JohnHenry.US

Tag: politics

  • My Apology to Bree Newsome Bass

    My Apology to Bree Newsome Bass

    I owe Bree Newsome Bass an apology. She doesn’t know this yet, but I do. So here we are.

    Somewhere in the past, for reasons I no longer remember and probably weren’t valid then either, I formed a dismissive impression of her and her work. This has led to thinking and speaking of her and her work as performative and commercially driven, without checking the facts.

    That was wrong. She didn’t deserve that, she doesn’t deserve that, and I apologize for it unreservedly.

    With that said cleanly and clearly, I’d like to take a look at “how this happened.” I think that doing so can be instructive and empowering for those of us who take seriously the duty to always grow and learn and improve who we are, recognizing that none of us are or ever can be perfect, faultless, or without error.

    Additionally, this all sits squarely inside the domain I claim to inhabit professionally and ethically. This is the work I do – or say and like to believe I do, at least – all the time. Strategic documentation, ideological mapping, recursive accountability, integrity of principle. If I’m going to present myself as someone who understands these mechanics – who builds relevant tools and teaches methods and critiques others – then I carry an amplified obligation not just to do the work, but to show the work, to make the process legible, and to model the audit, not just the outcome.

    Anything less is performance. Performance under the pretense of activism and action isn’t just part of the problem. It’s literally the problem my thinking was addressing in my whole wrong attitude toward Bass. Consequently, to let the apology stand without unpacking the architecture of the error would be more than an oversight; it would be a concealment. A failure to show the work.

    So let’s talk about how I got here, what I might have done to fix it far sooner within myself (and potentially thereby preclude the offense entirely), and how this apology seeks to both engage in active growth, and ensure that it continues.

    Forensic Deconstruction Of Calcified Bias

    Let’s put the specific event that led to this point into some context for you real quick.

    The detailed story is that I made a comment on Mike Ingraham For Everyone’s page in response to a Bree tweet, the same one that is at the top of this article. Mike called out the problematic tone of that comment, which I didn’t recognize in the moment, and that pushed me to look closer – “now that you mention it, why do I have these feelings about this person?” He did the work of holding a mirror I should have been holding for myself.

    The first error, the initial source of disinformed negative valence, where the core of my opinion of Bass was formed, I genuinely can’t identify specifically. I can say that it’s been there more or less for as long as I’ve been aware of her. So when Mike’s pushback forced me to ask myself why, the first giant red flag I detected was that I could not answer that question in a meaningful way. That absence of origin, that inability to locate the source, goes beyond inconvenience to condemnation. It meant I’d been carrying a judgment I couldn’t defend – and worse, hadn’t even tried to. This is a failure of principle, and I hope that the combination of genuine embarrassment and contrition, public apology, AND applying the same critical tools to my own thinking that I apply to everyone else’s serves as a correction of that failure.

    So: “In the beginning, there was misinformation, and it was bad.” Somewhere at the start, I failed to interrogate my first instincts thoroughly. I leaned on assumption where I should have demanded evidence, and that assumption calcified into fact, in my mind, simply through time and failure to interrogate my own assumptions for so long that I forgot they were assumptions. That was wrong, and given how much of my own public work and personal values are based on the idea that we must always, recursively and diligently, interrogate our own assumptions, it would be nothing short of deliberate concealment to not have this conversation.

    Having come to the realization that I couldn’t defend my own thinking to myself, I dragged out the toolbox, and took another look at Bree Newsome Bass as a public figure.

    To my embarrassment, I couldn’t find a single specific reason, event, action, or statement that reasonably would have led me to throw her in my mind’s “grifter” bin. If anything, I was giving her the same short shrift that has so long plagued my own public visibility and impact, and based on information just as flimsy or even fabricated for harm as that I could find within myself to validate or reasonably explain where I came to my negative opinion of Bass.

    As a matter of integrity, I couldn’t avoid the conclusion: I wasn’t and haven’t been giving her proper credit in my own mind – nor consequently in public discussion – for her work and perspective, and my failure was borne of ignorance. The opportunity to question myself and try to track it back to a “wait…why exactly do I think this, anyway?” has presented an opportunity to correct that ignorance, and with it, my misinformed general internal opinion of Bass. Further, it presents an opportunity to both model growth and discuss how reasonable observations can lead us to these unreasonable conclusions, and to publicly correct the record as a specific mass retraction of any prior criticisms that I may have made in the past based on the same flawed reasoning.

    To be clear: that reasoning is not, so far as I can tell on diligent self-examination, based in “racism.” I have always had significant antipathy toward those who co-opt ideologies as branding and promotional tools. Possibly in some transient moment, I misinterpreted something she said as being that type of behavior, but that is the behavior I attached to her in any event, and that was wrongly done.

    But it’s not just that it was wrongly done, which requires diligent deconstruction. It was the quieter thing that clings: the unexamined sediment of bias that can live in people who believe they are already vigilant.

    I thought I was catching myself.

    I wasn’t catching enough.

    That is a systemic failure, and for that reason, I decided to not just let this moment pass by quietly and adjust my own thinking a little bit, but to pull it out into the light and take it apart piece by piece, just like I would any similar display by someone else, in the hope that someone else might learn from my mistakes.

    Ms. Bass deserved clarity, accuracy, and better from me in public and in the privacy of my own thoughts. I failed to give it. I am sorry.

    I will continue to examine my assumptions recursively, to put my judgments through harsher tests, and to be accountable when they fail, correct the record when I am wrong, and continue to strive daily to listen with less haste to comment and more care to evidence.

    Bree, Mike, and anyone else I put in the wrong by acting on half-formed belief: I hear you. I was wrong. I am sorry. I will do better.

    —John Henry DeJong
    October 5, 2025

  • True Left

    True Left

    The Search For Direction

    (Introductory note: This began as a social media status that got so long it should be an article, which got so long it needed to go into the book – most people aren’t interested in reading online articles longer than 1500 words or so. This is now an edited-down version of what will be that section of the book.)

    There’s a long-standing observation about politics in the United States that we have no “true left” in our country.

    This is demonstrably untrue; there are any number of individuals, events, situations, and entities proving otherwise every day, including your present author.

    The underlying point of the observation – that the left we do have tends to be much closer to the center and less likely to resist or reject the prerogatives of capitalist power than in the rest of the world – has some merit. Unfortunately, that merit tends to be obscured by the gaping logical holes in the statement.

    Also unfortunate is that while the observation has merit, there’s no chance of addressing it effectively head-on without first addressing the reasons it happens.

    There is a much larger problem here that we seem to be refusing to see because it’s uncomfortable.

    Not Looking For Harris’ Flaws

    First I want to talk about Biden and Harris. I was against Biden dropping before he did it. When he did and endorsed Vice-President Harris my immediate response was “this is who we’ve got to beat Trump with, so let’s do it.”

    My reasoning for this is simple: there’s absolutely nothing positive to be gained from opposing or even energetically criticizing her at this point. Of course Harris isn’t perfect or flawless, but she’s literally the only thing standing between us and absolute catastrophe – historical, global, catastrophe – in November.

    I will not be so thirsty for traffic – or ersatz “street cred” among performative “leftists” – that I feed narratives to the GOP and the right wing by airing criticism here and now. The only purpose would be to draw attention to myself, and if my intentions were honorable and presented in good faith and I was successful in them by raising criticism of and opposition to Harris in public discourse, Trump would win the presidency.

    Ergo, I won’t be doing that. She needs to win. There is nobody else and it’s years past when we should’ve been thinking about it if we’re going to lay credible and serious claim to thinking about it now.

    Yet still, some of my friends and readers and supporters and colleagues on the left persist in discussing how Harris isn’t a true leftist and we must instead find a real progressive option and get behind them if we’re ever going to progress in this country.

    All of those statements taken individually are true, but at the same time taken as an integrated part of reality they don’t change the basic equation. Harris must win this election. There is no other option.

    Good Cop, It’s All Rigged, Blah Blah Blah

    Is that frustrating to me? Yes. I’ve been saying – publicly – for decades, since I was in middle and high school in the Reagan 80’s, that if we continued allowing it to be okay for our presidential choices to be reduced to the worst idea imaginable versus the second-worst, eventually we would end up in exactly this situation.

    Things could be much worse. There could have been a contested primary, or the DNC could have decided in some internal power struggle to go with a much worse candidate.

    In circumstances where we’re lucky to have a viable opposing at all, we’re beyond fortunate to have Harris as that candidate whether I agree with her on everything or not. She’s good at her job, she’s proven already to be a great candidate who is extraordinarily popular, and in a matter of a few weeks she’s turned the entire mood of this country around.

    That’s the thing that’s bugging me a ton right now about all these self-appointed experts and analysts and activists and pundits and thought leaders and influencers trying to find some way to generate traffic by criticizing Harris.

    Harris and her campaign, from the minute Biden dropped out to the minute I’m writing this sentence, have done things about as perfectly as they possibly could be from a standpoint of both the merits of their positions and the results. They’ve not dropped a single ball one time nor even looked wobbly, and I’m not sure they’re going to.

    Better Than Merely Lesser Evil

    We’re in a very complex moment where a population that fundamentally craves stability and consistency has no stable and consistent direction to turn, and there are radical changes at hand that must be addressed and not resisted, because they benefit all of us in the end.

    By the evidence to date Harris and her team are very much tuned in to all of these realities and are doing a masterful job of navigating them. That by itself is a display of leadership far superior to anything of which any Republican or most Democrats are capable.

    The “official” voice in my head is thinking 300-ish electoral votes would be a good, solid finish.

    The unofficial voice is increasingly convinced we could see a genuine landslide in Harris’ favor in November.

    It all depends on whether we show up, which is why I’m not celebrating a lot of positive poll numbers. The only poll that matters, happens on election day, and we have to make absolutely certain the victory is so iron-clad and unambiguous that it’s simply not subject to credible challenge at any level.

    Fortunately, we have a solid candidate to get behind and not just a “better than pure evil” placeholder or puppet.

    Yet some persist in imposing ideological purity tests on Harris while utterly ignoring her opponent’s catastrophically evil flaws.

    Right there is where that much larger problem that we’re not ready or willing to talk about has consequences, and it’s time we did the talking.

    Ready for it? Here it goes:

    True Left

    Here is the reality of the “true left” in the United States of America in August, 2024.

    First: A true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good if we’re no longer allowed to vote, or our system is retooled into a despotic facade of democratic process.

    Second: This sort of ideological purity test is more often egotistical virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than it is any grounded and coherent objection worthy of the attention being asked of it.

    Third: We tend to crap on true leftist options in this country.

    How all that shakes out as a set of values when you filter it through a hundred or two hundred million voters doesn’t make us look very good in aggregate in terms of our national character and “who we really are.”

    We’ve elected some real losers in this country and allowed plenty of others to hold power simply because we were high on our own flatulence and they kept feeding us raw vegetables.

    I think until we take a hard look at that, a true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good, because the problem isn’t about a lack of truly leftist or progressive options.

    It’s about our failure to live up to the world we say we want to live in.

    It’s about our refusal to work genuinely to create that world to any extent beyond that which is convenient to our existing interests and privileges – and that includes social approval and the material benefits that come with it.

    It’s about our willingness to be misled when it appeals to our egos, emotions, or sense of entitlement.

    I know that’s not easy to hear or accept, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.

    But this is the reality of our time, and we have to face it and address it because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep cycling through flirtations with autocracy until eventually one of them works and we spend a few hundred years with the human population largely impoverished and enslaved until we fight our way back to a more moral social structure.

    We have to stop falling for appeals to our lesser impulses.

    Baiting The Hook

    That’s how they catch us, every time. “They” being the power class in any socioeconomic system and “us” being those not holding significant power. They appeal to our egos and our conviction that if we just “play ball” the right way, we too will be part of the ownership class, but we never really are. Not most of us. The things we think of as “ours,” the cars and homes and all of that stuff, they’re not really ours until we’re done making payments on them.

    For most of us that day never comes.

    Most of us, one way or the other, continue to both tolerate and fall for this con because we believe that by successfully participating in the con we’ve earned a share of the ill-gotten gains of the con.

    Sometimes it even works. Sometimes people really do make out pretty well by being absolute bastards to other people and accruing wealth and power all their lives and dying wealthy and powerful. Not very often though; usually people who die wealthy were born that way.

    They’re the ones who keep all this mess going, and they do it because the mess preserves their privileges. They don’t care about the long-term cost or the sustainability or whether someone else or thousand of other humans are being relentlessly exploited to ensure those privileges.

    They encourage the rest of us to think in the same terms, making us all complicit and making it more difficult for us to change our own behavior due to feelings of guilt and shame when we look at ourselves honestly in the middle of the night.

    A certain percentage of the population always seems susceptible to this notion that if they’re willing to turn a blind eye to exploitation, they’re allowed to reap the benefits of that exploitation with a clear conscience. So long as they’re not holding the whip, their hands are clean.

    They con us into thinking like that, and we fall for it because we all want to be comfortable and have some power in our lives and the world around us, and we’re surrounded from birth by constant messaging that surrendering to the machine by becoming part of it is the only way to achieve that comfort and power.

    They sell us on the idea that there’s no way out of the hole except by climbing over someone else at a disadvantage compared to us, they lead us to believe this is the only way to do things, and then use our guilt and shame over doing what we believe we must to survive, to keep us doing it when we realize we don’t have to.

    They do it to preserve their power, and we let them do it because we believe that our cooperation will give us access to that power.

    Until we fix THAT problem, all the true leftists in the world aren’t going to help.

    Until we fix that problem we aren’t true leftists ourselves.

  • Why There Will Never Be A Successful “Third Party” In The US

    To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”

    The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.

    The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)

    The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.

    The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.

    That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.

    (NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)

    It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.

    There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.

    The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.

    Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.

    (In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)

    This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.

    Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.

    In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.

    I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.

    People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.

    The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.

    The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.

    The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.

    No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally

    It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.

    * In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”

    The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.

    If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.

    By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.

    (NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)

    In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.

    Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.

    No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).

    We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.

    That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.

    If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.

    And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.

    When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.

  • Better Call Saul? Maybe Not.

    This started being a curated post, but frankly as things worked out I think it deserves to be rewritten from the ground up.

    Back in 2010 there was this fella, Saul Anuzis. Saul had been a hotshot in the MI GOP for a few decades at this point, having held the state party chair among other prominent positions. He ran for national chair in 2009 and didn’t make it.

    So he ran again for the 2011 chairmanship. Was considered quite the likely prospect when he started.

    Along the way, he had the great misfortune to catch my attention while playing dirty pool.

    After that, he wasn’t such a hot prospect anymore

    Of course it would be silly to suggest that I was the reason for that.

    It all started here (amazing good fortune for me to find that the thread is actually still on Facebook 13 years later almost to the day)…

    Screenshot of Facebook post dated Oct. 11, 2010: Saulius Saul Anuzis · Really?? ...and Virg Bernero wants to be our Governor??? No wonder even Democrats are NOT voting for Bernero...embarrassing. (Followed by a fake tweet ostensibly from Virg Bernero reading "I am calling out my opponent for misleading voters during our debate last night. He refused a wedgie saying he WASN'T a NERD!"

    What you’re looking at is Saul Anuzis sharing a fake tweet from a Twitter account that I frankly suspected at the time but could never prove Anuzis himself was operating. Certainly whether he was or not, he treated this obvious parody as legitimate and responded to it just as though it was really written by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Virg Bernero.

    He even doubled down on it in the comments:

    Facebook comments from Anuzis on the photo thread: Saulius Saul Anuzis Even Democrats have to be embarrassed over a Twitter post like this...come on folks...this is serious business. Saulius Saul Anuzis Bernero shooting to beat Feiger...maybe get 37%!?!

    I took exception to this.

    In fairness, it wasn’t photoshopped; it was just a fake account.

    Transcript (too long for alt text):

    Don’t we think our electoral process and government are quite screwed up enough, without injecting photoshopped lies into the equation?

    Why not just photoshop Bernero’s head (or Obama’s, since that’s your ultimate target) into a picture and make it look like he’s peeing on the Bible, burning the flag, and r—ng a child [2023: redacted because I wouldn’t use this language in 2023, nor use the example at all, and I regret it…but I won’t deny I did it either, because I’m not a lying jerk -jh] and be done with it, if that’s the level of “integrity” that we’re bringing to the table?

    I mean, if you’re just going to insult people by lying to them and assuming they’re stupid enough to believe what you say just on faith, why not go for the BIG lie?

    As an ostensibly serious contender for the national chairmanship of the Republican Party, you should be aware that it is precisely this kind of childish and insulting behavior that keeps me resolved to never, ever trust a Republican. At least ONCE in a while I can find a Democrat who cares more about winning clean than about winning.

    The Weekly World News had better ethics than this. Shame on you.

    <insert lame “it was just a joke” defense, equally lame “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, or a disappeared comment and personal ban here>

    Of course some troll had to jump in with the usual stalking routine, poverty shaming (told y’all I’ve been broke for a while), dumb word plays on my then-current domain names…which just opened the door to further analysis of Mr. Anuzis’ egregious misrepresentation. I’ll trim the troll BS and stick to the substantive parts:

    Partial comment screenshot from JH: "You see, Harry Reid didn't publicize a fake statement from the President and treat it as though it were real. That is what is happening here. I realize it's hard to keep track, what with that all-important ad hominem attack to launch, but try to focus, would you? There are serious considerations at stake in this election. Maybe it's pleasing to you, or to Mr. Anazis, to treat your solemn duty as though it was just another game of beer pong back at the frathouse, but some of us are just about at the end of our ropes with the ongoing descent of our political processes into sheer fiction. Maybe you prefer for YOUR leaders to lie to you, Mr. Joseph. I don't."

    Further relevant trim from the back-and-forth with the troll:

    The funniest part of all of this: You've not only failed to make a single assertion of any relevance, you've also failed to mount so much as a token defense of your candidate's behavior - and out here in the real world where the sky is blue, your candidate definitely has some defending to do. At the very least he's guilty of remarkably poor judgment.

    And then – right on schedule, as predicted in the first comment, here comes Our Boy to make his excuses:

    Saulius Saul Anuzis Actually, this is the "fake" Virg Bernero Twitter account...just sounded too much like him..my mistake. Virg's real account is @VBernero
    Always with the implausible “plausible deniability.” Knowing something like this was coming was precisely the reason I included the remark about poor judgement in the prior comment.

    Sure enough, it’s the “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, with an attempted twist at “well it sounds like him!” It doesn’t. At all.

    So I called him out on that too.

    Crappy writing with the unfinished thought in the first paragraph…but the point was made, and firmly. This is not a man who should be leading anything or anyone; he demonstrably lacks the character for it. Thanks to the troll’s suggestion that I “write it up on your silly little website,” I did exactly that. The bulk of that material is below, trimmed of minor and irrelevant padding.

    This guy…wow.

    It’s one thing to create a parody Twitter account, although I question the ethics of doing so if you are a leadership candidate for one party and the parody is of another party’s candidate.

    I will also note here for the record that I have no evidence that Anuzis is in control of the Twitter account he supposedly is reporting on here…but it’s obviously not Democratic candidate for Michigan Governor Virg Bernero in control.

    So sure, parody.  Fine.

    Except Anuzis, as you can clearly see from the screenshot here, is deliberately playing this obvious fake as though it’s a legitimate public statement by Virg Bernero.

    – JH in the original article
    […]

    Now maybe if Mr. Anuzis was a college student pulling a prank or a young guy talking trash when he shouldn’t be, this would be a forgivable mistake.

    However, Mr. Anuzis is a candidate to chair the Republican National Committee.  He’s not just trying to have a voice, he’s trying to be the voice of the Republican party.

    And now he has demonstrated that his idea of ethics and integrity include treating an obviously fake public statement by an opponent as real.

    This is precisely the problem with not just the Republican party but with most politicians in this country period, and the people that vote for them:  we don’t seem to care about principles and ideals anymore.  Rather, it’s about who can make the most LOLs.  Hur hur hur, you are so clever.

    Maybe I’m at odds with the Republican party base on this – certainly your last successful presidential candidate would suggest that to be the case – but I’m not really interested in having a ham-handed giggling child in a position that includes the potential for him (or her) to influence public policy.  This is a position of national and world power, sir – tittering behind your hand like someone just made a wee-wee joke and you can’t help yourself is, at the very least, bad form.

    This is to say nothing, of course, of the outrageous ethical lapse in even pretending to believe that the quoted passage was actually a public statement by Virg Bernero.

    If this is what passes for “leadership” in the Republican Party, we may as well resign to becoming a one-party nation.

    – JH, extract from original article

    That was the end of the conversation, on October 12, 2010.

    By October 15th, Mr. Anuzis was no longer being spoken of as a serious contender for the Republican Party chairmanship. Indeed, Mr. Anuzis has done nearly nothing of note in politics since. His only activity of any real prominence was being part of the bipartisan coalition to push Michigan to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact…and he still holds no titled or publicly disclosed position of significance within the state or national party.

    Oh, that vote for chair?

    Wikipedia

    He placed dead last in the first four rounds of seven, only managing to make it to second of three with the help of cast-off votes for candidates who had withdrawn from the race…and the third-place candidate was a woman, so not terribly likely to win a Republican election for anything anyway.

    Maybe I’ve heard some rumors that a certain candidate for RNC chair was told sometime around November first of 2010 that he was not going to win that seat because of certain past public indiscretions that may call into question his integrity, his affinity for the online campaign work that had become the top priority for anyone in electoral politics by 2010, and his perceived seriousness as a candidate, even if they had to bring in the current chair to split the vote and keep Anuzis out of any serious contention.

    What is known for certain is that incumbent chair Michael Steele announced his candidacy for the position on December 13 – long after the other candidates – and then dropped out in the fifth round of voting. His votes were then distributed among the remaining candidates, with Anuzis receiving the second-least in round 5 of 7. He picked up 8 of Steele’s 28 votes; Preibus 9, Maria Cino 11, and Ann Wagner none. In the sixth round, Wagner lost 11 votes and Cino lost 6; of the 17 open votes Anuzis got five and Priebus 13…which means Anuzis also lost a vote to Priebus in that round, as that’s one more vote shifted than had been previously committed to candidates who dropped. In the final round, Cino lost 6 more votes and Ann Wagner dropped out, leaving 23 votes to distribute; Preibus picked up 17 of them.

    Certainly it would be ridiculous for me to take credit for effectively ending the man’s political career. Anuzis blew it and displayed poor judgement at best and almost certainly poor ethics given the great likelihood he really knew the Bernero account was fake when he tried to put it over as legitimate.

    Of course, poor ethics has never been a bar to Republican leadership…but a situation in which the party chair could reasonably be painted as a technologicially inept doofus was a weak spot the Republican Party simply wasn’t willing to risk.

    Aside from a brief stint as a RNC national committee representative to fill a vacant seat, which was immediately lost to a Tea Party candidate in the following year, to this day (as of October 6, 2023) Anuzis has not held a single elective position within the Republican party, nor any appointments of significance. His only designated party position at all since that time was as senior advisor to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, and we all know how that went.

    (A final note: it never stops making me laugh that if you take all the vowels out of Reince Priebus, you end up with R–NC- PR–B-S.)

  • Tebow, Dobson, and God

    Curated post from 2010, using the controversial anti-abortion ad aired during that year’s superbowl featuring Tim Tebow as a frame to discuss the larger abortion issue.

    (See original article: ‘Miracle’ Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad puts hit on critics – Faith & Reason [archive link verified working, Oct 2023])

    The debate over abortion in this country, and around the world, has raged since the first miscarriage.  In the main, the debate has been characterized by an overabundance of emotive outbursts, handwringing, ad hominem attacks, and a paucity of facts, balance, and clear, rational thought.

    One of the manifest expressions of the former list of attributes is the rise of hard-right “Christian” groups such as the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.  As a part of their overall fundamentalist diet of exhortations to donate money, condemnation of everyone who “ain’t like us,” and rampant, cynical fear-mongering for profit, these “faith-based” organizations routinely seek out hot-button issues like gay marriage, free expression, and abortion with which to stir up their marks and generate donations. 

    The Super Bowl 2009 advertisement featuring football star Tim Tebow and his mom making vague statements about family has stirred up some debate, but for me it’s not about the abortion issue.  The abortion issue is settled as far as I’m concerned; I don’t like them – and I know from the closest experience a man can that they’re not exactly a trip to the fun park – I wish they weren’t necessary, but until steps are taken to ensure that there is never a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy (steps that are currently well beyond the capability of our technology and our social evolution), they are.  Since they are necessary, the solution is to reduce their necessity while also providing a safe and reliable means of abortion for women who need it.  As need decreases, so will incidence.  Period.  There is no other logical solution to the “problem of abortion.”  So that argument’s done.

    My issues with the Tebow ad are not with his, his mother’s, or anyone else’s opinion about abortion.  I want that made clear. Everyone’s entitled to hold an opinion, regardless of how ludicrous I think it is.

    My issue is, first and foremost, with a group like FotF insinuating themselves into national discourse in the first place and secondarily with the stealthy way they’ve gone about it.  Frankly, I’d have had less problem with the ad if Tebow and his mom just walked onscreen and said “This man almost didn’t exist because I seriously considered terminating my pregnancy with him.  I’m glad I didn’t, and I believe you will feel the same way if you make the same choice.  Thank you.”  This heartwarming and light-hearted little diversion leads you to FotF’s website…where the indoctrination process begins.  “Oh, look honey, they don’t like abortion!  We don’t like abortion either!  We should sign up for their mailing list!”  And next thing you know FotF has a few hundred thousand more “members” that they can use to bully the media into covering them, and you as a member are suddenly being regaled with tales of doom and woe in which a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for mandatory gay marriage, mandatory gender education in first grade, the end of adoption agencies, nuclear war in the middle east, terrorist attacks in the US, a new Russian imperialism unchecked by a weakened and apathetic US military, [2023: and boy oh boy is that an entertaining read here in 2023, give that its premise is to predict the horrible, broken future of 2012 under the Obama presidency! It’s long and dull and enraging when you remember people actually think like that, but beyond that it’s hilarious. -jh] and all manner of other Terrible Things including a massive series of job openings when every good-thinking Christian quits their jobs and shuts down their business because they’re now being “forced” to act “against their morals” by (for instance) helping a gay couple adopt a child.

    Focus’ tactics and methods are execrable and well-known.  Any reasonably sentient mind can read the letter I linked to in the above paragraph and quickly note how often subtexts of pedophilia and homosexuality are both invoked and conflated.  In paragraph after paragraph we are told that the evil liberals, “the gays,” the ACLU, and of course that old standby the Commies, are just waiting for President Barry to welcome them in the door and transform America into a nation of roving homosexual pedophiles, anti-religious violence, and a new pot-smoking effete bourgeoisie that revels in the sight of Evul. 

    Organizations like Focus on the Family are brutal and terrorizing manipulators of public ignorance.  They rely on our inability to separate emotions from objective facts in order to push their dream of theocratic totalitarianism on the rest of us.  “Dr.” James Dobson and his ilk, each and every one of them, wants to be Nehemiah Scudder when they grow up.  This is the method behind their madness of the seemingly silly and naive attempts to influence education in this country; if we get ‘em while they’re young, they’re WAY easier to keep when they grow up. [2023: this isn’t just flowery prose; even as a firm atheist of some dozen years following decades of agnosticism, I still can’t – and never will – shake the brain-image of ‘God’ as an old white guy with a big white beard and flowing white hair. It was programmed into me before I could read, and I started reading when I was two. -jh]

    I appreciate anyone standing up for what they believe in [2023: given what I’ve seen people standing up for since writing this article, I can no longer stand behind the statement. -jh], but I think anyone who chooses to do so has the duty to ensure that they are fully aware of the implications of who they’re standing with.  I’m sorry, but if an organization like Focus on the Family came out hard in favor of anything I agreed with, I’d have to take a hard look at what I’m agreeing with.

    I’d respectfully suggest that those of you who are applauding Tebow here, or who think that your “support” for this advertisement or for Focus on the Family is going to prevent ONE abortion in the world today, tomorrow, or ever, may want to reconsider who you’re hanging out with.  Those groups are sick, endlessly focused on sexuality (and that often with a specific focus on children – EVERYTHING is a “threat” to “innocence” WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?! gimme money…[2023 and this con is also working better than ever, 13 years later. -jh]) and ultimately existing for the sole purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the credulous, the frightened, the ignorant, the superstitious, and the confused…every one of whom are good people with kind hearts and the best of intentions, just like you.

  • More Two-Party Myths

    Clearly we need further discussion of the two-party myths that are rampant in our discourse.

    I ran into this on Facebook. For those of you with screen readers or other visual impairment which makes it difficult for you to read text in images, it reads as follows:

    “We won’t be able to elect third parties if we never vote for third parties.

    It doesn’t make sense for someone in a deep red state to theor their vote away on Biden when they can try and run up higher numbers for Cornel West

    If they reach 5% of the popular vote, that guarantees ballot access and funding in the next election cycle.”

    It doesn’t guarantee a platform though. Nor does it circumvent Duverger’s Law.

    It’s important to point out at the top that this has been the operating strategy of “third parties” in this country for decades and it has yet to bear meaningful fruit. The two “third” parties that have made any headway at all, the Greens and the Libertarians, have yet to seat a federal legislator, and have only had spotty, inconsistent, and functionally useless success at the state level.

    You won’t be able to elect “third” parties in an electoral system based on single-member districts decided by simple majority vote until one of the two existing major parties decays so much on one end of the spectrum that a challenger from the other end can rise effectively, while the party in the middle drifts into the space formerly occupied by the fallen second party. That’s what we’re seeing right now as the GOP implodes and the democratic party continues sliding to the right under neoliberal capitalist-plutocrat stewardship and patronage.

    When serious leftist candidates have the confidence they can split off from the Dems and have a viable challenge from the left, it will happen. Then you’ll have a few cycles when the DNC basically runs the show while the GOP desperately tries to save itself by doubling down on plutocracy and the “new left” gets organized and gathers power from within the current Democratic party. We are probably in the early stages of this right now.

    It’s never one time happened any other way, even the direction of the shifts and rises are consistent – a leftist party becomes one of the two “majors,” and in the process of trying to protect and grow its power begins compromising and sliding to the right.

    As that slide – frequently called the “Overton Window” (* see below) – happens, the current right-wing group keeps moving further right until they hit the point of no longer being able to plausibly deny they’ve gone fascist/totalitarian. As the old left calcifies and stagnates it slides into the “moderate” right position.
    In every functional democratic system that has existed, it ends up either like this or with the hard right being so successful they rise to a level of power where they’re functionally capable of imposing the autocracy they crave and then you have a big war and a reset to more or less the status quo that existed prior to the rise of the right.

    Examples of the earlier process can be found in the demise of the Whigs in the US in the 19th century; examples of the latter can be found in Germany and other nations in the mid-20th century.
    It always goes one way or the other. Not once in human history has a populist left-wing movement coalesced into a viable party from outside the existing party structure.

    Focus on empowering your genuine leftists within the democratic party and helping them gather strength and viability so when the GOP finishes falling off the edge of fascism the new left has the confidence to believe they can step up. Your only other realistic option is sitting around carping about “third parties” and voting for almost universally unelectable candidates until you’re left with a one party system, and nobody wants that.

    Short of everybody getting off their asses and actually learning their individual candidates and deciding on an individual basis who they’re going to vote for, which absolutely will never happen because people are generally lazy and love to be part of an in-group, that’s the only way you’re going to find a viable pushback against the fascism and autocracy that has wholly swallowed the GOP and taken in a horrifying portion of the DNC as well.

    I know that’s not easy to hear and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the truth, and when we acknowledge it and work within it instead of trying impotently to fight the weather because it gratifies our egos to feel like we’re “too smart for that,” we’ll continue losing this country to fascism until we have to fight – literally – to get it back, and I don’t think anyone wants to go through that except the fascists, who think they’ll win that fight too.

    (* We shouldn’t use the “Overton Window” labeling. Overton’s description is deliberately malformed to present the process as being unrelated to left or right but rather, disingenuously, as a question of what is “socially acceptable.” Fundamentally it’s an attempt to advise right-wing politicians how to avoid social disapproval and loss of electoral power by being too honest about their intentions. Overton was a fellow of the radical right-wing, plutocratic, self-described “think tank” The Mackinac Center For Public Policy.)

  • Thanks, America (2008)

    It’s still sinking in.

    I’m 38 years old.  I was born in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War.

    In my lifetime, my country has been led by:

    • A crook
    • An oaf
    • A man whose good intentions and peaceful nature rendered him too soft on foreign aggression and inept in the management of the economy
    • A bad actor who shut millions of people out of the process of government, refused to confront the most pressing domestic issues of his time, and created a culture of greed that we have yet to grow out of
    • A spy
    • A philanderer
    • Another oaf, this one with an unfortunate mandate provided by circumstance that has allowed him to abuse our military and destroy our standing in the world

    Yesterday, on November 4th, 2008, for the first time in my life…we elected a leader.  A man of courage, of vision, of honor, and of hope.  A man who has spoken his mind, stood his ground, and encouraged us all to reject the politics of hate and fear.

    A black man.

    Last night at 11 pm EST, The United States of America turned the page on nearly two hundred and fifty years of unrealized ideals and unfulfilled potential.  We the people have rejected hate, fear, and division.  We have rejected hypocrisy and greed and envy, and for the first time in our history, we have taken a major step toward living up to that precious founding assertion that all men are created equal.

    Even as recently as a year ago, it was inconceivable to me that a black man could be elected President.  I liked Obama, and I wanted him to win…but I didn’t think he could.  I didn’t think we were ready, as a country. to elect a black person to the Presidency.

    I am proud and honored to say today that I was wrong.

    I am sure that Barack Obama will make mistakes.  I am sure that he will do things I don’t agree with.  I am sure there will be controversy and conflict.

    But I am equally sure that never again can the world look at us and say ‘before you take the mote from our eye, remove the beam from your own.’

    The next four years will be tough.  You don’t need me to tell you what’s going on in the world, you’re well aware.  We have a lot of problems to solve, at home and abroad.  We have errors to correct, and we have some major repairs to make in our systems and processes.  We have a baddly tattered national psyche to heal – one that has never really been healthy in the first place – and we have some soul-searching to do.

    A week ago today I wrote, “…it’s not just time for them to change…it’s time for us to change.”

    Last night, in the most significant positive historical event of my lifetime, we began that change, and for the first time in my life I can say without hesitation or qualification:

    I am proud to be an American.

    I don’t want to get too wrapped up in navel-gazing.  There is work to be done, and it’s up to us to do it, working with our leaders instead of working in spite of them.  This is not the end of struggle, merely the end of the beginning of a long journey.

    But at long last, that journey has well and truly begun.

    Savor this moment, if Obama was your candidate.  If he wasn’t, consider that maybe you have bought in to ideals that are less than ideal, and maybe it’s time for all of us to look inside ourselves and see what could use some adjustment.  Rest assured that although I have great faith and confidence in President-Elect Obama, I will hold him to the same standard, if not a higher one, that I have held our previous leaders.  Don’t think that if you are a card-carrying Democrat or liberal, that your agenda just got a blank check, because it didn’t – I suspect that those lawmakers on the left who still cling to their outmoded methods and ideologies (lookin at you here, Pelosi) are in for a bit of a rude awakening, because we’re still trillions of dollars in debt and we still have major steps and sacrifices to make, and there is much to be corrected and abandoned as useless on all facets of the political spectrum.  For too long, the starry-eyed idealism of our social conscience has been either untempered by pragmatism, or defeated by cynicism.  

    Today, we begin to find the balance.

    The whole world is indeed watching, and in this one night America has taken a major step to not just reclaim the honor and respect we have sometimes enjoyed in the world…but perhaps, for the first time in our history, to make a strong case for deserving it.

    And now…now we have to get to work on maintaining it.  Each of us has our part to play in rebuilding and building up this nation.  Some of us may not know what that role is yet…but we each have one, and it is vital.  If you don’t know yet where you’re going or what you’re doing, then my best advice to you is to work now to get yourself in fighting shape so that when the call comes, you’re prepared to answer.

    Yes, America, we can.

    My congratulations and my thanks to everyone who has played a part in making this happen.  

    Now let’s get to work.

  • The Price Of Fear (2008)

    Curated post, originally published 10-Oct-2008

    The lies and bile of the McCain campaign are officially Not Funny Anymore.

    I’ve been quietly concerned as I read and participate in various message groups and discussion fora at the level of seething hatred some McCain supporters – I won’t even call them conservatives at this point – have for Barack Obama.  We have seen a few scattered reports over the last week or so, mostly from Palin rallies but at McCain’s as well, of crowd members screaming such unjustified and ugly things as ‘traitor,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘liar,’ and worse.  In one instance, at a Palin rally, even the chilling refrain, “kill him!”

    This evening, I read this story, detailing how John McCain got booed at his own rally for saying that Obama is “a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”  The story includes quotes from McCain’s followers at a “town hall” style meeting, complete with ‘socialists taking over this country’ and ‘I don’t trust Obama…he’s an Arab.’  These are clearly the same people that many of us who support the Obama candidacy have been laughing off.  Let’s face it – they’re pretty damned stupid, making political decisions based on rumor, innuendo, and negative ads.  In the exercise of what is, regrettably, a fairly common liberal trait of condescension toward the credulous and naive, we have basically ignored these knuckle-dragging noisemakers because frankly, we find it difficult to believe that anyone is dumb enough to buy in to theridiculous, irrelevant nonsense being churned out by the McCain campaign.

    But it’s gone past funny over the last week.  There’s nothing at all funny about an American citizen shouting ‘kill him’ at a political rally.  There is nothing funny about accusing a presidential candidate of terrorism or treason.  

    People everywhere, across the political, religious, and ‘class’ spectra, are hurting, angry, and frightened.   As the Obama campaign has worked to stay positive – not always with great success – McCain-Palin and their Atwater-Rove-inspired hate machine have continued throwing the negativity in ever-increasing intensity toward Barack Obama.  The Republican’s haven’t just failed to control the negativity, they have actively encouraged it at every turn.  They intentionally stoked those fires in the mistaken belief that the solution to the ineffectiveness of their negative message is to ramp up the negativity; portraying Obama as a terrorist, someone to be afraid of, someone who cannot be trusted, someone who is ‘different than us.’

    And now, it’s spinning out of their control. 

    It seems to have finally dawned on Senator McCain that the politics of hate aren’t winning this election for him, and when he tried to rein them in…his own crowd turned on him. 

    Frankly, I don’t have enough respect for John McCain any more to believe that his attempt to be less negative toward Obama is motivated by any sense of shame, or of concern at the intensity of the hate he has engendered.  I think he just noticed – after weeks of failure – that his negativity isn’t bringing in the voters.  The problem is that in ‘energizing the base,’ McCain and Palin have given those who would themselves aspire to radical terrorism a sense of validation and righteousness.  

    John McCain has deliberately turned the slim possibility of Obama’s assassination into something that is frighteningly plausible.  We are faced with two possible scenarios:  either McCain is just too ignorant to have understood the power he was unleashing, or he understood it and unleashed it anyway because he cares more about getting elected than about the consequences of his filthy, digusting, fear- and hate-mongering tactics.

    Now – too late – he tries to put the brakes on, and like the fabled sorcerer’s apprentice, he is faced with the frightening fact that no matter what he does, the brooms continue to fetch water even as the house is flooding.

    I’m forced to wonder if McCain or his ‘brilliant’ team of strategists who have engineered this pretty hate machine have considered the fear that’s going through my mind right now…the fear of how big the explosion will be if one of these ignorant, hate-filled, seditious domestic terrorists actually manage to make a meaningful attempt on Barack Obama’s life.

    Senator McCain can’t un-ring this bell.  The brooms keep fetching and the water keeps pouring in, even as the apprentice who thought he was commanding the brooms is overwhelmed and drowned.

    And that’s a cute, funny little analogy, you know.  John McMickeymouse waving his wand ineffectually at all those disobedient brooms that he’s brought to life.  The problem is, it’s not funny anymore.  It’s getting ugly.  Bobby Kennedy ugly.  Abraham Lincoln ugly.

    John McCain has failed, miserably, in his first real test of leadership.  A leader would never have opened this Pandora’s box in the first place.  A leader knows that you do not set loose forces that you can’t control. A leader knows that in a place and time when people are already frightened, angry, and suspicious, to further encourage that and direct it against a political opponent can have dire consequences.

    John McCain brought those brooms to life.  The man is 72 years old and has been a national leader for nearly 30 of those years…and yet he lacked the foresight and judgment to consider what sorts of consequences would be in the list of potentialities if he chose to pour gasoline on that fire for the sake of his own ambition.

    If for no other reason, this stunning lack of judgment and blind ambition make it clear:  John McCain is not fit to be the President of the United States, and that hate-filled, bigoted, wretched joke of a woman he selected for his vice-president doesn’t deserve the slightest bit of attention or respect from the people of this country.  Time and time again, through poor judgment, through the abuse of power, through the malicious disregard for the sancitity of the offices they hold and seek, they have proven themselves profoundly unfit for service.

    Let’s just hope the gun they’ve loaded with such irresponsible avarice is never fired…unlike Barack Obama’s “relationship” with Bill Ayers, the results of such a tragedy are something that is really frightening.

  • It’s Time To End Confederate Flag Worship

    Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.

    Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.

    This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.

    In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.

    Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions

    These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.

    So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?

    Family Pride

    I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example

    In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.

    The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.

    Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.

    However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.

    In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”

    So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!

    Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.

    Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.

    So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.

    That brings us to…

    The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice

    Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.

    Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.

    Pictured: The ultimate participation trophy, symbol of losers since 1865 (far left of the image), shows up at another lost cause: the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Government by violent coup in Washington DC at the behest of President Donald Trump

    Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.

    I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.

    And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia

    Erasing History

    This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.

    Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.

    “Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.

    Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.

    (Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.

    In 1970.

    This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.

    To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)

    THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.

    In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.

    I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.

    But it’s time to accept reality.

    Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.

    Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.

    I’m sorry, they’re not.

    The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.

    I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?

    No.

    That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.

    Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.

    But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?

    No.

    We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.

    And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.

    It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.

  • Omar Rivero Conversation

    Among the large-scale scammers, grifters, harassers, trolls, and losers who have been trying to drag me down, play me against my allies, and sabotage my work over the years is Omar Rivero, founder of Occupy Democrats. (Incidentally he had exactly nothing to do with the Occupy movement, he just co-opted the name as a marketing strategy.)

    A few days ago another of these big pages ripped off some content from me, so I wrote about it – loudly. One of the things I wrote was this article on Medium. While doing my normal maintenance I noticed a new comment on that article, and of course it’s a newly-created sockpuppet account repeating the same old stupid lies trying to con people into believing that the guy whose annual income has been less than 10K for years is the grifter and it’s really the guy paying himself hundreds of thousands a year to clickbait the left who’s on the up-and-up.

    I have been holding this conversation in an archive since 2015. I’ve mentioned it before and even posted a couple of screenshots with information redacted. And of course it gets ignored because by and large people (including you, and for that matter me) are egomaniacs and hate finding out they’ve been conned, so when faced with the evidence of the con they ignore it and get mad at whoever showed it to them. We probably ought to break that habit, since it’s literally killing us, but that’s a different article.

    Anyway with all that backstory in mind and remembering that the latest sockpuppet’s claim was that “Omar Rivero doesn’t know who [I am],” here’s the ENTIRE conversation in which Rivero attempts to stir up contention, bait me into throwing popular leftist Manny Schewitz under the proverbial bus, and make all kinds of logically broken and entirely baseless accusations.

    If Omar’s got a problem with that, he can sue me for defamation and we can go to court and he can tell the judge these screenies are fake, at which point I’ll just pull up the archived conversation on my FB account and win the countersuit. But he won’t do that. What he will do, on the off chance this gets any visibility, is make a bunch of excuses how it was 2015, he didn’t know any better, he’s not the same person he was then…but if that was true, he’d have ended the blackballing of my content, and he hasn’t. He’d have stopped the grift, and he hasn’t. What he has done is continue sucking up to the center-right power core of the DNC in the hopes of furthering his political “career.”

    These people are lying, grifting scum – Occupy Dems, Other 98, Being Liberal, Addicting Info, and EVERYONE in their sphere. The only reason anyone would work with any of them is because either that person/entity is unaware of all this garbage, or they’re part of the problem. Either way, enough is enough. If we’re ever going to have a real left wing in this country, we must flush our commode and get these floaters down the drain so they stop stinking up the place.

    Let me be clear: no genuine progressive, nobody who respects independent activism or progressive values or leftist values or anything else they’re pimping for bucks would ever have engaged in any of the behavior I’ve been subject to by them over the years. If you are following these people, if you are sharing their content, if you think they are in any way liberal (in the colloquial sense used as a synonym for “left wing,” the real definition is an entirely different matter), leftist, or progressive, you are the victim of a long, deep, con game that has extracted millions of dollars from the real left and deliberately neutered left-wing social media for the explicit purpose of co-opting grassroots leftist energy to direct it at fakes, frauds, sockpuppets, astroturfers, liars, and thieves. I know that’s hard to hear. I know plenty of folks will just hate me for saying it out loud, and frankly those people are no more “progressive” than the people they’re following – they’re pretending to be progressive for social approval and/or profit, and they will absolutely abandon any genuine leftist principle in a heartbeat if it becomes too inconvenient, expensive or socially challenging to uphold.

    I thank you for your time. And yes, I’ve verified this is legitimate THAT Omar – not a sockpuppet, not a fake account, not a troll that’s pretending.

    “A lot of people” = “nobody, I went googling a new site that was set up to be the antidote to my bullshit, now I’m gonna try to troll you with this random auto-scraped entry that means exactly nothing” First off, people working above board don’t play this backchannel crap.
    The explanation is you don’t know how Zoominfo words and you’re a creepy little stalker.
    OMG THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!
    Hahaha isn’t anti-Semitism funny? Your “leftist” hero. Your “liberal” standard-bearer. Your “progressive” warrior. Your buddy of Elizabeth Warren.
    For the record, he never sent me jack shit. But ask yourselves what kind of progressive or leftist or liberal engages in poverty shaming and ridiculing people who have to eat ramen.
    “If you have to cheat to win…” “We make mistakes.” See the gaslight there? Also the obviously backhanded, snotty remarks about “nobody watches” and “nobody reads.” “They hate me because I’m successful (defined as ‘making money by bullshitting people’)” – another common refrain of the plutocracy. The only thing left about this clown is he should’ve left the political activism to people who live their values and believe in progressive ideals.
    Incidentally that article remained on the site, uncorrected until sometime between Sept 2020 and April 2022. At the time of writing this article AI appears to have gone 404. Ironically it was stolen from Raw Story, which is probably what Matt Desmond didn’t want people to notice and that’s what set him off like a coke freak on a four-day bender.
    This me explaining to a guy I know is part of the problem why he’s part of the problem, while pretending I believe he’s acting in good faith. That’s my way of making sure “I didn’t know” isn’t a plausible excuse anymore. He knows. I told him. He doesn’t care because grifting makes him money.
    “Just news blogs.” More gaslighting. This is also how they rationalize themselves. It’s “just a mistake.” Then they find someone like me making an honest mistake and scream SEE YOU DO IT TOO! Nobody is so stupid as to not understand the difference, but the pretense gives them plausible deniability. Now who else can I think of that’s staked the whole game on pretending they really believe their own bullshit? Clue, it rhymes with Trump.
    How many progressives do you know who think maintaining ethics in their sphere is “beneath them?”
    Another gaslight – diversion tactic. The fact we were exploiting a sensationalized story about a murder wasn’t really exploitation because there was a minor factual error in the website we copied and pasted the story from before applying a fourth-grade rewrite to avoid obvious copyright infringement. God these people are scum.
    “Yeah dude I’m a nobody,” but a few panels up he’s bragging about five million visitors a month to his website. False modesty that he clearly doesn’t believe; it’s a show of ersatz humility leveraging the human tendency to feel bad about distrusting people who act humble. I’m not saying he’s not VERY GOOD at being a lying manipulator. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have made so much money doing it.
    “So are you saying that…[insert attempt to go back to the narrative you’re trying to control]” Pure manipulation.
    Just in case anyone thinks I’m afraid to “say that to his face,” this is me telling him to his face he’s a sleazy self-aggrandizing money-grubbing dick pretending to be a political activist, to his face. Small woncer the conversation ends immediately after.

    That’s the entire conversation. The discerning reader will clearly see the attempts at manipulation, the plays to plausible deniability, the fake “oh I’m not important” modesty performance, etc. ad nauseam.

    THIS is the attitude that has been “informing” left-wing politics for the last decade or so, I’ve told you and told you and told you what was happening, and nobody wants to hear it. I’ve resisted putting this out for nearly a decade because I just don’t need the BS, but you know what? I’ve got the BS anyway. I’ve spent the majority of the time since this conversation happened destitute, desperate, begging to survive, and STILL doing more in any give series of random grunts than these scamming pigs have done for the left in their entire lives, collectively.

    I’m done playing.

    https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/videos/805871634614882/ Livestream where I establish beyond question that these messages came from the real Omar. (Don’t forget to like my page – unlike Omar, I need an audience that appreciates being respected. You can also use the widget on this page if you don’t have it blocked somehow.) If it disappears I’ll upload the archive to YouTube…and if THAT disappears I’ll just host it myself.

    I’ve been trying to tell people for over a decade that these bad actors were bad actors, and they’re damaging our hope for a progressive and successful future. I’ve been largely ignored. It’s time to stop hiding your heads in the sand and face reality: if you’re on board with these pages, you’ve been had, and it’s cost the left and by extension all of us far, far too much.