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.
You hear a lot of talk, usually from right-wing trolls and ‘bot farms and influence operations, about how terrible left-wing authoritarianism is. Constantly the screams of “socialism” and “communism” are used as boogey-men to startle the easily manipulated away from their own best interest.
It’s important to understand that all authoritarianism is not the same.
The real left has been in “dad vibe mode” for a long time. Part of your job as a dad is the hard, hard task of letting your kids learn their own lessons. You gotta watch ’em try things you know won’t work and might even sting a little, because they’re not going to believe you TELLING them what’s gonna happen, no matter what you do.
And then sometimes you’ve got say okay, this has gone on long enough, time to step in.
There’s a very current-day Undertaker vibe to it, if you’re a wrestling fan. Like “okay, we’ve had our fun, but it’s time to set some things straight now because this has got out of hand. Watching the campfire is cool. Roasting marshmallows is cool. Playing with matches isn’t, and you won’t put ’em down, so now I’m gonna have to bark at you and startle you and scare you a little so you do, because you have to put them down, for your own good and everyone else’s.”
It is the inclination of the left to be hands off. Real anti-authoritarianism (as opposed to performative flexing, the people who can scream along with the lyrics of every Rage Against The Machine song but don’t understand a single word) has always been a leftist inclination. The same values and attitudes that make us leftists make us very disinterested in telling anyone else what they should do or trying to enforce social compliance with authoritarian tactics.
But…once in a while, the alternative choices start getting slim.
That’s how you can tell the difference between genuine leftist movements and right-wing propaganda campaigns pretending to be leftist, like so-called “communist Russia.” Genuine leftist movements abhor and avoid tactics of force and intimidation and coercion whenever possible.
The back side of that is when someone like me tells you, this is how it’s got to be, that’s not because “I say so.” It seems like those of you who tend to think in those terms have a really hard time grasping that not everyone does. Very, very little of *anything* I’ve said in the last thirty years, even before I started getting off the drugs and detoxifying my thinking around 25 years ago, has been said simply as a matter of throwing my opinion around. My opinion isn’t any more meaningful or powerful or authoritative than yours; anything I say that I think is “more authoritative” is so precisely because it’s not an opinion but a series of descriptions of observed facts.
That’s really important to remember, because there’s a difference between strong-arm tactics backed by abused power, and good advice, and part of the strategy of those who rely on strong-arm tactics to maintain their power is keeping you confused about which is which.
I’m not telling you that you have to reject bigotry and xenophobia and hate and oppression as behaviors and thought processes simply because I find those things distasteful and obnoxious. I don’t have to be around you, if that’s the case.
I’m telling you that because the consequences of not doing so are the existence of the species and the ongoing, right now, day to day quality of your very own life, which is itself oppressed often without you even realizing it, using exactly the same tools and values and attitudes that you’re using to oppress others, and until you figure that out, none of us is gonna get the boot off our necks so we can deal with the clowns at the top of the pyramid whose relatively tiny footprints are somehow holding all of us down under their weight.
I’m telling you that because I can see that the consequences of your behavior are making you miserable, even if you can’t see it.
(Yet. People like that usually catch on, and usually about five seconds after the acute and material costs of their behavior come due.)
That’s the difference between “authoritarianism” on the left and on the right. On the right, they live for that crap because they all believe that if they’re just big enough jerks and can sufficiently prove their heartlessness and ruthlessness to their owners then they’ll be allowed to become an owner one day.
On the left, we’re mostly pissed because you made us get off the couch, and we’re gonna want to get this over and done with quickly so we can get back to singing kumbaya and watching TV or tending our kale gardens or driving our lesbian friends around in a Subaru or whatever stereotype you want to throw around for a little cock-eyed giggle.
If you’ve been around enough people, you know. The folks who tend to the right are the ones who yell and threaten and hit and make a big production out of things and there’s all the theatrics and this is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you gaslighting.
The folks who tend to the left are the ones who snatch your ass up about two seconds before the consequences of your actions hurt you, which gives you a nice three seconds to let your life flash before your eyes and give you a real good scare before sitting you down, looking you dead in the eye, and saying “now don’t you feel a little dumb for doing that? How about you don’t do it again?” And we do it knowing you’re going to hate us for it, at least a little bit, but also knowing that if we don’t, you won’t be around to hate anyone.
And that’s the lesson you remember and learn from. You might remember getting hit. You might even believe it’s the right way to do things and do the same to your kids. But you’ll rarely remember any specific reason it happened, any specific action for which the violence was a consequence, any particular moral or ethical lesson you learned from it.
But you remember that feeling of having disappointed someone you respect and admire, for the rest of your life, and you try not to do it again.
Right wing authoritarianism is their default setting. Bullying and pushing people around and ordering compliance and throwing your weight around is part and parcel of what attracts people to right-wing ideology, it’s why they work so heavily on anger and fear and ego.
Left-wing authoritarianism is reluctant, always a last resort, and always executed in the hope of being a temporary expedience to solve an acute issue, and letting go of it when that issue is solved.
As the current situation worldwide shows us, sometimes, as reluctant as we are, we have to stand up and say :no more, or else.” That’s a form of authoritarianism, to be sure…but it’s the only one I can see having any ethical redemption or validation – reluctant leadership that wishes to stop leading the minute it’s possible to do so.
It’s time for us as a species to accept a hard reality: about a third of us have no respect for nor intention of adhering to the vital social contract that hold us together and keep us functioning as a species.
About a third of us – and this is across the board, not just in the US or any particular demographic group, which we’re going to discuss in a minute – are openly and proudly rejecting every lesson of human history about the futility and waste of tribalism and isolation and fear of the “other,” and are enthusiastic to proclaim their refusal to recognize or cooperate with any so-called “social contract.”
I’ve observed many times in the past that in any time and place where there are large enough groups of people to form governments, about a third of the people in question are perfectly willing, or at least easily convinced, to throw the rest of them under any available bus if they think doing so will get them laid, paid, or praised.
Clearly and for good reason on this day, the second of Donald Trump’s second term as US President, there’s a lot of frustration and trepidation and anxiety about what the future will bring, as well as a quite reasonable incredulous outrage at the idea that somehow there are 80-odd million people in this country stupid and evil enough to vote for him.
We need to talk about that, both in terms of the risks it presents to our own integrity and in terms of how to address the emergent and exigent situation that has, as of noon eastern on Janyar 20, 2025, successfully ended American democracy, and is doing the same to democratic countries all over the world.
First I want to talk about this “social contract” thing and where it comes from and what it means.
What is the “Social Contract?”
Formally in philosophy and political science the “Social Contract” is a theory with roots going back to the Greek sophists, and the first real description and labeling of which is usually credited to philosopher Thomas Hobbes (for whom that adorable tiger is allegedly named, incidentally), with Locke, Rousseau, and others following up and developing and applying various high-minded philosophical concepts focusing largely on the broad ideas of individual liberty versus the utilitarian and ethical demands of functioning on a planet which also features other humans (or forms of life at all, for that matter; cf. Bentham “does it suffer?”)
In popular and informal use outside of academia, political science (and that weird subset of “m’lady” guys who think that being a verbose sanctimonious dull-witted boor somehow makes it better), the “social contract” refers to the very broad range of human activities and institutions, formal and informal, written and unwritten, from governments to handshakes, express or implicit, that generally tend to facilitate humanity not boiling down into a perpetual stew of hostile warring tribes.
Clearly, it’s not a cure-all or some binary condition under which, once met, Society Functions Properly. It’s just the label we give to that set of ideas and systems and institutions and philosophies that say we’re generally not going to run around trying to hurt each other because that’s stupid and causes the whole species to evolve and progress more slowly.
Governments and laws are one functional expression of that social contract, mechanisms by which people can be informed of and held to account for respecting the million little things that go into keeping us from collapsing into a frothing mob.
We all agree to drive within the lines. If you don’t agree but insist on doing it your own way, you’ll be sanctioned. If you’re not aware of that clause in the social contract and violate it through ignorance…well first and foremost you’re probably driving without a license but also you might face a less punitive sanction that includes an educational component – go learn to drive and get a license before you try it again on public roads.
So that’s what four years of political science classes taught me about what this “social contract” really is. Now let’s talk about why we need it.
Divide And Conquer
If you let the shiny junk distract you, you won’t see the monster behind you until it’s too late. Image courtesy Bing AI.While it’s always important to keep in mind, in a time of trepidation and previously unimaginable decline of ethics resulting in what appears to most to be an almost overnight collapse of the US political system into overt and unambiguous fascist totalitarianism such as we’re currently facing it it is critical to our survival to remember that none of this is about demographics and groups.
It’s important to remember that rough third I talked about in the previous section can’t be identified by any external characteristic. They are rich and poor, black and white, Chinese and Ghanian and Guatemalan and American, they are man and woman and non-binary and trans, they are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Hindu and Buddhist and Jainist and shiniest and atheist. They are sex workers and PTA moms and deadbeat dads and captains of industry and church leaders and police and average everyday people you probably share a coffee or maybe lunch or some gossip with on slack or maybe they’re a member of your family. Maybe ALL the members of your family are part of that one-third.
It is a time-worn and long-proven effective tool of oppressive and totalitarian power to set the populations they seek to subjugate against one another based on various meaningless attributes usually appealing, at their root, to fear and ignorance.
There’s certainly some reasonable criticism to be directed i our current situation; large identifiable demographic groups contributed significantly and inexplicably to Trump’s victory. Among other relevant observations I’ve had my own words for the Latinos and those of middle-eastern descent who withheld their votes from Harris or voted for Trump on some pretext like failure to support Palestine or the “sin” of women not being compulsory brood mares for any man who cares to force himself on her. because they’re among those groups most certain to be targeted by the Trump administration for oppression soonest and most violently, and I think that’s a thing worth noting for any number of reasons.
So I’m not saying I don’t “get it.” Nor am I trying to shout down the idea of saying “hey wtf were you thinking over here? Seriously?”
If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of focusing on those demographic numbers and wondering about specific examples of why this group or that group would have to be out of their mind to have done this, we will alienate others like us and begin thinking in precisely the ways we’re trying to resist. That’s why making such divisions happen is so important to the despot or tyrant. The more intramural rancor and hostility and distrust can be sewn among the proletariat, the easier it is for the aristocracy to get away with unimaginable levels of exploitation and malice in the distraction.
Ironically this can only be done by first pushing us together under labels – black, white, gay, straight, Christian, man, woman, Jew, etc. – and then defining an antithesis to that label and pushing others of us under that, and then setting us at each other’s throats like a disturbed child agitating cats to fight each other.
The only defense against that is a diligent ongoing mindfulness about our own thinking, because human brains like patterns and groups and categories and sorting things and labeling them, and we’ll do it off-hand if we’re not paying attention and not even realize it until months later it dawns on us that some basic idea worked its way into something way back when that didn’t belong there and has caused harm to whatever ongoing effort it infected.
We have to be honest with ourselves and we have to be willing to admit when we’ve blown it, because none of us are perfect and we’re all going to screw up sometimes. The important part isn’t that you’re perfect, but that you’re aware of your imperfections and working in good faith to ensure your thinking is clear and hasn’t become infected with some bad idea without you realizing it.
Individual Choices
Demographics don’t vote. Individuals do.Edmond Dantès at PexelsWith all that said, in the end elections still come down to individual human beings making individual human decisions. Every single person who voted for Trump knows what he is and what he’s about and they signed on to it. There is no demographic descriptor that covers all of those people, nor one that guarantees through some other observable trait that they can be easily identified.
It’s about individuals, and that’s really important because you know what? We gotta fix it individually. That means no more debate callouts and back and forth and trying to give benefit of doubt or keep the peace or reach across the aisle. That means we don’t just roll our eyes at ol’ drunk uncle Cletus when he starts screaming racism, we make it quite clear and without any room for further debate that Uncle Cletus is welcome to either stop being an unrepentant monster or he’s welcome to not come around at all, period. Yeah, that’s gonna hurt his feelings and make you feel bad, tough. You have to stop letting these bullies push you into allowing them to be part of your lives when all they do is make you miserable and exploit you and insult you and disregard you on every human level unless they want something.
It means no more relentless relitigation of every conceivable idea just because team dumbass tagged in a new partner. No, I don’t have to rationalize or validate my belief that we shouldn’t be pushing trans kids around just because some adults are sex-obsessed perverts. No, I’m not required to step through my every internal dialogue for the last fifty-four years related in any way to whatever we’re talking about just so you can whip out some snotty condescending gotcha when I make a typo or get a meaningless trivia point wrong.
We’re done doing all that now. That is my individual choice. And yours. If you want to persist in holding values and beliefs that are objectively reprehensible, then I am under no obligation to keep explaining to you why they’re objectively reprehensible.
That also means you might be the odd person out, maybe you’re in a whole family of these ridiculous cretins and somehow you’re the only one who managed to find any human decency or redeeming character trait. This is where it gets hard, because we need a community out there that’s ready to be family to those folks, that’s ready to take the place of the sniveling, cowardly traitors who turned their backs out of ignorance and fear. And that doesn’t just mean a pat on the back and thoughts and prayers, a lot of folks are stuck in these situations because they have nowhere else to go. That means you need to consider being a place for them to go if you have one. Not because they share your hobbies or identity or interests or religion but because they share your humanity.
Individuals did this. Individual human beings making individual human choices to allow or create suffering in others for their own benefit.
THAT is the problem that needs fixing.
The only way it gets fixed is we make it frankly and unambiguously clear to every one of them one by one that their money’s no good here and their custom isn’t welcome, playtime’s over, this is no longer acceptable at any level under any circumstances, and if that’s too big a problem for someone then they are welcome to remove themselves from the society whose contracts they refuse to respect.
Because what they stand for and advocate and support is what has made my life far too often a miserable waste as it has billions of others, it’s disgusting and it’s evil and it’s wrong and I don’t want it around me and no human being should be subject to this treatment and these conditions and this futility of a life, and that’s all the reason I need. Dismissed
As long as they’re going through life supporting and propagating and validating ignorance, hate, servility to power, bigotry, and violence, they have self-selected non-participation in our society. They have chosen to egregiously violate the social contract, to the extent that some of them will haughtily declare they didn’t sign one and millions of others want to renegotiate it.
That means they don’t want to be part of our society, so GTFO. Can’t throw most of ’em out of the country, but I can damn sure throw ’em out of my world, and I can make sure they stay gone.
As long as someone is willing to try or help those who are trying to replace progressive democracy with totalitarianism and oppression and exploitation, they are not welcome in my life, or my social circles, or my church, or my public events. They are shunned. They are subject to precisely the same treatment they wish upon others whose sole offense against them is their existence, because that is the justice that has been long-delayed by the distaste held by decent people for the unavoidable unpleasantries of seeing it applied. If they want to use my bathroom, they have to show me their genitals first so I know which one they need AND I know they’re not lying about it to gain access to me or my family in a vulnerable moment. If they want to eat my food, they have to show me they earned it. I wouldn’t want to impose my socialism on them by just giving it to them, they have to contribute somehow. If they want anything from me, at all, they have to jump through every hoop I can possibly come up with and then I’ll deny them anyway. Because that’s the world they’re trying to create for us, and I’m not having it. Or we can talk about them growing up and acting like an adult and facing the facts that the way they think is harmful to others and that is wrong and they need to change it, starting right this minute.
Because anything else is their choice to dishonor that social contract, and if they’re not participating in the contract, they’ve self-selected out of that society.
That was their choice to make, as an individual.
And these are the costs of that choice.
Now is that how I want to be to people? No. But there’s about eighty million of y’all who need to hear me loud and clear, right now: You’re not leaving me or anyone else with a conscience any choice. You ARE the trolley problem, and we’re the ones who have to decide whether to act or passively allow harm to happen to innocent people including us.
Clock’s ticking. There’s only one right side of any of this. Get on it and mean it.
This curated-and-updated post was originally published Oct. 29, 2009, and centers around a situation in which Home Depot terminated an employee named Trevor Keezer for refusing to remove a pin from his work uniform, while working, that read “One Nation, Under God, INDIVISIBLE.” You may recognize this as one of the many Islamophobic slogans that was flying around during the decade or so after 9-11 (and to some extent still are). The company’s policy was that employees may not wear anything on their uniform that wasn’t provided by the company. While a great deal of noise was made in right-wing media over the whole thing and indeed a lawsuit was filed, there’s no indication it ever went to court, and indeed it seems to have just been quietly dropped after a year of right-wing media outlets trying to drum out outrage over the “discrimination” against Christianity.
This essay is presented as originally written in the immediate aftermath of the event, with minor editorial corrections and edits. -jh
I’m definitely missing my camcorder today as this pointless, divisive kerfluffle over some redneck getting fired for pushing his religion on people on the workplace. What a great topic for a video rant…
I find it hilarious that so many people get all het up and whiny about BOYCOTT HOME DEPOT THOSE ATHEIST EVUL COMMIES, but boy wouldn’t they feel differently if the guy expressing his religious views on his work uniform was a Muslim, druid, or follower of Cthulhu? But no, it’s shove those noses in the air, start wringing your hands, and quick everybody get wrapped up in a my-god-is-better-than-your-god argument that solves nothing and distracts us from dealing with the very REAL and PRESENT and OBSERVABLE problems that we are wrapped up in.
A friend on Facebook linked to the Today show’s little fan page there, where one such conversation is taking place. it’s hilarious. “It’s not freedom FROM religion it’s freedom OF religion!” Uh…same thing, Captain Logic Freedom of religion by necessity includes the freedom to not participate in any religion at all without fear of persecution or discrimination. And then it’s the same tired old arguments that have been shot down time and time and time again over how this is a ‘Christian nation’ (it isn’t and it never was) or how anyone who doesn’t believe in Jethro Bodine’s particular concept of “God” is unpatriotic and evil and should LUV IT ER LEEV IT.
Now there’s a proud American sentiment, eh? You must worship according to our rules or be rejected from society. Oh, hey, waitaminnit, that’s the whole reason we (well, YOU. My people are native american, dutch, and black) left England in the first place, isn’t it?
What I can’t figure out is where all of these ‘good Christians’ get the fancy bibles that are missing the first part of Matthew 6. Especially verse five:
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
This is one of the most important verses in the Christian canon, and one of the most overlooked. In short, it says “you keep your religion between you and your god, rather than displaying it openly so that you can make money or impress people with your piety. ‘God’ does not care if your friends are impressed with how holy you are, so STFU and keep it to yourself. Anything else is stagecraft and hypocrisy. I AM, that which I AM, and I do not need to pursue or convince my creatures of my power, nor need I for you to pursue or convince them on My behalf; they will choose to come to me.”
I’ve seen this behavior at many large companies I’ve been employed by over the years, people decorating their cubes with their little holier-than-thou displays of bible verse and self-aggrandizing piety. It made me terribly uncomfortable, afraid to express myself openly. I even had colleagues ask me what church I attended – love that assumption that I attend ANY church, let alone that it’s anyone else’s damn business which one.
(Sidebar: One of the precious, self-righteous jerks I observed made the remark that one of HD’s competitors offers a standard military discount, so they were a better store anyway. My first thought: WTF lady you sent your husband off to die so you could get a good price on f’n gutters?! How callous.)
I don’t have anything against believers, personally. I just don’t believe that your beliefs give you the right to force those beliefs on anyone else, particularly when you’re in a public-facing customer service role; it’s obnoxious, unwelcoming, and exclusionary to anyone who doesn’t share your beliefs – which, frankly, is the entire point of doing it so let’s not kid ourselves.
You want to blog about Jesus and pray in your facebook status, that’s no skin off my nose in the least. I don’t want to be prayed over at Home Depot or have my soul saved at McDonalds or get into a long discussion about my religious beliefs when I try to buy a slurpee.
I still can find no Christian principle is supported by wearing buttons and slogans on my clothing to push my views on other people when I’m at work. That guy wasn’t being paid to proselytize, he was being paid to stock shelves or run a cash register. When I’ve had corporate jobs I haven’t decorated my workspace with political or social or religious messages. Of course I have opinions, that much should be no secret by now, but I also have enough grace and respect for others to not make their work day uncomfortable by broadcasting them in that forum. That’s not where they belong.
Believe what you want. I won’t hold it against you, in and of itself. Do I have things to say about these issues? Of course…but not when I’m working for someone else. If I’m stocking shelves or building databases or whatever, I’m being paid to do that, and all of my time save that which is necessary to attend to the necessities of human body function – i.e. eating, drinking, restroom, and a short step-away every few hours to ‘cleanse the palate’ and clear the head for more effective work function – should be spent doing that.
But more than anything else, what really chaps my ass about this whole thing is the smug tyranny of the majority, that obnoxious and distinctly un-Christian attitude that so many self-proclaimed followers of Jesus display to the rest of the world. You know, that condescending crap they wrap around themselves that screams to the world, “I am a member of a special club, and if you don’t do things my way you can’t join my special club, and then I and all of my special friends will make fun of you and not rent apartments to you and not let you eat at our restaurants or date our daughters or work for us, because YOU are not one of US, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it because GAWD is on MY SIDE.”
This root and its derivatives are, and have always been, among the fundamental causes of human misery.
Isn’t it ironic that so many followers of the “Prince of Peace” will cheerfully do violence and wage war in his name? Isn’t it ironic, that so many followers of the man who said “Be ye kind one unto another, tenderhearted, forgiving…” (Ephesians 4:32) are so cruel and heartless in their dealings with one another. That the religion which gave us the concept of pride as sin should give rise to such pride-filled followers; that the religion which purports to teach us that judgment lies solely in the hands of the Almighty should generate so many adherents who incessantly judge others on their mode of worship, their sexual habits, or whatever else, rarely if ever exercising such strict judgment on themselves.
Every one of us – every one of us – has skeletons in our closet. We are all human, we are all fallible, and we are all in this together. Anything that separates us one from another in the greater sense, as religion unquestionably does, is by definition genocidal…if slowly.
The guy shouldn’t have had the pin on his uniform. When the whole story’s out, it’s likely that he was asked/told/warned about this several times, and further that his decision to start publicly practicing his religion at work was intended to get him fired and provoke just this kind of self-righteous indignance, once again warming the fires that keep us from coming together as one people to solve our common problems, face our common threats, and improve our common state of being. [Ed. note 2023 – the eventual playing out of this case in one brief announcement of a lawsuit a year later followed by dead silence from all sides bears this analysis out entirely. He was in fact asked, told, warned, and even offered a company approved pin reading “United We Stand,” which is the same sentiment minute the Islamophobia/Christian proseltyzing. -jh]
In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.
We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.
I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?
Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“
Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.
You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up
They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)
The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.
What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.
The Eurozone
A Different Feather Of Fish
The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)
“Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.
The Guardrails
Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).
Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.
Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.
That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.
The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.
It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.
This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.
All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.
It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.
That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”
In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”
This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.
More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…
Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.
So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!
We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”
This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?
Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.
There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.
A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)
In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.
Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.
NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.
Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!
That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.
In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.
Hey, y’all, before you fall TOO much in love with the whole “will of the people” thing, I want you to think about something.
A few years ago majority of people in multiple states voted in favor of amending their state constitutions to make gay marriage illegal.
It took the US Supreme Court to make that un-happen, and they did so in direct opposition to the express will of the people.
Sometimes the majority is WRONG, and that is why we live in a democratic REPUBLIC. “The will of the people” is of paramount, but not ultimate, priority. This nation was not built to be ruled by “the will of the people,” but by “the will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives who also have a moral and ethical duty to oppose that will when it’s harmful or destructive.”
That’s why our system is constructed the way it is – and I’ve wracked my brain trying to imagine a more effective set of mechanics that successfully balances all the necessary priorities of a free modern nation, and I couldn’t do it. And I’m a political scientist, so I’m definitely on the shortlist of people who should be able to, if one could.
The system works: when “the people” tried to put something over that sucked, the system said “no, we’re not doing that.”
We’ve completely forgotten that the purpose of government is not to make everyone happy, if we ever really grasped it in the first place. You don’t elect people to do “what you want,” any more than you hire a doctor to perform heart surgery to your specifications.
You elect people, which makes them accountable to your will but not bound by it, to do what’s right.
This silly fantasy people have of a perfect candidate is just that – a silly fantasy. I wouldn’t even agree with 100% of my own decisions if I was in office, and if I did I’d be worried about it.
The problem is, a whole lot of folks honestly don’t give the first drizzling shit about what’s “right,” they only care about what benefits them. They aren’t interested in electing someone who’s going to do the right thing; they’re only interested in electing someone who’s going to do the thing that’s beneficial to them.
Because those among us who are sane and reasonable don’t think in those terms, we haven’t taken the threat these folks represent seriously.
But the threat is very real, and it’s in your town. It’s running for school boards and library boards and county commissions and small-town mayoralities and sheriffs and judicial seats. It’s showing up at every public meeting to loudly browbeat local leadership into accepting or conceding to things they shouldn’t, just to make the bullies and aggressors shut up and go away.
It’s not that I’m saying “democracy is bad” or anything like that. But it’s a system that requires engagement to work. If people of conscience allow themselves to neglect their duties as citizens, then people without conscience can weaponize it against the rest of us, and that’s exactly what’s been happening for decades.
I really have to add here that this isn’t a secret or conspiracy. It’s been openly discussed since I was a kid in the late 70’s or early 80’s. Here’s a link to a google search. Once you get there by all means look at the raw web results but also check the news items. If you have access to a favored news or periodical archive like JSTOR check that for obvious keywords in content produced in the 70’s and 80’s. This is an ongoing thing, and it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves that it’ll just go away if we ignore it. It won’t go away. Every time we ignore it, every time we back down because it’s too much hassle to fight, they get stronger and sanity and reason get weaker.
That’s why we’re in this mess. The covid deniers, the trumpers, the white nationalists and neo-fascists like the Proud Boys and the Prayer Warriors and the Oath Keepers, this is where they came from. We thought we could live with it; we thought we could let it go and it would just fade on its own like any other bad idea.
But we can’t, and it won’t.
If you’re going to rely on “democracy,” then you have to be prepared to deal with the reality that democracy only functions properly in an educated and informed and engaged society. The entire 20th century of social philosophy revolved around the great truths of Orwell and Bernays: if you control the information you control EVERYTHING. You can wipe out the entire concept of freedom if you just have enough power over information.
The fascists and authoritarians and nazis and white nationalists of the world are absolutely willing to literally rewrite reality if they think it will benefit them materially, and we’ve been letting them gain the tools to do it for half a century.
It’s time to stand up and say no more, now. While we still can. Go to that school board meeting, that city commission meeting. Run for that uncontested office if you’re in any way qualified for it. Run even if it is contested. Run as a third-party candidate just so you can have some power to direct the narrative even if you lose…and you might not. If you can’t stand the idea of running yourself, find someone. You know somebody you think should be in office. Ask them to run. Get a bunch of mutual friends together and stage an intervention if necessary.
But act.
Because to the precise extent you don’t, you are abdicating your democracy.
