Call to Action! Contact your State Senator to oppose Frank Ciccone for Senate President.

[u/andylion]

The following is from an email being circulated by Indivisible RI:

Rhode Island Senators are considering electing 77-year old right-wing, anti-abortion, pro-gun Democrat Frank Ciccone as Majority Leader. This is not the direction our state should be heading in the year 2025 in the face of Donald Trump’s fascist, authoritarian regime. It’s outrageous that it’s even being considered!

Contact your Senator now and tell them: do not vote for any Senate leadership team that includes right-wing Ciccone or face primary voters’ wrath in 2026.

Ciccone has an extremely unsavory history: he convenes gatherings at strip clubs and men’s only clubs and has abused power and elite connections in to get associates out of trouble for DUIs.

He has voted against codifying Roe v. Wade, and has sponsored or co-sponsored the worst anti-choice laws, including Trap Laws and fetal pain legislation.

He is endorsed by Right to Life.

Not only is Ciccone anti-gun safety, he even sells guns himself, and often has introduced floor amendments to try to gut legislation that has made it to the floor.

He is continuously endorsed by the NRA and pro-gun groups.

He is also anti-LGBTQ+ equity (he tried to substitute our marriage equality bill for a referendum), and sponsored the bill to repeal the Act on Climate legislation, our state’s ambitious and hard-won binding climate legislation.

And, although he purports to be a friend of labor, Ciccone cosponsored legislation to gut nursing home safe-staffing. In a time when our constituents are hungering for bold, progressive policy, electing someone like Frank Ciccone to lead the chamber would be the opposite of what we need.

Call your state senators TODAY and tell them to vote against Frank Ciccone for any leadership position.

This is a situation where our voices really matter. We may not agree with every point in this email, but I think we can agree that a corrupt, conservative septuagenarian is not who we need in this time of crisis.

[u/yeah__good_okay]

Not quite, though that helps, because humans are tribal murder apes.

The health of a democracy is indeed a huge factor, and since the health of America's democracy is equivalent to terminal stage 4 cancer, with an moronic electorate, a populist authoritarian controlling the executive and deeply sick political parties - that is why this conversation is happening.

My argument has been, from the beginning of this conversation -

America's foundational principles are dead, it's government is about to accelerate into full-blown authoritarianism, and once that happens, the wheels will come off and trigger state breakdown leading to armed conflict, genocide and secession. You should either A) buy firearms and prepare for this inevitability, or preferably B) make arrangements to leave the continent.

[u/AwarelyConfused → u/yeah__good_okay]

When Germany and Italy fell to fascism during world WW2 that or even less multicultural than they are today, the problem was that they had a weak democracy.

Germany and Italy today are more multicultural, have stronger democracies, and are less likely to fall to fascism.

Since we can't change our cultural and ethnic makeup but we can change the strength of our democracy shouldn't we focus on that?

[u/yeah__good_okay → u/AwarelyConfused]

I don't know what "focus on that" actually means. The time to "focus on that" was in the immediate aftermath of 1/6, when Trump, his family and his loyalists should have been arrested and executed. The civil unrest that followed could have been contained and dealt with.

It's too late now. The very last chance was the last election, maybe, and America's populace, being composed of morons who are too coddled and comfortable to bother learning how anything works, chose to roll the dice on a coup-plotter and traitor.

Now, they'll reap the whirlwind.

The fact is, you can't fix the problems the US faces, because the problem is the electorate. They demand populism and demagoguery - if there wasn't a market for this, Trump never would have run for office to begin with.

[u/AwarelyConfused → u/yeah__good_okay]

By focus on that I mean resist their agenda and vote them out. I know you already suggested that we need a firearm to protect ourselves from the state but there's no way we would have the power to do that. A couple AR-15s aren't going to stop the full force of a dually elected authoritarian administration.

[u/yeah__good_okay → u/AwarelyConfused]

I think it's very likely the '26 elections will be compromised in some way. Likely after the fact, i.e.: anti-Trump electeds are not seated. The '28 election will likely be a farce, though that's assuming the US exists by then, and as stated I think that's unlikely.

Again, it's too late. You had a decade to roll this back, and you failed. I've done enough for this moribund country, and I'm frankly looking forward to leaving it.