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The 119th Congress Starts Tomorrow (maybe), On Optimism, Fighting Trump's Unacceptable 4, Josh Stein Is Sworn In

Welcome New Subscribers. 2025 Is Here, And We Need To Get To Work!

Simon Rosenberg

Jan 2

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Morning all. Our thoughts are with the people of New Orleans this morning, and the families who lost loved ones in the terrible attack yesterday. Let’s start with an image of the beautiful French Quarter on a happier day:

While we are all weary and could use more time to rest and regroup, the great MAGA sh--tshow returns to Washington tomorrow as the 119th Congress begins. The Senate transition will be orderly and John Thune will become the new Senate Majority Leader in a 53R-47D Senate. In the House, however, there is Trumpian chaos. Despite Trump’s hasty backing, Speaker Mike Johnson does not yet have enough votes to become the Speaker of House in the new Congress. He needs 218 votes tomorrow, a majority, to become Speaker. Will he round up the votes and get his 218? Or could we be in for days or weeks of uncertainty? Who knows. The House cannot conduct business of any kind until there is a Speaker, including certifying the 2024 election, that is supposed to happen on Monday. Stay tuned all. As I’ve been writing Trump 2.0 is off to a remarkably bad start, and remains at its core, a deeply unstable enterprise.

I want to remain focused on working to knock out Trump’s Unacceptable 4 - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy and Patel. I am grateful to the many of you who have called your House Members and Senators demanding they work to prevent these dangerous extremists from being confirmed. We need to keep going, and cannot let up. I hope everyone reading will take time tomorrow to make your two calls. Welcome folks back, and insist they put their heads down and work to knock out the Unacceptable 4. These calls matter in these offices. They log them and use them to gauge public sentiment in their states or districts. So do find time to call tomorrow and as many days as you can until these four are abandoned by Trump.

The New Orleans attack was yet another reminder why unqualified extremists like Gabbard, Hegseth and Patel should not be in critical national security positions. A new article by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, A Triple Threat To Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics and Anti-Science, reminds us why it is Robert Kennedy cannot allowed to become HHS Secretary:

This brings us to the third and perhaps the most insidious component of all: a well-organized, financed, politically motivated, and steadily globalizing campaign of disinformation and attacks against mainstream science that makes it extremely difficult to mount an effective global response to the climate and pandemic threats. We witnessed an early instance decades ago as one of us (Michael Mann) described in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars when he and his colleagues came under vicious attack by forces linked to the oil and gas industry who viewed the hockey stick curve as a direct threat to their future profits and business ventures. As a pediatrician-scientist, Peter Hotez came under attack for his staunch defense of vaccines. Hotez’s book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, about his youngest daughter, was a threat to a group that became known as the “disinformation dozen” (named by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, see also Nick Tiller’s piece in SI’s September/October 2022 issue), monetizing the internet through sales of nutritional supplements, spectacular cures, or anti-vaccine books on Amazon. Anti-vaccine activism took an even darker turn during the COVID-19 pandemic when more than 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they refused COVID-19 vaccines during the delta and BA.1 omicron waves of 2021–2022. This occurred when the anti-vaccine movement fell under a new banner of “health freedom” in conservative circles.
Increasingly, we recognize how the forces behind the attacks on climate science and biomedicine (around vaccines and pandemics) have begun to converge. Unfortunately, they also include not only attacks on the science but also the scientists themselves. Tragically this even includes personal attacks from high-ranking public officials and even members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. Presidential candidates. They also include attacks from billionaires and the conservative media, especially Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. However, even the mainstream media has increasingly helped spread anti-scientific disinformation and has platformed activists seeking to discredit both science and scientists.

Need to keep working peeps. Gaetz fell. Lara Trump removed herself from contention for the Rubio Senate seat. Let’s focus on knocking these four out in the days ahead (link for the chart, below).

A New Team Takes The Helm In North Carolina - Josh Stein was sworn in as the 76th Governor of North Carolina yesterday:

In his first remarks as Governor, Stein said:

“As I take this oath of office, I am profoundly aware of the solemn responsibility before me: to uphold the Constitution of the State of North Carolina and to serve our people. The work ahead of us is significant, but the time is now to build a safer, stronger North Carolina, where our economy continues to grow and works for everyone, where our public schools are excellent and our teachers are well-paid, and where our neighborhoods are safe and our personal freedoms are protected. And of course, we must act with urgency to help the people of western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene. And we will.”

The Hopium community raised over $1.1m for the NC Democratic Party this past cycle, and many of you put in lots of volunteer time too. Our investment helped make NC one of the Democratic Party’s biggest success stories of 2024 election as we won 5 statewide offices - Gov, Lt. Gov, AG, Public Instruction, Secretary of State - broke the GOP’s legislative supermajority and won a close Supreme Court race. This year we will be taking and celebrating the wins as they come and our allies coming to power in North Carolina is an early and important 2025 win for all of us.

Anne Applebaum On The Importance Of Optimism - In a new Substack post, author and historian Anne Applebaum writes:

I dedicated my recent book, Autocracy Inc, “to the optimists.” Since it was published, I’ve been repeatedly asked why. It’s such a dark book, readers and interviewers say: how can you be optimistic?
In fact, that’s the wrong question. For one, I don’t think it’s a dark book, just a realistic one. Also, the dedication is not about me. It’s rather an expression of admiration for the extraordinary people I’ve met around the world, people who continue to work to make their societies more just and more open, even in the face of obstacles that would defeat the rest of us.
Most modern authoritarian propaganda is designed not to give people hope for the future but to encourage them to feel cynical, pessimistic, nihilistic and hopeless. Rulers like Putin, Maduro (or, until recently, Assad), don’t offer people a beautiful future, even a fake one. Instead they lie constantly, repeatedly, in order to pollute the public sphere and convince people that nothing can be known or understood. They attack and smear anyone who calls for more transparency or accountability. They go out of their way to attack the democratic world as equally corrupt, and degenerate as well, as I’ve written. They run smear campaigns against their opponents, using false accusations of corruption, and arrest and torture them too. Any Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan or Zimbabwean who continues to insist that politics can be better, that public conversation can be civilized, and that it is possible to have liberal institutions like independent courts and judges is, in the face of what can feel like overwhelming pressure, not just an optimist but a hero.

Her powerful essay reminds us that we are in a global struggle for freedom and democracy, and that optimism - in spite of it all - remains essential and necessary. Watch this forthright and compelling New Year’s Day message from Hungarian opposition leader, Peter Maygar, about the ongoing betrayal of his country by Trump ally Victor Orban:

In what is another hopeful moment, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister visited Syria this week and established direct ties between nations ravaged by Putin’s barbarism. President Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine, a global agricultural powerhouse, will start immediately supplying grain to help feed the Syrian people and help “stabilize Syria.”

In another hopeful note, Ukraine ended its arrangement to allow Russian natural gas to flow to Europe:

The flow of natural gas through a major pipeline from Russia to Europe was cut off early Wednesday after Ukraine refused to renew an agreement that allowed for the transit of Russian gas through its territory.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had warned for months that he would not renew the prewar contract, which expired at midnight on Dec. 31, because of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kyiv’s decision to suspend the flow of gas through a pipeline that had carried Soviet and then Russian gas to Europe for decades is part of a broader campaign by Ukraine and its Western allies to undermine Moscow’s ability to fund its war effort and to limit the Kremlin’s ability to use energy as leverage in Europe.
“This is a historic event,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Galushchenko, said in a statement. “Russia is losing markets, it will suffer financial losses.”