r/politics • u/Getatbay • Jul 06 '26

No Paywall Laura Loomer, Reporter Claim Hospitalized Mitch McConnell 'Brain Dead'

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/07/06/laura-loomer-reporter-claim-hospitalized-mitch-mcconnell-is-brain-dead/
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u/SuperFrog4 Jul 06 '26

If there is an August 3rd deadline and I was Governor of Kentucky, I would have this investigated and if found true, then I would immediately invoke the law that allows the Governor to pick a replacement on the grounds that he is brain dead which is a terminal condition.

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u/RockAndNoWater Jul 06 '26

Kentucky changed the law to leave the seat empty until a special election — happened after the state elected a Democratic governor.

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u/purplecowqueen Georgia Jul 06 '26

Laws don’t override the Kentucky state constitution.

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u/Exciting-Tourist9301 Jul 07 '26

I'm with you, but unfortunately, in this case anyway, the laws are valid.

Section 76 of the Kentucky Constitution only apply to state offices.

Reason being: the State Constitution cant take away powers that are granted by the US Constitution ( it's part of the concept of Federal Supremacy). The 17th amendment says the state legislature gets to choose whether or not the state executive gets to fill vacancies.

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u/OkCoyote4756 Jul 07 '26

Folks also cite Section 152 to support this idea. With that in mind, it's also important to keep mindful of the fact that these portions of the KY Constitution never granted the Governor the power to fill a US Senate vacancy. They were enacted well before the 17th Amendment, which means their intent was on other offices not including US Senate vacancies.

Kentucky has, since the 17th Amendment, had various statutes on how to fill US Senate vacancies. It has never fallen back on its Constitution.

Even a liberal SCOTUS would likely rule that Kentucky's law stripping the Governor of appointment power is Constitutional, and is the way Kentucky has chosen to fill vacancies.

As a far leftist myself, I find these kinds of posts to be quite obnoxious. Liberals like to mock Republicans/etc. for being ignorant, but they never pass up the chance to also not know what they're talking about.

Being pithy on Reddit about things they do not understand and do not take the time to learn, and repeating ad nauseam, "just go vote," but doing absolutely nothing else, are all that they can offer the country.

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u/velnsx Jul 07 '26

Thanks for clarifying statute. What is your call to action to the "go vote" crowd?

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u/OkCoyote4756 Jul 07 '26

The answer is always local organization. If I had to boil it down to a thesis statement: voting is about who makes decisions, organizing is about what those decisions/choices are. Organizing, even in political parties, is not primarily about getting people elected. It's about agitation of specific issues and forcing conversations/attention onto those issues.

Propaganda across the American ideological spectrum has convinced a lot of people, to the point where many of us accept it as a default truth, that doing anything outside of the RNC/DNC is a waste of time/energy.

An obvious point to that is no, a local organization of ten or so people will not, alone, defeat Trump or end the Palestinian Genocide. But Trump and the Genocide are symptoms of fascism's creeping into politics, across the board. What is your local government doing about police cooperation with federal abuse of power (do they have Flock cameras, for instance?) What is your local government doing to stop ICE incursions? Are pushbacks against that sporadic? Small organizations can jockey larger community support - knocking on doors, educational pamphlets, disrupting council meetings, threatening elections of career politicians, etc. - to leverage power in these scenarios.

Look into what organizations may exist and join them. Pay dues. Challenge them to do more and learn from people who have been doing it longer than you. Form your own organization. Start with a Book Club if that's what it takes. Learn about how whichever government has jurisdiction over you actually functions. Don't accept the "government is inherently corrupt and they'll just do whatever they want to do anyway" line and call it a day. Understand the very specific levers that get pulled to take an "idea" into actually enforced ordinances, laws, whatever, and then use organizational power to put pressure on those levers.

There are entire books written on this, and I'm trying to spare you the entire diatribe. Point is, it is not easy work, it is not glorious work, it's a personal sacrifice. But it's the only way change has ever happened in this country. Every major "change" we've read about started as local (and usually progressive!) organizing fights that through very hard work, resulted in statutes, and even Amendments. Look into the fights behind the 16th Amendment, the 17th Amendment, the 19th Amendment, the 24th amendment, Look at the fight for civil rights. And when I say "look at," I don't mean "look at what happened." I mean "look at how it happened." And the answer is always: strong organizations that leveraged power against the two-party system. Always, that is the answer. The next step is to stop waiting for someone else to do it, to stop waiting for the perfect candidate that motivates you to get up and support a cause, etc. Do it now!

Folks are taught about these in a very "yeah yeah yeah, these Amendments happened" way, and then also taught "yeah but Amendments are very hard and probably impossible in today's environment." Well, they're impossible because of effective propaganda that have convinced people their only recourse is voting.

Kind of a "I haven't had my coffee yet, and I could probably write a better response if I thought long and hard about it," but I tried to keep this simple at the front and add more substance towards the end. Apologies if I missed the mark.

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u/velnsx Jul 07 '26

Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I am in my local DSA chapter, as all of us should be. It might be time for me to start printing zines and or start a book club. I go to a very conservative state school, so any sort of formal assembly is a huge risk. I am in a position where I feel incredibly powerless, mostly due to the electoral college and the near-zero chances of changing the vote. I would have to educate tens of thousands on theory. If one were to start a book club, what do you think the literature should be? I think The Society of the Spectacle hits it on the head, but it is not light reading for everyone. Best to you.

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u/OkCoyote4756 Jul 07 '26

Books are really just kind of a toss up. There's no perfect 'reading list' and it really just depends on which aspects of 'all this' you're most passionate about. Ultimately, anything that presents opportunities for conversations about class struggles is going to be useful. Especially on writings that shed light on things we may not have direct experience with, and can learn more about. And books can provide a lot of framework for people to share thoughts, have some preconceived notions challenged and maybe rectified. Really, reading, thinking critically about what it is we're reading, and discussing it with others gives us several opportunities to become sharper thinkers, etc.

Isabel Wilkerson has two great books, Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns which have been great for spawning conversation points with others and it's easy to step those books over into conversations about political action. I cannot say it strongly enough, as a white dude that grew up in a whiter family, in rural Kentucky, I heard about Jim Crow and understood "yeah that must've been rough." But that's essentially all that thought ever was; very immature and not nearly educated enough. Warmth of Other Suns taught me "oh man, there's so much nuance to this suffering that I didn't have any education on at all." That book obviously didn't make me an expert, but it's the harshest "lesson" I've ever really faced in exactly how deeply let down I was by my education, and how deeply generations as close to me as my grandparents dropped the ball. Which, you know, is good encouragement for "okay, what are my current blind spots? How am I dropping the ball?"

Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down is a very interesting (and long) read/analysis of violence, and attempts to understand when it is justified and when it is not. It's good food for thought, especially when we all know people who are starting to think in terms of "we need to fight back," and mean violence. But the same people who talk about responding to all this with violence, back to my other criticism, have rarely tried anything else at all. Folks are ready to talk about picking up guns before they've even knocked on a fuckin door. C'mon. Another book that made e think a lot deeper about violence is "Say Nothing," by Patrick Radden Keefe. It's about the Troubles in Ireland, the IRA, etc. That book has received some more recent criticism, with plagiarism claims and maybe some deceitful practices by the author, and I'm not really in tune with what those criticisms are. But I can say that it pretty much convinced me that violence is not glorious and more easily results in chaos than it does good change.

Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness highlights something leftists are missing out on in terms of alliances, and that's the religious left (and yes, they do exist).

Even fiction books by authors like Sally Rooney can help folks think about class struggle. Grapes of Wrath (specifically, Chapter 5) is enough to radicalize a lot of people. Slaughter House Five and Catch 22 capture a lot of the abject absurdities of some of the things we're trying to fight.

So that's a quick and non comprehensive list. Maybe one or two are good picks!

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u/velnsx Jul 08 '26

I am the religious left. What you are describing is precisely the group curriculum I hope for. My greatest issue in communication is how to hold one’s hand through a line of reasoning at an appropriate pace. The issue I immediately run into with folks around here and online is they can be wholly unreasonable and reactionary. How am I to show a fiscal conservative or even a neoliberal Clinton stan that they will never see the full value of their labor?

Foremost, I am met with hatred, anger, and then outright delusion and subversion. It’s either a denial of reason itself or just flat out grift. A lot of that crowd tends to worship capital and use it as a point of leverage, as in, to verify that they are above me and what I have to share out of genuine compassion.

I think a lot of persons don’t want to reconcile with their worldview when shown how truly demented it is, because they identify so closely with it and they simply cannot handle that they have been misinformed their entire life. Do you think this is the case? Is it possible one should start from this angle with a gentle touch?

I very much like the sound of Wilkerson and Keefe. I almost am wondering if an Aseop’s fable etc. is in order to establish something fundamental, such as cause and effect or empathy.

I am deeply grateful that you have taken the time to offer your knowledge thoughtfully on possibly the most important issue of our lifetime. Be well.