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.
The “price of bread” is a tried and true hook on which to hang any given complaint from any given ideological perspective to shock the consumer, draw attention, and stoke feelings of anger and frustration. The “bread” in question is a metaphor for any consumer good. The arguments in question tend to take the general form of “I can’t believe how terrible the economy is today. Why, when I was young I used to get two packs of name-brand cigarettes and two 16-ounce glass bottles of Mountain Dew for $2!”
The “price of bread” argument fails not only in that it’s usually highly subjective and prone to strong influence of personal bias e.g. artificially glorifying “the past” as having been “better,” but it’s also completely meaningless by itself. Numbers increase, particularly in capitalized systems wherein the currency is based on an intangible asset like “the full faith and credit” of the issuing nation, as is the case with all such nations including the United States. By itself this increase means nothing that can be said to meaningfully reflect on the average quality of life.
Worse than that for those seeking progress, it often inadvertently draws attention to weaknesses in argumentation and flaws in a given logical calculus attempting to rationalize or validate progressive social policy. In doing so, the net effect tends to be empowering counter-arguments rather than advancing the ostensible agenda at hand.
In today’s example we’re going to look at a tweet by someone calling themselves “Fred Krueger” (not likely to be a real name, but it’s possible). Mr. Kreuger, who is entirely unknown to me, claims to hold a PhD from Stanford, and says he’s a “bitcoin maxi,” whatever that is, in his twitter profile. I’ve included a link to the original tweet below, but given conditions at Twitter I thought it best to also include a screenshot.
The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x
however,
The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x.
The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x.
Original URL: https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285Screenshot of original tweet posted at https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285
The tweet reads as follows: “The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for “progress.””
Problems Of Fact
There is a whole lot wrong here. First and foremost there is no indication of any of the sources of any of this information, so let’s track that down first. The Census Bureau tells us that the first number isn’t far off – the median family income in 1971 was $10,290. We also find with a bit of quick google-fu that the median price of a new car was $3890, and a new home was a nice even $25,000. Of course none of those numbers are normalized – those are 1971 dollars being compared to 2024 dollars, which is sort of the whole point of the exercise.
The “reader added context” in this case isn’t particularly helpful and leans toward its own agenda.
First and foremost the reader feedback ignores that the entire point of the framing is to compare price increases of specific items to baseline inflation. I believe the intent of the writer was to imply that life is much more economically challenging for most of us than a simple broad average inflation rate tells us, so noting that the numbers haven’t been normalized doesn’t really address any of the problems with the tweet and in fact mostly serves to point out that the people offering that particular criticism didn’t understand what they read very well. The fact that the numbers aren’t normalized is the whole point of the tweet.
Second, there aren’t many people alive right now who were around in the 70s who really feel like they have nearly twice as much purchasing power today as they did fifty years ago, and there are some very good reasons for that.
While the implication that quality of life is significantly improved across the board for most people is ostensibly supported by adding up the cash value of various goods and services, it also overlooks the necessity of far greater levels of spending than were necessary fifty years ago, even accounting properly for inflation. This is propaganda in the other direction; suggesting that people are basically doing just fine right now and any struggle you’re experiencing must be down to something other than a steadily decreasing quality of life. In short: gaslighting.
But I digress, let’s get back to the tweet at hand and check some numbers. I’ve included a few direct citations links, those numbers not directly linked come from the same or similar sources.
The median family income “today,” i.e. 2023, the most recent year for which statistics have been properly documented, is $80,610 – a difference from the quoted post of about $32K, and an increase of 8x, rather than 5.5.
Already this is going to make the comparisons less striking, and we haven’t even checked them yet, but let’s finish the job for posterity and we’ll move on to understanding why we can’t keep doing this, nor allow it to continue being done.
A new car in 2024 is averaging about 48,400.
A new home is about $420,400 – a greater increase than the tweet by about 18% (and an increase of about 17x rather than the 14x cited).
The rest of the numbers are similarly garbled; an ivy league education in 1971 was 2600 rather than 3K – a difference of about 13%. Today’s cost is 64,690 – $25K less than cited. The Social Security Administration tells us that per-capita health care expenditures in 1971 were $358 – less than 90% of the number given here. The most recent available information is for 2022, which the WHO tells us is 12,473 – about a sixth less than this tweet reports.
So we’ve established that, at the very least, there are significant errors in basic information here, which of course throws all the calculations off.
We’re not off to a good start; if someone wanted to argue against the core thesis of the tweet (that the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971), this writer has certainly given them plenty of ammunition to call their basic reliability into question, which delegitimizes the thesis in the reader’s mind before it even happens.
It all forces us to consider: why are we listening to this person or taking this message seriously in the first place?
Problems of Reason
On the other hand, here are two semi-randomly selected prices for 25-inch televisions from the Sears catalog in 1974. One is 609.95, the other 759.95, which average to 684.95. Divide by 25 and you’ve got 273.98 per viewable diagonal inch, in old-school NTSC resolution at best.
I’m currently using a 40-inch Polaroid flatscreen as my desktop monitor. I paid $259 for it in 2019, which is 319.62 in 2024 dollars, or 7.99 per viewable diagonal inch.
That’s a 97% price decrease, and this is why item price comparisons are always a flawed argument.
Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, this isn’t less true but more so when the flawed argument is supporting a larger (and entirely valid) point about the relative cost of living.
In 1974 the minimum wage was $2.00 an hour, that would be 12.80 today. But that’s also not a fair comparison because so many things have changed since then about how we make and spend our money. The internet and its accouterments were not a required part of living in 1974, and the expenses one might incur to replicate the necessary functionality were often far lower but also with much lower quality of access, e.g. looking up information in an encyclopedia at your local library rather than on your cell phone. Fundamentally free or close to it, but also limited access and functionality. (Worth pointing out for pedantry that there are of course costs involved in transportation plus the value of one’s time, but that’s still not working out to a monthly cell phone bill of $50-$200+ dollars…and if you’re a kid in the seventies and eighties like I was, you were at school with a library full of reference material several hours a day anyway).
There is also a long, LONG list of important social advances that have happened in the last fifty years. That we are not yet in some progressive utopia doesn’t change that. However as a rhetorical tactic, to ignore or disregard that progress out of fear that people will think the job’s done and stop trying or something (see: “post-racial America” circa 2009) is insulting to the people who made that progress happen and disheartening to those working to ensure we keep moving forward. It also adds to the general sense of futility that can attach to any attempt at meaningful social change, on any level.
Cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.
“People aren’t going to change and it’s a waste of time to try. You may as well give up, because even with all this advancement you’ve gotten nowhere.” This is a critically important subtext contained within this entire argument. It’s messaging that serves only the interests of the entrenched and abused power to which so many people taking this attitude believe they’re working against.
A loaf of bread ran 28 cents in 1974. It’s 1.92 now. That’s only 7 cents off the standard rate of inflation.
These comparisons have no meaning. They’re only intended to shock and grab attention, but they don’t convey meaningful information. What they are is a nice setup for someone who understands why this framing fails (consciously or unconsciously; Hanlon’s Razor applies) to come along and yank out a list of similar comparisons – go ahead and price what would’ve conceivably passed for a home computer in 1974, or a mobile phone! – in an attempt to invalidate the core point that we’re living in a capitalist-sliding-quickly-into-fascist dystopia, which stands just fine on its own without making a bunch of cherry-picked comparisons in an appeal to emotion.
In both cases – and this is important! – the actors at hand, both the person throwing these kind of “information” around and those who show up to try to undermine the thesis by attacking the obvious weak points in the supporting arguments or evidence, are deliberately and intentionally aiming at your emotional responses in order to subvert, distract, and ultimately mitigate your critical thinking, because they both know their arguments don’t hold up to critical analysis.
Why It Matters
“RAWR! THERE’S NOTHING BUT LIES AND DAMN LIES IN HERE!’ (Bing AI generated image, with modifications by JH)As with so many discussions of this nature, the first objection one can usually anticipate is some sort of argument from apathy – why does this matter, you’re just splitting hairs, this is all just pseudointellectual self-indulgent twaddle, insert dogwhistle for whatever audience e.g. “wokeism” or appeals to ridicule, etc.
So let’s talk about why it matters for a minute.
First, cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.
This seems like one of those things that would hardly bear saying out loud, but apparently it does: the most effective way to lie is with as much truth as possible. Simply throwing a bunch of statistics around without context and validation is often the tactic of someone who knows they’re trying to make a point, but doesn’t know how, and doesn’t want to let that get in the way of the dopamine rush and-or traffic bump and-or possible passive income generated by throwing around empty aphorisms and questionable statistics that are emotionally appealing and don’t invite careful scrutiny.
(NB: When this is done at high volume with deliberately malicious intent, it can quickly turn into what’s become known as the “Gish Gallop,” wherein the speaker just throws such a ridiculous pile of misinformation around that by the time you sort through it you’ve forgotten the original point and likely made some superfluous error the speaker can then seize on as evidence of your incompetence. Hence the troll…)
But there’s more. Inherently the application of dishonest and manipulative rhetorical tactics reflects, at the very least, a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker in their own words – if they believed what they were saying they wouldn’t think they have to lie about it to convince anyone else. By using these tactics, the subtext we’re writing is that either we don’t believe our position holds up on merit, or we don’t believe we’re not capable of expressing our reasoning effectively. Most importantly, it shows. People tend to pick up on it when you’re trying to con them, whether they do so consciously or not.
To a discerning media consumer – and we’re all media consumers, discerning or not – this is an immediate red flag that the speaker may not be a reliable information source. Maybe they know they’re lying; maybe they’ve bought into it and are choosing to resolve any internal cognitive dissonance between what they want to believe on one hand and reality on the other by trying as hard as they can to convince other people to believe with them. Whatever the specific situation may be, people who are paying attention are going to pick up on the flaws in the argument almost immediately, and that calls into question the validity of the entire thesis. As I’ve noted above, they’ll often pick up on it even if they don’t consciously realize it.
Arguably however the real damage comes among the less discerning consumers, those who repeat this information in earnest good faith, not realizing that they’re basically being set up to fail. Now they’ve distributed the information, and those who consume it via their distribution will hold them responsible for its accuracy. The entire conversation is now reduced to back-and-forth arguments that resolve nothing and are all based in factual and logical error. They’ve sacrificed their own credibility and taken on a huge set of arguments, while validating the source of the bad information!
I have a problem with this in a pretty serious way because I happen to fully support and believe in the surface thesis presented by this tweet as a question of personal ideology. I was alive and conscious in the early 70s and I absolutely believe that in many important ways we were all doing far better then than we are now. Many of us were also doing far worse, which nobody of any sense wants to ignore or pretend isn’t the case. However it’s also true, and important to recognize in this context, that in terms of stability and security in the lives of the average American, the 70’s and early 80’s were far superior to any time since including the present, and indeed the nature and pace of our social progress has sunk to embarrassing lows by contrast as well, especially when one thinks not in terms of what constitutes the current status quo but in terms of what’s being done to improve it, and why, and for whom.
We had a lot of work to do back then.
We still do.
We’ve done a significant bit of it as I’ve alluded above, and there are significant and powerful forces in this world who do not want that work done because our collective progress threatens their personal power. We were more honest with ourselves, culturally, especially in advanced nations, about our need to grow and recognize that we weren’t the pinnacle of human advancement but just the current step in a never-ending series of them, and that our job was not to be the best but to be the best we can, improve on what came before us and set up and inspire what comes after to do the same, where “improvement” is defined as being in more complete compliance with the “ultimate ethic” of keeping the species alive and propagating.
We know through the research of all human history that the greatest progress happens when human minds are well-educated and free to explore and express their thoughts and ideas in a fair and just context that ensures both the right of the individual to say their piece and the right of other individuals to reject their piece as ugly, ignorant, or malicious, including the right of society to collectively reject their values or ideology as unacceptable, immoral, or unethical.
We know that human progress individually and collectively relies entirely on our capacity to unlearn old lies. We also know that there are forces in this world whose power relies (no pun intended) on us not doing that. The capitalists can’t keep running everything if we refuse to be capitalized or to participate in their games anymore. Problem is we’ve been letting them do it for about five hundred years now and they refuse to get out of the way.
Now, given all of that…
Ya Thought I Forgot, Huh?
Our thesis is that dragging out prices fifty years ago, or a hundred, or twenty-five and comparing them to current prices is a waste of time and energy, except perhaps in radical situations like a collapsing currency where you’re seeing prices jump by orders of magnitude in a short period of time, and in very specific applications of economic analysis that simply aren’t either directly relevant to or within the personal intellectual capacity of the average person. It’s certainly of no value in social media conversations about the need for broad social reform of capitalized institutions.
Another AI take on trolls cherry-picking statistics, this one courtesy of OpenAI via Jetpack, and enhanced a bit by yours truly
I hope that by laying out weaknesses that are readily open to valid criticism in this framing, we can learn to first frame our own thinking more effectively but also learn to start rejecting those who either can’t or don’t.
Because the raw truth of the matter is that either you understand the things I’ve discussed here or you don’t. If you don’t understand them, you’re probably not qualified to be participating in the conversation as anything but a spectator, and that’s okay. I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery, and that’s not a reflection on my character either. NB: If I know I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery and insist on doing it anyway, that is definitely a reflection on my character!
If you do understand the things I’ve discussed here and still choose to frame things in this way, you’re being deliberately dishonest and manipulative. This means you can’t be trusted, and nobody with a worthy message wants to have it promoted by someone who engages in deceit and manipulation to communicate it. Since I happen to think that the underlying message of diligent and constantly refining progress of human quality of life is worth, I have to stand up and call out this radically unhelpful framing as it is.
If the message is worthy, deceit and manipulation isn’t necessary.
If deceit and manipulation are necessary, the message isn’t worthy.
What happens when we allow this kind of noise to flood our zeitgeist is that we begin to accept the premise that the behavior is necessary, like someone trying to rationalize lying on their resume. “Everyone does it, you can’t avoid it.” That argument has its place. For instance, I can’t avoid trying to make money with my work; I live in a world that requires money to survive and ensure my capacity to do that work.
That argument isn’t valid in this conversation; it’s a capitulation to the bullies and the liars, the manipulators and deceivers.
What happens when we allow those who are intentionally deceitful and manipulative to control the conversation is we force everything to become deceitful and manipulative in order to keep up. The deceit and manipulation undermines the legitimacy of the core ideas in people’s minds until eventually nobody knows what truth is anymore, and at that point Big Brother has won the game. We let them make deceit and manipulation necessary, and then none of us can trust each other enough to work together on anything…including pushing back against the powers who want to permanently convert the vast majority of us – everyone but them and those they choose – to “human capital stock.”
So please stop doing this stuff and stop putting it over. Stop believing and validating things just because they push your emotional buttons in a way that satisfies you. That reaction, all by itself, is what every perpetrator of evil has counted on in one way or another for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories.
The only way to stop the evil is to stop falling for it.
(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.
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.
(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
Introduction
It must be said at the outset that the behaviors and tactics described below aren’t limited by any means to the social media sphere other than the raw mechanics of using social media as the delivery mechanism for disinformation. Nor are they limited to high-powered international politics, or even professionally organized information management firms.
These behaviors are fundamentally those engaged in by those who see life as competition and are set out to win even if it hurts someone else along the way. Whether it’s musicians and comedians competing for ticket sales, actors competing for roles, nations competing for resources, politicians competing for office, there is a moral calculus in every decision as to whether one human being or the next, making the decision for themselves hundreds of times every day, chooses to compete against their fellow human beings, or to work with them against the greater challenges facing the species as a whole.
Those who choose to put themselves above others are absolute master artisans with these behaviors. Even to the level of family dysfunction and relationship abuse patterns, it all shows up the same way in the end, and it’s all corrosive to our individual and collective well-being and health.
That’s why It is absolutely crucial to understand and teach yourself to identify and reject social media disinformation. The damage done just in the last few years by this problem includes millions of lives lost.
One classic tactic of disinformation campaigns is “counter-intelligence.” This phrase gets thrown around a great deal in online conversation these days, often by conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizen types and the like, but it very much is a thing, and you are very much being bombarded with it.
I recently ran into a good example of aggressive counter-intelligence with a high likelihood* of being a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign via a message posted by a page labeling itself with leftist, anti-capitalist terminology.
*One of the core problems with online disinformation campaigns is that you can often never hope to be 100% certain that your instincts are correct. That’s why it’s critical that you keep them razor-sharp.
I won’t link to the page or the displayed content, but I don’t have to hide the page’s name, either. The piece immediately caught my attention, not because oh a swastika or I care what some neofash has to say, they all say the same things anyway. What caught my attention is that this page is “calling out” the Biden administration, treating this ridiculous and obvious display as thought it were in any way meaningful to a thoughtful consideration of…well, anything.
I didn’t even pay attention to what page this appeared on until after I’d commented, and while I wasn’t ridiculously aggressive I also minced no words. What I said was, in short: this is absolute nonsense for a million reasons. I laid my case out firmly, clearly, and without flinching, but also without profanity or threats or aggression.
I did this deliberately, and I try to do it consistently, because the first response of the source nearly always tells you everything you need to know. We’ll get into that, and more details about all the specific disinformation tactics being employed here, why I have a high degree of confidence that this is deliberate behavior by willful neo-fascists, and how you can be better equipped to wade through the onion-layers of online disinformation without falling prey to it.
So the first question, obviously, is “how do you know? Let’s look at that on the next page.
How do I know?
How do I know this image is disinformation? How can I determine the intent of the poster, the writer, the man in the photo, in a brief interaction?
Obviously to fully answer this question you have to read the entire article; that’s why I wrote it, but in a nutshell, given all the factors at hand, there are only two conclusions to be drawn about this information as it is:
The person who posted it genuinely believes what they’re saying. Somewhere, they’ve managed to convinced themselves that what’s written in the text is true. If that is the case and their genuine goal is to work against capitalism, they are simply incompetent to do so. I don’t mean I disagree, I mean they are blatantly and directly working to propagate information that works directly against their publicly identified and self-stated intentions and interests.
They do this in the very act of attempting to advocate for those intentions. There simply can be no other word: they are not competent to do what they are doing, and if they genuinely want to advance their cause they would best do so by sitting down, shutting up, and letting someone competent do the talking. Have all the opinions you want, but don’t present yourself as some kind of expert when you clearly aren’t. It causes great harm – millions of deaths just in the last few years. When someone points it out to you, makes their case clearly, and you want to argue? That leads us to…
The other possibility, which is that the person is fully aware of what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. That makes them a deliberate and willful disinformation agent. In the case of this image, it makes them a deliberate and willful neo-fascists advancing a obviously constructed pro-Putin narrative with eyes wide open.
I repeat: there are no other reasonable explanations. It may very well be that the person really believes what they’re doing, but in refusing to stop doing it when they’re told what they’re doing they are actively advancing the agenda of autocracy and totalitarianism. In immediately jumping to a fevered and meaningless rationalizations of their behavior and attacking the messenger, they reveal their priorities to be other than truth, no matter what those priorities may be.
Exactly who is this person? Exactly what are their priorities? Exactly why did they choose to share this story and then stand by it? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. What matters is regardless of the answers to those questions, you know with a very high degree of certainty that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t worth dealing with and should be ignored. Why? Because as we’ve already outlined, either they’re incompetent or deliberately lying. We’ll discuss this more in a later section of this article.
But what makes the story nonsense? That’s important because if the story has reasonable merit then my response to it did not, so let’s talk about that next.
The Story Itself
Let’s start with the first thing that caught my eye about this story: the premise. In short: a known neo-Nazi “endorsed” the Biden administration and praised their decision to send arms to Ukraine. Therefore, asserts the post and poster, the Biden administration should be opposed in every way because clearly they are Nazis.
While it’s very difficult to find specific examples and citable scholarship in a casual search on the open web, this is a well-known and widely discussed tactic of manipulation that nearly any of us will recognize. The “bad” actor deliberately associates themselves with an enemy. In doing so, they deliberately create an opening for the suggestion this proves that the person they want to discredit surely must be a bad person.
(There’s a variant of this thinking that you see in abusive relationship patterns and gaslighting, which can be loosely rendered as “you must have something wrong with you, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be with me.“)
Fundamentally this relies on exploiting a logical fallacy called “association fallacy.” It has various types and synonyms – well-poisoning is a type of this fallacy, for instance. In the case of the piece we’re looking at today, the specific type of association fallacy is “guilt by association.”
There are a couple of reasons this logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The first is because Biden has no control whatsoever over who endorses him, nor what they give as their reasons; assuming there’s any responsibility for any of this on the part of the Biden administration is childishly silly in that aspect.
The second reason is the endorsement is obviously not made in good faith. This bad actor knows what he’s doing, so much so that he’s nearly winking at you as he does it – is winking at his ideological comrades. They know there’s no way to conclusively prove he’s deliberately lying for the overt purpose of associating the Biden administration with neo-Nazism, that would require mind-reading. So they lie with just the thinnest pretense of believing their own BS, knowing that calling them out on it directly would just end in inconclusive bickering.
Millions of abusers and tyrants and bullies and bigots throughout human history have manipulated association fallacy the same way, and we’ve all seen it in our lives many times if you give it some thought. Being able to recognize this level of manipulation and cunning is critical to protecting yourself against it on all levels.
The Premise
It’s also important to say out loud that part of what makes this effective is that you can make reasonable arguments for different dimensions of the argument – “People KNOW Biden is a fascist,” because it’s only a shade off the truth. You can build the argument quite easily. Certainly Joe Biden could be characterized as pro-Capitalist. I’ve said myself many times (and will probably have it on a shirt or something here in a minute), the win condition of capitalism is fascism. You can’t escape it when you play it out, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.
In the mean time, in the full context of the world and life and history and everything else that’s relevant, Biden is just not plausible as a marauding autocrat deliberately burning the world down to put money in his own pocket. Biden is not plausible as even deliberately evil most of the time. But if you get baited in to trying to argue with the idea that he has the approval of neo-Nazis and that makes him evil, you’ve already lost because you’ve validated the idea that this assertion is sufficiently credible to require counter-argument.
Truth is, in some ways Biden’s very progressive – one can hardly overlook how he forced the Obama administration’s hand on gay marriage, for instance. In other ways, he’ll likely never catch up completely. The ending of capitalism is one of those latter things. I think he’ll never stop believing that there is some way to engage in capitalism – not commerce, mind you, capitalism – without ending up breaking everything beyond repair. He has made decisions in the past that I believe had evil consequences. I believe that in particular some of the decisions he made, votes he cast, etc., early in his political career displayed much more of that tendency to make decisions that were hurtful to innocent people.
That also doesn’t make him “a fascist,” at least not in the intentional and deliberate sense intended by the writer.
Fascism requires deliberate, willful, hostile intent to establish or defend autocracy. Biden still believes the whole “American Dream” thing he grew up on. You work hard for a fair wage, you make enough to live on and enjoy a hobby, and if you care to and want to you can even go do something other than wage work to live on, you know the drill. He’s not ready to think post-capitalism. Neither is most of the rest of the world. That doesn’t make him a “fascist” in any but the most technical of senses, and most importantly that doesn’t make him an irredeemable soul like some of the great monsters of history, which is the narrative this whole mess is trying to sell.
The Propagator
Having reviewed the message, now let’s take a look at the messenger.
The first thing you notice is that it appears to be a radically left-wing page – the name “Capitalism Kills” is a giant dogwhistle of course, but they referred to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” and the other content on the page falls in to the same far-left tropes and symbolism.
“We attack both US political parties” isn’t a meaningful rebuttal in the least. Nor is the assertion “we’re marxist-leninsts here.” If anything they seem more like people out to make the general public think of “Marxism” and “Leninism” as these radically anti-American ideologies, foolish and extreme.
Not to say there is no -ism involved here, but if we credit the speaker for good faith belief in their own words the -ism is “egotism.” No reasonable person sweeps with this broad a brush; nobody who’s interested in real progress or discourse is going to spend all their time throwing around the idea of “condemning all US presidents past and present” as though it’s a meaningful and carefully considered position. It’s intellectually lazy and logically invalid, a position taken solely for the emotional satisfaction of the person taking it.
That’s if we credit the speaker with believing their own words, which I’m not entirely sure is a good idea. If I was going to create an identity to make leftists look ignorant, radical, aggressive, and unreasonable, I could hardly do better than this set of messages.
The assertions about “Biden and Obama helping the Nazis in Ukraine” is also, at very best, a radical misrepresentation of reality. While there has been aid from the US to Ukraine this has been consistently a matter of assisting their defense against ongoing Russian aggression into the territory. There is simply no reasoned basis to hold forth the notion that the Ukrainian government or any more significant portion of its people that could be found in any other country are “Nazis” or fascists of anything of the sort.
This is typically where the propagandist will start gloating little factoids and trivia bits. In the context of Ukraine, invoking the Azov Battalion is a constant go-to, as though the existence of an isolated group of right-wing extremists is evidence the entire country is corrupt. This is illogic on the level of pointing to the Westboro Baptist Church as evidence that the entire US are raging fundamentalist religious bigots.
In this case they went with a video showing a trident patch on a Ukranian military official’s uniform and then portraying this as evidence of Nazi control, in spite of the fact that the symbolism is at best ambiguous and focusing on it is ridiculous on the level of conspiracy theorism.
The point however isn’t that the symbolism is ambiguous or that the Azov group was like thirty people; the point is to get you talking about those things rather than the fact that Russia is conducting an entirely unjustified and illegal war against another sovereign nation. The point is to focus negative attention among the hard left in the west against their own leaders by building accusations of their allegiance to far right, fascist, and or Nazi ideology.
Then as a final nudge, we add a little social proof to validate ourselves by having another account – again, with the clear dogwhistle right in the name – come in and validate us without actually adding any substance or clarity to the conversation, or even trying to make an argument in support. Just say “nope, that one’s right” and get a little heart react and everybody’s warm and fuzzy while the person pointing out the propaganda is discredited and run off.
In Conclusion
This message was crafted to stoke anti-war sentiment and progressive distrust of the status quo Democrats into pro-Russian sentiment that also inflames internal opposition to Biden. The “left” in the US has never been particularly cohesive to begin with, and it’s quite easy to invoke anti-war noisemaking to create conflict among us. Start throwing around exaggerated and baseless but emotionally appealing claims and you’re certain to ensnare those whose egos far outpace their intellect.
This, assembled guests, is just one example from the millions and millions of social media messages sent out every day with deliberately manipultive and malicious intent. The Russian government does a great deal of it to garner support for Putin’s imperalist aspirations; the plutocracy does it to herd us back to work in a pandemic; various and sundry interest who profit from confusion and strife are filling us constantly with well-designed nonsense – usually based on appealing to our egos in some way because that’s where we’re weakest – in order to weaken the entire concept of “democracy” because they believe that, being ruthless and having some access to resources, they believe they will benefit from the fall of democracy just like the Nazis benefitted from the persecution of Jews in the sudden availability to “good Germans” of fully furnished homes and fully stocked stores that had been appropriated by that persecution.
Of course the great truth of hard-right ideology is that the monsters these people are feeding will be perfectly happy eating them for lunch when they run out of “others.” You can always create more “others,” just pick a new group to scapegoat – Jews, leftists, people of color, religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill – as long as you can maintain that us vs. them pretense and con enough people into believing they’ll always be an “us” and never a “them,” you’ll not lack for targets for persecution until there’s nobody left to persecute at all and we’re reduced to a state of social development that makes feudalism look like egregious liberty.
They always believe they’re driving the machine until it runs them over.
Those of us with the perception to understand this is a losing strategy for everyone must ensure we are well armed and with eyes wide open. A startling percentage of leftists have been sucked in by this narrative.
Now (writing in October 2023) we’re seeing a whole new set of social disruption and argument in the wake of the recently escalated conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people – an argument with no possible “clean” resolution that’s been going on in one form or another literally since pre-historic times. We’ll be encouraged to pick one point or another in the past when things were “right,” then blame the “other” for making a mess of it.
Of course the only solution there ever was is for people to learn how to live peacefully and cooperatively together, but instead we’ll be continuously baited into these pointless arguments, we’ll become ever more radicalized against each other, and in the end the real objective – creating further factiousness and dissent among the free nations of the world, particularly those on the left working toward every more refined and effective democracy – will be gained unless we start taking the problem of disinformation seriously, right now.
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)…
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:
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:
Further relevant trim from the back-and-forth with the troll:
And then – right on schedule, as predicted in the first comment, here comes Our Boy to make his excuses:
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.)
This was a fairly exceptional find; I’d honestly forgotten about this article, written in March of 2010. Of course when it was written I was jeered and rejected as a handwaving extremist – how could you possibly think Facebook is destroying democracy, that’s just ridiculous – by all right-thinking people, with a healthy chorus of helpful disdain and ridicule from the usual gang of trolls.
President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS!!! Please repost if you support our troops….1 Term say good bye
This is the second time in a couple of days I’ve seen this, yet I’m not having a lot of luck finding any objective source that discusses these events, just a FB meme claiming it happened. [2023: This was originally written on March 8, 2010. The claim has since been broadly debunked as the nonsense that it is; military pay is tied to the Employment Cost Index and the president is required by law to propose pay increases tied to this index to ensure military pay rises in line with consumer product price inflation. Much of the related information which follows was written without that knowledge in hand at the time. -jh]
I’d like to see more facts, including a broad discussion of the considerations which go in to making such a decision. For example, what if the rate of increase among military personnel has been 10x the cost of living, while welfare payment caps have dropped, for all of the last ten years except this year in which an adjustment is being made to compensate for decreased military need and increased public assistance need? [2023 – this is where I basically cited the true mechanics of military pay raises without realizing it, in spite of using an extreme example. The underlying reasoning is why military pay is tied directly to ECI. -jh] Obviously this very extreme example is not the case, but the underlying point remains: this is a complex series of issues, and the idea that posting some hyper-patriotic status message with a guilt-trip/us v. them tagline is going to solve anything is not only ridiculous, it’s incredibly destructive – and that’s the point of this article.
It’s not that I reject out of hand the assertion of this latest rabble-rousing meme [2023 – and again rightly so, as the raw numbers were correct, so rejecting the assertion out of hand would’ve been wrong. -jh]. Rather the problem is that I have serious concerns about the direction we are being taken by our collective will to participate in such things without first determining their objective accuracy.
It seems to me that this kind of thing, while usually well-intentioned, represents the same sort of shallowness of thinking that led to the Iraq war in the first place, to some 60% of the US still believing as late as 2006 that Iraq was directly involved with 9-11, to the gigantic stimulus package [2023: this was the enormous bailout of Wall Street banks in 2008. -jh] that regardless of necessity was passed with such haste and sloppiness that it’s an iron-clad certainty that it’s not going to work as well as it could have. We get all revved up over something and we just pounce, with little regard for the long-term results or the bigger picture.
Look around this country, this world, your own mind.
Are you one of the people who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to continue beating the “Obama’s citizenship’” horse?
Are you someone for whom “because the Bible says so” is a reasonable basis for laws to be made?
Are you someone who doesn’t throw up in their mouths a little bit every time you see a well-intentioned friend post a status message that suggests that if you don’t do the same, you are a traitor to your country and you want soldiers to die?
Then I am sorry, but even if I love you from the very bottom of my heart, you are a Part Of The Problem.
How DARE any human being undertake to pass judgment on my love of country or fellow man – to suggest that I lack ‘patriotism’ or commitment to country or respect for those who volunteer their lives to defend it regardless of whether I think they’re ultimately being conned in 90% of the cases when this is their motivation for enlisting – based on my willingness to endorse with my name and supportive repetition a poorly-constructed paragraph full of – at BEST – emotively presented para-facts intended to do nothing more than stoke the ire of conservatives and further create a society of code words and passphrases by which we can identify “them” and “us” as defined by some arbitrary and subjective standard of political adherence that ultimately exists only in the mind of the person passing judgment? How terribly disrespectful and presumptuous.
Frankly, I wouldn’t post that paragraph in my status message even if I believed every word.
Why not?
For starters, it’s written with all the intellect and critical thought of a rambunctious sixth-grader. I’m 40 years old, and I’d be embarrassed to lay claim to the “logic” and “patriotism” presented here. Look at it. The SCREAMING CAPITALIZATION AND ABUSE OF PUNCTUATION! The saccharine exhortation to “patriotism” that’s really an exhortation to look down our noses at those un-American liberal commie heathens who Don’t Support Our Troops (and in the process of that coercion, an exhortation to frankly piss all over everything that actually makes this country worth fighting for). The snide, unspoken undertone that of anyone in Our Great Nation who might need some money from the government, them welfare leeches (read: ethnic minorities, brown people, and white women who have sex with them; these folks never care that the vast majority of welfare recipients in this country are white people in heavily Republican/right leaning states) better be the LAST in line. The suggestion that “supporting the troops” must necessarily entail supporting their orders. The relentlessly stupid and continually increasing attempt to lay the results of 8 years (and more) of utter mismanagement and malfeasance at the feet of a president who has been in office less than a year and a half.
The whole thing just plain sucks. It’s an intellectual void. I’m sorry that some people will take that personally, but let’s be real here: as much as I complain about people, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to point these things out if I didn’t love and respect them. I’m sorry that it hurts some people’s feelings or moves some people to drop me from their friends’ list or what have you, but remaining silent is not an option. I’d certainly rather your feelings be hurt by me rattling you out of your comfort zone with the truth than they be hurt twenty years from now when you realize it’s too late to stop the decline and part of the reason for that is you were allowed to continue believing things that aren’t true.
There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like the guy at a party just sober enough to try and tell a friend that they’ve pissed themselves, only to get punched in the mouth for saying bad things.
America…you’re drunk on fear and you’ve voided hate and xenophobia all over yourself. Go sober up and change your pants. [2023 – spoiler alert: we not only didn’t sober up, we didn’t even bother changing our pants. We just drank more and more and insisted that anyone who didn’t void themselves in their Levi’s was an unamerican traitor in thrall to the illegitimate Kenyan non-citizen President. And it worked on about 70 million of us, and it’s still working. -jh]
All I’m saying is that if you want to have something to say, try to make it something meaningful and fact-based if you’re going to complain about the government. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to gripe without relying on this kind of unsupported hyperbolic hang-wringing panic-button nonsense, and in many cases (like this one) the unspoken messages tend to ring much louder with the coherent observer than the spoken ones do. When I see a message like this, all I read is “I’m really worried about the economy and my position in life, but I can’t be bothered to find an effective way to improve things for myself so I’ll just whine about the evil gubmint.” In the mean time, people are continually manipulated into cheering for the defeat of a health care bill that would, without question, save their lives or the life of someone they love in reasonably short order. [2023 – this was, of course, what became “Obamacare” after it was watered down and compromised to the point of being only slightly less odious than the godforsaken trainwreck of a health care system we had in place already. Obama’s compromise on this remains one of my greatest disappointments in his presidency. -jh]
But instead the politicians play on our fears and prejudices, and we continue buying in. It’s not health care reform people are rallying against, it’s the notion that they might have to pay for someone else’s care…which, if people were really angry about it, would be the absolute end of the insurance industry (and would also result in a 20-year drop in our life expectancy in a matter of a generation or two) given that’s the entire basis of the idea of insurance.
The problem in this country, quite frankly, is that we’ve become a nation of selfish, greedy, avaricious, entitled, lazy, ignorant, jerks. [2023 – and it’s only gotten worse since I wrote this in 2010. -jh] Until we get it through our heads that we are ALL in this together and when one person fails we all fail, we’re going to continue these silly, pointless arguments, and people will continue to die senselessly and our nation will continue to erode as our best and brightest are continually prevented from reaching their full potential by the efforts of those who hold the cash to avoid sharing it with anyone.
These snarky, factually void, and often logically broken memes are a huge part of the problem. They play on mob mentality and the human need for acceptance in order to manipulate people into rallying against the very things that would improve their lives. We get the leadership we get because we consistently refuse to educate ourselves to understand what real leadership and real solutions look like. These kinds of memes make this refusal not just okay, but popular and easy – why bother knowing what’s going on in the world when we can just get it from our friends’ status updates?
It is the fundamental obligation of a free citizen to make every possible effort to understand the issues and candidates that are spread before us at election time. It is a direct assault on that obligation, and on freedom itself, to reduce this obligation to a copy-and-paste lynch mob.
93% of people won’t have the guts to tell their friends to quit trying to manipulate them (and to quit allowing themselves to be manipulated!) via status messages….will YOU?
[2023 – you can see in this article some of the roots that led me to start attending university to major in communication and minor in political science about five months after this was written. While it’s not bad, I generally failed to make the points I was reaching for, in large part because my abilities were limited by my lack of formal education in the subjects under the review and criticism of qualified professionals in the field. Still, I prefer being honest to stroking myself with ego-gratifying lies, and the honest thing to do is let it sit as written and accept that while I did a competent job of explaining my position, it’s a far cry from the level of expertise I could’ve brought to the conversation even a year later, let alone now nearly a decade and a half in the future. Among other major issues, I failed to clearly make the point that absorbing our political information in memes and snippets crafted primarily to appeal to our egos is poisonous to our democracy and we not only need to stop doing it, we need to pressure social media companies to enact stronger protections against the propagation of disinformation. It’s a good article, but it didn’t make the case I wanted it to as strongly as I’d hoped, in retrospect. -jh]
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.
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.
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.)
