Links and connections by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

On this last day of 2024, I am trying to stave off despair. 

I go out to get gas this morning and turn on the radio. Bruce Springsteen is singing a heartfelt rendition of We Shall Overcome. This afternoon, I happen upon a CBS Sunday Morning interview with Joan Baez from a year or so ago. In one of the historical clips, she’s singing the same song at the 1963 March on Washington. “You were there,” the interviewer says, “with Dr. Martin Luther King. Were you hopeful then?” “I was smart then,” Baez replies. “I was smart enough to know that we shall overcome probably did not mean in this lifetime… I knew this was going to be a long battle.”

Okay. I’m starting to get the message.

More communications come via email and Substack notifications. In the past few weeks, I have started to draw comfort and information from the voices — none of them part of the mainstream media — who are politically savvy, still very much paying attention, and who I trust will continue to speak out as long as they are able to. Their observations and predictions are not pretty but telling the truth about what is going on and the dangers in front of us has never been as important. 

Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who advised W and John McCain, among others, started The Warning in 2022 “to help readers understand the gathering dangers bearing down on the United States and its people.” From today’s post:

The American people have picked a low man for a low moment. They have responded to the great gaslighting of the Biden era, the smugness of the media and its sneering dishonesty with a proverbial gasoline can and a match.

In today’s in-box came an email from Rick Wilson, another former Republican strategist and, along with Schmidt, George Conway, and John Weaver, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project. He writes:

What really got me over the past few weeks has been the absolutely feckless, ridiculous level of capitulation I’ve seen from… basically everyone who needs to be fighting back… History doesn’t look kindly on those who dismiss existential threats simply because they’ve grown tiresome.

Also today came an email from Joyce Vance, who served as the US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and was the first woman to hold such a position. It was reading the piece she wrote on her Substack, Civil Discourse, from the end of November, Not Broken, that started to pull me out of the hole I had been in since Election Day.

This is, in large measure, about us and not about Donald Trump. Yes, we will have to pay attention to understand what he is doing and assess how dangerous it is, but we don’t have to give him control… The cavalry isn’t coming. It’s just us… We have two choices: Give up or move forward. It’s not even close. We have a Republic to keep, and we are not quitters.

She ends each of her pieces with the words, We’re in this together.

Yes.