Stop Playing Checkers While They Rig the Chessboard
🔥🗳️ Democrats love to talk about norms. About fairness. About tradition. Meanwhile, Republicans are shredding the rulebook and lighting cigars with the ashes. They gerrymander maps until they look like spilled spaghetti, they strip voting rights with surgical precision, and they hijack the courts like it is a garage sale.
And what do Democrats do? Write strongly worded letters. Beg for bipartisanship. Pretend that if they model civility long enough, the other side will suddenly rediscover its conscience. News flash: fairness is dead, and Republicans are the ones who strangled it.
That is why Gavin Newsom finally showed what real backbone looks like. He stopped wringing his hands over “tradition” and started playing the game the way Republicans already do. He stopped letting the other side define the battlefield. He stopped pretending that civility could stop a movement bent on authoritarian rule.
No one wants to hear it, but it is the truth: you do not beat cheaters by asking them to stop cheating. You beat them by flipping the script. By redrawing maps. By expanding courts. By using every legal lever of state power available to you. Because the only thing Republicans respect is power, and the only language they understand is force met with force.
This is not about sinking to their level. It is about refusing to be the only side that still believes the game is fair while the other side is hiding cards up its sleeve. While Democrats hesitate, Republicans are rigging the system so thoroughly that elections will soon be little more than theater. The ballot box will still exist, but the outcome will be predetermined.
That is the road we are on. And if Democrats continue to cling to outdated ideas about “norms,” they will watch democracy dissolve in real time. The GOP is not trying to win elections. They are trying to eliminate the possibility of losing them. That is the difference between a party and a regime.
History is filled with moments when republics slipped away because the defenders of democracy refused to fight as hard as its enemies. We are in that moment right now. Every day of hesitation is another day Republicans redraw the lines, stack the benches, and gut the safeguards that once kept this country intact.
Democrats must understand: this is not a friendly rivalry. This is not the Red Sox versus the Yankees. This is survival. If they fail to adapt, there will not be another chance to argue about civility or fairness. If they fail to fight fire with fire, there will not be a democracy left to defend.
Newsom just gave them a blueprint. Take the gloves off. Stop pretending Republicans can be shamed into good faith. Use the tools of power with as much precision and intensity as they do. Expand where they contract. Build where they tear down. The only way to preserve the republic is to stop letting its destroyers dictate the terms.
And history will not care that Democrats were polite while the house burned. It will not applaud them for preserving norms as the match was struck. It will only care that when the moment of crisis arrived, they chose civility over survival. And it will damn them for losing a democracy they had the power to save.
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