investigation of anyone who pushes hate for profit. A Democratic Congress will likely look into Trump’s various “propaganda” arms, and even a cursory investigation reveals myriad connections to Russian influence campaigns.

30/ To be sure, if Nixon had botnets and cable news shilling for him every hour on the hour, Watergate might not have been such a watershed.

31/ To restore America to a country of law and order and not partisan rule we must take a look at the presidential pardoning power. Things changed dramatically in this country when Ford pardoned Nixon, and when Reagan pardoned the operatives caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal.

32/ STATE OF GRACE: We have to be willing as a country to make some hard choices before we are no longer allowed to.

I’ve been traveling to Germany since the late ‘60s, and have witnessed firsthand how a once violent country can emerge in a state of grace.

33/ To detrumpify America, we’ll have to take action against hate groups. We might have to take a cue from Britain and hold the operators of social media platforms accountable to shore up our privacy laws and potentially even take a cue from Germany, which bans hate speech.

34/ In the future, fewer and fewer Americans will admit to having supported a chiseler, as even the staunchest deniers will have to confess they were duped by a lifelong conman.

35/ THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL WIN: In post-war Germany, after the Allied forces essentially gave up trying to determine the good Germans from the less good, it was ultimately the children who held their parents accountable by asking what they did during the war.

36/ And it will be the children who turn to their parents in post-Trump America who ask them what they did to defy Trump. Or worse yet, why they supported him.

37/ Dr. Reiss says to buckle up our seatbelts because it’ll undoubtedly be a bumpy ride.

“In considering ‘detrumpifying’, you did not hear me use the word ‘easy’,” says @DMRDynamics. “I honestly believe it will be difficult and painful.”

38/ As Hemingway might say, we pay some way for everything that was any good. For this country to return to good, we’ll gladly pay. And it’ll be worth the price.

—heidi siegmund cuda, 11/27/2018, with the help of some brilliant colleagues @tracygreen @DMRDynamics @KenLevy2020

My daughter cried in my arms on Nov. 9, 2016. I promised her we would get Trump out, that I was on it, and would expose him for the criminal that he is.

Never dreaming it would take us four years of relentless fighting, exposés, digging up the evidence, and offering the proof. https://twitter.com/Heidi_Cuda/status/1211481839602286592

So many people lost their livelihoods, marriages shattered, engagements ended, all because we publicly, tenaciously, put truth and facts, the salvation of country, above personal comfort.

Let it not be in vain.
https://millennialpolitics.co/the-writers-are-winning/ 11/30/2018

FROM THE ARCHIVES 2:

The Writers Are Winning
by me, 11/30/2018

1/ I always knew the writers would win. We are, after all, a wild bunch, stubborn, untamable. I just didn’t know it would take this long.

2/ We’ve had the goods. Investigating, poking, prodding, kicking hornet’s nests wherever found, not for glory or payola, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s terribly American of us.

3/ Journalists of my generation got into the trade like cops or firefighters, it was the thing you did when you were good with a pen. It wasn’t a get rich quick scheme, more like a vow of poverty. The big contracts came later, what “Ailes” America came later.

4/ The spin-cycle, the ratings game, the corporate control and its diabolical fallout, all manifesting within the last decade.

5/ But I’ll be damned if we writers didn’t rise to the occasion in the last two years. I’m of the mind that whatever you were doing before the War of 2016 is less important than what you’ve done to serve you country, and ultimately humanity, since November 9, 2016.

6/ Each day, I rally the troops. I post articles written by brave men and women from across this globe who face the fuckery day in day out, but who sleep well knowing that they’ve done what they could to present the truth during a global disinformation war funded by bad actors.

7/ The names of these writers are too many to list, but they are my heroes, and in the moments when I feel most terrified for the soul of our country, and democracy as a whole, I keep typing because I know it’s the right thing to do.

The writers of the revolution are my wings.

8/ Yesterday, a story I wrote for Millennial Politics on “The Detrumpification of America,” got listed in a Washington Post roundup of notable works, the only independent in a group of esteemed journalists, and for that, too, I am grateful.

9/ Being first gen German-American, the story was born while pondering how Germany united as a people after World War II. Those I interviewed to help me find clues on how to “detrumpify” America are among the brilliant, gutsy and vocal experts I met thru the Twitter Resistance.

10/ When many of us were putting the defense of truth and justice above our own well-being, by pushing facts out on Twitter 24/7 with our various areas of expertise, we were often damned in our own homes. So we found each other and that was some consolation during very dark days.

11/ And today, things are a bit brighter. Yes, the writers are winning. And there’s no time for gloating or schadenfreude. There’s too much work to be done. The wounded, lying beasts, with all their cash and corruption, will not go gently into that dark night.

12/ It’ll be the writers who must rage, who must push on, who must use their words as words were meant to be used.
For the noble purpose of truth.

—heidi siegmund cuda, 11/30/2018, Millennial Politics