Well, howdy there internet people, it's bow again.

So today we are going to talk about lessons learned and moving the conversation forward

and things that we should have learned and should have remembered from 2016

because things are cycling back around and we're seeing a very similar dynamic

play out in the run-up to 2024. It looks like a lot of the same techniques

and tactics are going to be at play and we have to remember how to deal with them before, how we dealt with them before

and there are people counting on it.

Okay, so what's the situation?

The far right in the country has decided that there are a couple of demographics that

they're going to go after, via legislation, via rhetoric, and via action, right? and that rhetoric is super critical

to legitimizing everything else.

Sounds familiar to what happened in 2016.

So what happened? 2016, I didn't figure it out. We don't really know how to respond to it as a country.

As time went on, we did. It became more and more obvious because the technique that the

far right was using, well, it became more transparent. What happens? They say something wild, just completely out of line, right?

And then the outrage ensues. You can't say that. And then what do they say? Oh, that's not what I meant. I didn't say that. That's not what I meant. I said this other thing, which is still like way out of line, but it's a lesser position than what you're saying therefore you're the unreasonable one

and I'm okay I'm the good guy here because you you said this thing about me and that's not really

what I said. And what happens in the process there is that that lesser position,

that thing that they admit to, that isn't as bad as what it sounded like, that position gets normalized.

So what do you have to do?

There are one of the more interesting ways to deal with somebody telling a racist joke around you when you're not really capable of dealing with it the way you might want to

is to pretend like you don't get it. You might have heard this before. You pretend

...