Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.

Which speaks to a much greater problem regarding Sanders: he dropped the chance to build a movement and parallel platform and instead just became a sheepdog for Clinton, Biden, and Harris. He was a useful lightning rod for the popularity of social spending policies and getting debt off the backs of the vast majority of people, but only served as a lightning rod, not turning it into organizing or strength. Just like Obama disassembled his electoral team to use party insiders and lose the 2010 midterms, Sanders gave away his donor list for a song and left his ground game operation hanging until they fucked off and did their own things.

This is why any turn to the Democratic party is a death knell and why we need the exact opposite approach to building the left. The heart of left strength is organizations, of people workinh to educate one another, recruit, and engage in action according to an independent political program that does not wane or falter just because one old guy capitulates to Democrats. There needs to be hundreds of people ready to replace any “important” figurehead or candidate or politician, they must be jettisonable as needed and beholden to members’ will, not donors’.

Yes, join a socialist organization and help delegitimate these (literal) losers and help put focus on the issues faced by working people!

If you are are still particularly interested in electoralism, then I recommend getting together with like-minded people to create a disciplined voting bloc who loudly announce that they will not vote for Dems unless a certain policy regime is adopted.

The sassy way for me to put this is that there will be no blowing up or realignments so long as you and others vote for these clowns! This is why they try to pander using PR and not policy concessions.

In this timeline, Dems will endorse and successfully help pass a repeal of the 22nd Amendment so they can run against Trump again (because he’s so beatable!) and still lose.

Blue MAGA out in force

American universal healthcare would mean eliminating a huge pile of profits for healthcare-related companirs that are effectively just charging you rent for the privilege of going to a doctor. Those companies are large donors and fund think tanks that spread PR about how it is actually fiscally irresponsible to pay less for healthcare while changing where the balance sheet is calculated and what will happen to all of those jobs predicated on wasting your time and money to get healthcare?

You will not get universal healthcare, let alone single payer healthcare, without having some kind of leverage and using it in a disciplined way. And unless you are a CEO, your leverage can only come from collective organizing, of power in numbers, of political education so that everyone in the org is practically aligned on these goals and will noy disintegrate or be coopted by liberals.

This is a cold take it has been 8 years of Sanders actinh like this. What would you expect to need a source for, exactly?

It is not harm reduction to support genocidal neoliberals. It is not pragmatic to contradict all of your stated ideals to go to bat for them, give them your donor lists for a song and fail to do any movement building whatsoever.

Stop defending these losers.

Trump got fewer votes than in 2024. Dems ran a pro-genocide empty suit that did not distinguish themselves from a disliked incumbent and got even fewer votes than Clinton in 2016.

And the party itself doesn’t really care that they lost aside from how it impacts individuals’ careers. They are not your friends or allies. They probably would’ve won if they just had Harris pander on Gaza and introduce 1 (1) major policy plank people could grab on to. She wouldn’t have even followed up on either one of those topics, it would’ve just been the usual false promises and it probably would’ve worked. That is how closely they stuck to the donor class: they could not even construct their usual bad faith strategies. So instead you got Liz Cheney constantly on the campaign trail, lmao.

I’ve asked 4 Harris voters irl to name a single major policy plank and they each just plain went silent for around 10 seconds.

If you want to actually fight for yout causes, it is important to look at this with clear eyes. The failures of the Democrat political class are not your failures. They don’t listen to you and you had no input whatsoever on theit policy platform or choice of candidate. You don’t need to defend their failures or act like they don’t bear responsibility for running historically unlikable campaigns and candidates. Just because there is a dang cheeto does not mean Dems are redeemable for what they do. It has been a year of naked genocide and they demanded your complicity and still lost.

To oppode the right it is necessary to join and build othrt organizations, organizations grounded in working class power.

Will do!

Biden beat Trump during COVID and when Trump was the incumbent. Being, “not the other guy” works a lot better when you aren’t currently the president when the bad things are happening.

Given high inflation that was never balanced by wages or deflation and an ongoing sponsored genocide, “more of the same” and a near complete lack of major policy positions means hewing close to the unpopular incumbent.

Also she literally never won a primary. She lost to Yang lmao. This was donors shoving a pro-gemocide empty suit candidate down peoples’ throats. “Winning” is a secondary goal to choosing the candidates.

Right you accuse those that correct you of being paid Chinese agents. This is correctly understood as a racist response.

Hey look the person that refuses to read and makes racist comments is calling others fake lefties.

How can you even distinguish between soulless empty suit grifters?

Typical sinophobe response

And don’t just get that soup for your family on your own! Teamwork makes the dream work.

America has already used all of the tools of fascism before, often to greater extremes. Lebensraum found its inspiration in Manifest Destiny, for example.

Expect to see things you have seen before, but now with clearer eyes. When Dems want to double their police forces and tighten preparedness of the national guard instead of maintaining or increasing social spending, recognize that the boots they are lacing are intended for your necks.

Hey let’s give the neoliberal Keir Starmer staff some credit too!

Most information is not under new threat of disappearing like in a book burning, at least not by a concerted right wing effort. The censorship that removes information at the level of basic availability will continue to be corporate enclosure and censorship of academic work, like results that run contrary to business interests not getting published at all or by academic paper publishers that want $30/article. Both have already been here for decades. The latter is adddressable through systems like SciHub. The former is not addtessable except through overcoming a substantial ruling class profit seeking interest, which the people of the US are currently incapable of doing because they are too disorganized and politically miseducated. The answer to that, which is of course not easy, is to engage in political educwtion and to join and build an organization that challenges capitalism.

The forms of censorship that will increase, at least in a more overtly reactionary form, are purely in the political and social realm. It will be narratives used to justify policies and misinformation about the marginalized. The solution to this is the same, however: to join and build anticapitalist organizations and work on political education. Once you are in that space there is still plenty to deliberate about, but it is the essential first step. You cannot displace or oppose a false narrative without being able to draw attention to your own and to teach others correct narratives. And if you rely on ruling class formations to do it (like the Democratic Party) you will be faced with a different form of false narrative over which you do not have control and that will be wishy-washy. For example, Dem messaging narratives in support of abortion have a false premise that Dems actually fight for it at the federal level and often includes implicit transphobia. The net result of following their agenda there will be to sheepdog those who care about abortion access back into an ineffectual and relatively passive political engagement rather than building power to demand abortion access. To spread accurare information against false narratives is our task, and to tie this to robust leverage-building activity.

In other words, the primary form of censorship is in which narratives enter “discourse” and which do not. Who makes the decisions on that. What is the realm of mainstream speech and political work? What is the actual activity that can be engaged in that will challenge the sociopathic power status quo? Will anyone hear the answer(s) or will they be ignored for cynical PR firm-tested talking points, diverting focus and time and thought away from what is needed?

The best thing to do, as an individual, is to join an org and emphasize political education.

While I don’t want to reveal my academic background, I can say that in my work Chinese papers were just as good as if not better than those of other counteies. And to me seemed to be less focused on creating academic cliques.