ZFacts has roots in the Berkeley of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Those were the years of the Free Speech Movement, and the Anti-War Movement, followed by the Black Panthers (next door in Oakland), the Symbionese Liberation Army (Berkeley), and the Weather Underground (still connected to San Francisco).
You can learn about me, Steve Stoft, on the next page. But for now, I’ll just say, I missed the start of the Free Speech Movement by a year and jumped directly into the anti-war movement while it was peaceful (and got arrested anyway).
But what opened my eyes, was watching what we radicals did to the Democrats. In 1964, LBJ won a 61-to-38% landslide and then passed the Voting Rights Act and the whole War on Poverty. We chased him out of office in 1968 and wouldn’t back his V.P. So Nixon squeaked in to ramp up the war. Then we ran our radical—George McGovern—who lost just as badly and Johnson had won, in a 61-to-38% landslide for Nixon. And the Democrats still have not recovered. (Carter scored 50.1% due to Watergate. Clinton won with 43% and 49%, which kept him weak. And Obama’s best margin was not even one third of Johnson’s.)
ZFacts has mostly focused on opposing Bush’s Iraq War, and supporting climate policy and Barack Obama. But when Trump won, I took a break to write a couple of books trying to make sure far-left radicals didn’t do that again.
Two New Books
ZFacts.com has now been re-focused on an update of Ripped Apart, the first of my two recent books. Currently, it includes a mix of chapters from the first version of Ripped Apart and new material from my second book How Democrats Win.
The update will be evolving over the next few months, but the publication date is unpredictable. Hopefully, it will be in the first half of 2021. In the meantime, you can get a free PDF of either on zFacts, or a Kindle or paper version on Amazon.
I will also be adding book-relevant posts to the zFacts blog, as well as a few on important current topics that don’t quite fit in the new book. These will mainly relate to my interests in economics, climate, and international politics.
Recent zFacts History
On election night, 2016, with a house full of friends eagerly looking forward to the coming good news, I just kept silent. For months, I’d been saying, “Yes, we’ll probably win, but we’d have a better chance playing Russian roulette.” And that night I knew the gun pointed at our collective head was no longer a six-shooter, it was a four-shooter. One bullet, three empty chambers.
How did I know? Every day I checked with the smartest polling-stats guy in the country — Nate Silver. The whole trick is knowing where to get the Facts.
Trump took the White House and we took to the streets. I was impressed. But again, everyone seemed sure we’d soon have good news. It was deja vu all over again. So I left zFacts.com behind and have spent the last two years looking for facts that were up to the new challenge — putting this country back together.
I looked harder at the Democrats because, if you want your team to win, that’s where you have to make the changes. Of course, we also need to understand Trump’s base, but good luck changing them.
So my two books on political polarization focus on how the far-left exacerbates this and feeds into the far-rights efforts to polarize. And the update of Ripped Apart extends this analysis and explains better the urgency of our situation.
The good news is that the aspirations of the moderate and extreme Democrats are almost identical. Don’t take my word for that, I’m quoting Bernie Sanders who says his “vision today” is the same as FDR’s in 1944. Well FDR is the patron saint of moderate democrats and Sanders learned of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and his 1944 speech promoting it, from … you guessed it, a very moderate Obama Democrat. That would be Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory Czar.
So read Ripped Apart, and find out how we can put this party back together again.
Ripped Apart
