Progressives are vilified as extreme. I am proud to be extreme.

A recent New York Times article created a false equivalence between the far Right and Progressives, the Left. They are trying to indoctrinate you to defy what we all want.

There was a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking after the 2022 Midterm. Mainstream Media jumped on the Right Wing con from Fox News and the trickery from Republican pollsters and false narrative builders. I never fell for it. It was refreshing when I saw Michael Moore echoing the same sentiments.

Many of us, the non-traditional independent media, were screaming about keeping a solid narrative and ensuring folks went out to vote irrespective of the harmful noise. I spoke to hundreds of people across the country, across cultures and ethnicities. I never saw the trajectory shown on the RCP and FiveThirtyEight aggregators.

The last sentence of my previous election Substack Newsletter said the following.

In other words, there is still a lot of flux. The polls are not capturing the full picture. And we are still building the full picture up to election day. So let us all get busy and vote to save democracy, our economy, and our lives.

Now the epitome of failed electoral wisdom is giving advice. The New York Times article “Extreme Candidates and Positions Came Back to Bite in Midterms“is upsetting.

A surprisingly nuanced verdict in the midterm elections has delivered at least one important conclusion about the state of the national mood: In battleground states and swing districts across the country, voters voiced their support for moderation.

That happened in Nevada’s Senate race, where Catherine Cortez Masto, an unassuming incumbent Democrat occupying one of the party’s most endangered seats, overcame voters’ economic fears and won re-election, highlighting her Republican opponent’s embrace of Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and his denigration of abortion rights.

It happened in Pennsylvania, where Josh Shapiro, facing the far-right Doug Mastriano, won the governor’s office in the biggest landslide for a non-incumbent in the state since 1946.

And it happened on Sunday, when a liberal Democrat in Oregon who beat a veteran centrist House Democrat in the primary, Representative Kurt Schrader, lost the seat for her party to the G.O.P., a stinging blow to the Democrats’ chances of holding their majority.

In contests up and down the ballot, Republicans betting on a red wave instead received a sweeping rebuke from Americans who, for all the qualms polls show they have about Democratic governance, made clear they believe that the G.O.P. has become unacceptably extreme.

On a smaller scale, a similar dynamic could be discerned on the left: After Democratic primary voters chose more progressive nominees over moderates in a handful of House races including in Oregon, Texas and California, those left-leaning candidates were defeated or are at risk of losing seats that could have helped preserve a narrow Democratic majority.

Understand the subliminal message that the corporate mainstream media are trying to push. Democrats, many very progressive, pulled out victories in places where one would not expect. Katie Porter won in Orange County in a year where she should have lost. John Fetterman’s election was not even close to being the close one that the mainstream media predicted. This blows up the theory that candidates must tack to some mythical center to win. That is not the answer. If a candidate responds to the needs of their constituents and gives them hope based on attainable goals, more often than not, they will win.

Please watch this short segment from my recent Politics Done Right program on KPFT 90.1 FM. I am sure you will agree. More importantly, please share this newsletter with everyone you have access to, whether they are progressive or not.

Here is the reality. Most Americans support the policies the extremist Progressives are pushing. The following snippet from Public Citizen is probative.

• The policy most associated with the “progressive” agenda, Medicare for All, earns 70% support among Americans, despite relentless trash talking by “serious” people.
• Americans are united in demanding aggressive action to slash prescription drug prices. Ninety percent of all Americans – and 91% of Republican voters – want to empower Medicare to negotiate drug prices (a policy that could easily reduce prices by 40% or more). Nonetheless, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are split over an aggressive plan to empower Medicare to negotiate and authorize generic competition if drug companies refuse to agree to reasonable prices. Democratic opponents of the bolder measure want to appear “reasonable” – yet nine out of 10 Republicans support a more audacious approach!
• Two-thirds of all Americans favor expanding Social Security – not just maintaining it, but expanding it. Republicans favor the concept by a 2-1 margin.
• A strong majority of Americans favor doubling the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour. Seven out of 10 Republican voters favor raising the minimum wage.
• Three-quarters of voters favor breaking up the Big Banks by reinstating the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial banking from more speculative activity like investment banking. Two-thirds of Republican voters favor that approach.
• Three-quarters of Americans say the tax system favors the rich and has too many loopholes. Three-quarters say that the wealthiest and large corporations should pay more in taxes. More than six in 10 Republicans agree. Sixty percent of Americans favor a wealth tax on those with more than $50 million in assets.

Americans also want clean water and air. Imagine if we could arrest the misleading information endemic in the mainstream media through false corporate advertising and intentional truth corruption by the wards of our oligarchy.

The definition of extreme pushed by the mainstream media, Republicans, Neoliberal & Corporate Democrats, and MAGA is projection. Neither you nor I should apologize for wanting to do what is right to make a better America where all have equal access to success and the services we’ve earned and can afford. It is they who are extreme as they fail to fulfill the will of the people.