cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44416979
Michelle Goldberg March 12, 2026
Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws too lax and its public teacher pay too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000 grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium.
Most of all, Fishback has made contempt for Israel and its American lobby a centerpiece of his campaign, constantly reminding audiences how much America spends on Israel while its own needs are ignored.
I’d like to see the Democrats take up a modern version of the WPA, if I’m honest. The conservatives get all butt mad about such things, but hell, some of their output is something you still see around, nearly 90 years later. My understanding is that for men that were out of work, it gave them a real sense of pride and purpose, too.
We have a crumbling infrastructure and we have people being thrown into desperation. Seems like the problem almost solves itself. That is if ridiculous conservative dogma about how economies work can be cast aside. If we can spend ~19 billion and counting on something like bombing Iran, we can do something like this.
It doesn’t have to just be only the usual infrastructure we think of like bridges and roads. Why not hire a bunch of people to (responsibly) migrate our older systems running things like COBOL that always seem to have so many people wringing their hands over? And do it not as an outsourced project, but instead, under something like WPA?
Why not have people hired to re-imagine and re-implement our mass transit? Everyone from people working on the design for such changes all the way down to the people that need to hold signs to direct traffic when the construction is under way…
I’m not sure I’ve heard a politician even talk about something like WPA being done, at scale.