If ever the maxim of fighting fire with fire presented a fitting action, it’s in these desperate times.
Texas mid-decade and against rules reshaped the state district map, a move intended to add more Republicans to Congress when Trump asked for five more seats. A move that suppresses the votes of brown and Black residents.
For a nation to function, its citizens must abide by agreed upon rules.
The United States, though born imperfect, has strived to improve. Over the past 250 years, we’ve progressed slowly through hard-fought battles for our constitutional rights, but no situation has been as crucial as the one we now face.
The Republican Party under the tyrannical leadership of Trump turns the clock back. He has control of all three branches of government. He’s whipped a large segment of the media, courts, and universities into submission, closing down avenues of information and redress. He himself charges, convicts, and disappears people. He upends regulations, which destroy our health care system, our environment, and our justice system. Crucially it denies us free speech and isolates us.
We stand in the path of a maelstrom with few ways to fight back. We can play fair and stand by as democracy burns to ashes or start a defensive fire to contain the turbulence.
Passing Proposition 50—a temporary measure—gives us a chance of gaining some control in Congress.
When the Republicans change the rules, we must fight back. An unchecked authoritarian government closes all avenues of dissent. Once in power, it’s very difficult to restore democracy.
Shirley Schaffer
Arroyo Grande
Sarah Newfeld-Green and Kathy Bond
Grover Beach
This article appears in Oct 2 – 12, 2025.
Let’s pretend for a moment what your Democratic party would do right now if in power. How would they deal with an economy that has collapsed? My guess is that rather than stop the importation, through tariffs, of massive quantities of cheap Chinese, plastic garbage, they would simply open the borders so millions of illegals could come in and work for the same wages Chinese sweatshop workers make in China so that anything left that is actually manufactured in the USA costs the same. That’s simply a race to the bottom and a recipe for a social disaster. The solution is to tariff the crap out of Chinese products and make it worth capital to invest in building factories here, not opening our borders and not ending tariffs.
Most of the people that write into The New Times are Boomers. Guess what? Your generation did this. All of the lies you ascribe to Donald Trump are a response to what your generation did. Your generation to the Post War Boom, pocketed everything, cruised into old age, and now judge the rest of us because we will pretty much vote for a ham sandwich if it meant restoring 1/10th of the largess your generation stole from the rest of us and that your generation did nothing to create. Your parents did, they gone blown out the sky or stepped on landmines in WWII or worked on the assembly line creating B52 bombers. So here you two birds are, in your dotage, quite possibly well off, lecturing the rest of us just trying to save our country from the ravages of liberalism. No thank you, I’ll take law, order, and the nuclear family any day.