JohnHenry.US

Category: TLDR

  • The Mind Of A Trumper

    Recently the excellent Facebook page “Bring Evidence” shared a story from Ohio about Trumper, anti-vax grifter, and Darwinian one-way cul-de-sac Sherri Tenpenny, who recently had her medical license suspended for refusing to cooperate with an ethics investigation regarding various fraudulent assertions made from behind her professional status.

    Those claims include that the covid vaccine makes you “magnetic,” that it “interfaces with 5G,” and that major metropolitan areas are “liquefying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.”

    This isn’t a questioning skeptic who didn’t pay enough attention in biology class. She knows she’s lying. Her refusal to cooperate with the investigation proves that.

    What struck me in reading this story is Tenpenny’s reaction to being called out on her deadly disinformation for profit behavior.

    “After Tenpenny made the comments that sparked her regulatory problems, she showed no signs of regret. Despite lampooning media coverage, Tenpenny emailed Gross to thank her for being “strong and brave” in allowing her to testify, according to The Ohio Capital Journal. Tenpenny doubled down on her theories.

    “Don’t let them bully you or disparage me,” she wrote. “We’re on to something here… and the LOUDER they scream, the more they are trying to hide. I stand by everything I said today. I put out FACTS and HYPOTHESIS [sic -jh] (points to ponder),” she wrote. “God Wins.””

    – Cleveland.Com article linked inline above

    This person knows they’re doing something bad and wrong, and intends to continue doing it by conning and manipulating other people into helping her do it.

    This is what a world of Trump supporters would look like, everywhere. These are people who understand that stupidity is more socially acceptable than evil, so they perpetrate evil under the pretense of stupidity.

    And they get away with it.

    You don’t get to “magnetic vaccines” while holding ANY degree, without being in on the con on some level. If nothing else, you definitely didn’t earn your degree because you’re not smart enough to pass the classes.

    This is one of the reasons we have to stop explaining the basics to people over and over. Some people go through their whole lives being respected, secure, and evil simply by pretending they don’t understand that they’re wrong.

    This is someone who is playing a whole stack of silly games so she can feel like she’s superior to, better than, and a winner. It looks like her whole life is based on this behavior.

    It’s the same behavior as any other autocratic, power-mongering, demagogue. Say and do the most egregious and outrageous things you can, and someone will believe it and pay you. All you have to do is pretend you really do believe it, and you’re a hero. Don’t break kayfabe(*) and the show will sell every time.

    (*) “kayfabe” is a word used in the professional wrestling business to refer to the artistic subterfuge maintaining the “reality” of in-ring/on-screen storytelling. To admit that match outcomes are predetermined or that two “enemies” may not actually hate each other is called “breaking kayfabe.” Think of it as a bit like letting it slip that Santa’s not real. These days the pretense pro wrestling is an athletic competition as described has almost entirely disappeared from the business, but that’s a thing that’s happened within my lifetime. Forty years ago, most people still believed that it was “real” to some degree. The substance of that belief and all the pretenses needed to maintain it in the public eye are part of “kayfabe.” Dr. D. David Schultz slapping the snot out of John Stossel back in the 80’s was part of maintaining “kayfabe” – Stossel asked “the big question” (“is it fake?”) and Schultz could not, in character, let that slide…and back then you were always in character, or you’d soon be an ex-pro-wrestler.

    It’s not that these people don’t understand the ethics, they just don’t care. They divert attention away from it with emotionally provocative agitprop to avoid probing questions.

    “Bullying” and “disparagement” aren’t the tools of facts and reason, they just feel that way to emotionally and intellectually stunted narcissists lying through their teeth to rip people off while bullying and disparaging all critics into silence, when they’re finally caught. It is a common tactic of narcissists to accuse those they’re hurting of being the true aggressors.

    It’s hard enough to get lay people to understand specialized information like medicine and law; it’s much harder when they’ve been given every good reason to distrust the entire field because they’ve been lied to so many times by “experts” like this. That the self-policing mechanisms of so many key professions like law and medicine are so clearly broken adds immeasurably to the problem; it’s outrageous this woman was ever allowed IN a hospital, let alone allowed to run anything. Someone’s responsible for that, too.

    We need to start standing up and saying no to these people.

    No you may not hide behind your profession (or “free speech!”) to hurt people for profit.

    No you may not perpetrate a fraud on the country because you wanna be president.

    No you may not spend hours rambling at the family holiday table about whatever random group of people you blame everything on because nobody’s got the heart to tell you to shut up.

    Shut up. You’re wrong, you’re a jerk, and you need to sit down and shut up until you learn how to act among reasonable people.

    Sherri Tenpenny’s words killed people, and she knew she was doing it, and she did it for profit. That merits more than a mere license suspension in my book. She should be imprisoned for the rest of her life and her entire personal holdings should be turned over to the state for distribution to or benefit of the many victims of her snake-oil game, and the same goes for the Sidney Powells and Rudy Giulianis and Andrew Wakefields of the world. Put ’em on the dole and don’t ever let them near a platform again without a giant standard disclaimer.

    Then let’s talk about whoever let her get away with this for the last couple of decades.

  • TLDR – Jason Aldean: Small Town, Big Deal

    So the internet noise machine has been trending this last week or so due to an execrably antagonistic and jingoist track called “Try That In A Small Town,” recorded by country “singer” Jason Aldean.

    First, let’s be 100% clear: this song is just…junk. Musically it’s as cookie-cutter and formulaic as they come in every possible way. The video immediately validated my suspicion that country music in 2023 is just hair metal with steel guitars and flags. I swear they lifted part of this directly from Bo Burnham’s Country Song.

    Pictured: A rube propagating propaganda

    This all started because I heard the beginnings of the big controversy and just for grins I read the lyrics.

    Here’s the thing, man – to even take this song on without burning the lyric sheet and hoping it doesn’t summon a demon, either you’re the rube who falls for this junk, or you’re a carefully constructed façade masking a steel-trap mind engaged in the deliberate subversion of American cohesion and community by fearmongering and playing on racist and “othering” tropes while clearly holding the intelligence and culture of your audience in contempt (and not without some reasonable basis given that you do in fact have an audience, which is definitely contemptible).

    I’m gonna go with “rube,” and assign responsibility for the rest of it to the committee of faceless hacks who take responsibility for actually writing this dreck.

    First, let’s start with the dystopian fearmongering nightmare of the first verse:

    Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
    Carjack an old lady at a red light
    Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
    Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

    Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
    Stomp on the flag and light it up
    Yeah, ya think you’re tough?

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    This is a master class in “agitprop,” agitating propaganda. Propaganda subverts critical thinking by appealing directly to emotion; agitprop specifically targets emotions like anger, outrage, and frustration, and can reasonably be seen as one means of engaging in stochastic terrorism.

    So in the first verse you’ve got the setup – “those people” are comin’ to “our town” to sucker punch meemaw while they’re jacking her 93 Tercel so they can go rob Jimmy’s beer store! Be afraid! All Is Chaos!”

    Let’s be clear: crime happens and that sucks. But these are cherry-picked, isolated incidents far less common than, say, unarmed young black men being murdered by police. The purpose is to make you mad and get your blood pumping, because ol’ Jason here is gonna tell you just how to solve that problem in a minute. Let’s take a look at the chorus:

    Well, try that in a small town
    See how far ya make it down the road
    Around here, we take care of our own
    You cross that line, it won’t take long
    For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
    Try that in a small town

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    It gets really creepy in the second verse, all about grampa and some firearms put to good use against those others who aren’t “our own,” with vague references of what’s gonna happen when “they” come to take our guns.

    I can’t help but think of how many “small-town” folks I know – I lived in Oxford, NC for many years, and I’m currently sitting where I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which isn’t exactly Midtown Manhattan – who aren’t drawling, drooling, bigoted, ignorant, stereotypes. The contempt these “songwriters” have for the intellect of their audience is palpable, and that audience should be insulted to know someone believes this kind of bigoted dogwhistle – and it is one, those details have already been more than adequately covered by others at this point – will appeal to them.

    Listen: If a ratty old “NO FEAR” t-shirt covered in layers of Doritus and beer stains that are almost invisible because the beer that was spilled on ’em is some crappy, watery thing in a plastic bottle suddenly became a song lyric, this would be them.

    If you need to know exactly how many pounds of copper wire it takes to get a box of cold medicine, this song’s got you covered.

    This song’s gonna get that back door fixed one of these days but who CARES, Bobbie Sue, it’s the BACK door ain’t nobody can SEE it!

    This song spent thirteen thousand dollars on new suspension parts trying to get their ’78 Nova to stop dog-tracking…and six thousand of that was because the struts had rebel flags painted on ’em.

    This song used to have long hair until it got tired of cleaning the remains of last night’s alcohol overdose out of it.

    This song’s gonna chest-thump and in-group and passive-aggressive all OVER you, and what are you gonna do about it, SITTY BOAH? Ain’t been doin these twelve-ounce curls all m’life for FUN, son. *belch*

    It’s just dumb and gross and needs to stop. All of it, including the mediocrity of the music itself. Spare me the arguments about whether or not it’s a racist dogwhistle, it very clearly and obviously is, everybody knows it, the only people pretending otherwise are the dogs being whistled for, and everybody knows that, too, including them.

    Enough.

  • “Just Ignore It…”

    “Just ignore them and they’ll go away” is a long-standing stock response to behavior that is abusive, harmful, dangerous, and intolerable. In this edition of “TLDR” we break down this gaslighting behavior and call it out for what it is. It’s time to end this harmful and destructive narrative.

    In a departure from the norm for this edition of “TLDR,” this page is just a summary with the media files embedded. The canonical transcript is published at this link on Medium.Com. (Disclosure; I get paid for writing at Medium. This is a “friends link” that will ignore your free article limit if you’re not an existing Medium subscriber, or bypass the paywall if you’ve already read your five free Medium articles for the month.)

  • In Capitalist America, Bank Robs YOU

    In spite of all the disinformation you’ll find around the subject of capitalist economics, it is very true today in the US that banks have rigged the system to rob everyone else.

    And it just sort of…happened, while we weren’t looking. The result of it happening is this massive inequity of wealth and power that we’re living in now.

    In the US (and most other places) we have this thing called fractional reserve banking. In this system, commercial banks are allowed to loan money in excess of their actual cash and assets on hand. If the fractional reserve is 10% and I have a thousand dollars, I can write loans for ten times that.

    Perfect conditions for this to actually work are first, all the loans have to be paid back, completely, on time. Second, the banks aren’t leveraging regulatory and tax code features to lower their tax liability through artificial or less than honorable – even if legal – means.

    In that perfect world, the payment of the loan cancels the money created by the loan. This is the same mechanism as federal tax; they “print” the money by appropriation, and then they “destroy” it by taxation.

    We don’t live in a perfect world.

    If you default on a loan, that’s money in the economy which has lost its way to get back out. If you pay it off early that’s (usually) a loss of some amount of profit for the bank. That and innumerable other variables all have to be accounted for in tax policy.

    It also means that even though that money cancels itself out as its returned to the lender, you still have to adjust tax policy to account for the money that’s in the economy right now, including the rates “we the people” must pay in to keep things running smoothly.

    The people who manage the whole thing aim to balance between maintaining currency value and ensuring there’s sufficient currency stock in the economy to keep it stable. That balance must be calculated to fit as closely as possible what’s really in the economy, rather than only the aspirational projections of what commercial banks expect to be in the economy.

    It’s that first calculation which has the greatest impact on tax policy. You and I pay taxes now to balance the money creation that banks are profiting on now (by charging interest on those loans). Then banks hire attorneys and accountants and lobbyists to take advantage of regulatory and tax code features to reduce their own tax bill – and also to have a strong hand in creating those features. That includes increasing the amount of money they can “print” via loans versus the amount they actually hold.

    Eventually other capitalists realized they have attorneys and accountants and lobbyists too and joined the party, further shifting the burden of taxation onto the backs of the people they were refusing to pay and overcharging to live – us.

    End result: they are never paying the taxes needed to offset the money they’re printing and putting in their pockets, and thus that money, the taxes, has to come out of our pockets.

    Then our pockets become too shallow to meet our needs and we get a credit card. Or take out a loan. Next verse, same as the first. They get paid on the money, then they don’t pay taxes on what they get paid. The taxes must be paid to keep things running smooth and stable (but not to pay for federal spending! It’s so important people internalize that fact!) so we, the rest of people who aren’t major executives in banks and multinational corporations and such, pay them instead. Over time this puts an ever-larger portion of the “real” wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, while leaving an ever-smaller portion for everyone else.

    Executive compensation is a tax-deductible business expense.

    This isn’t all the result of some “invisible hand” or magic. It’s the result of individual human beings making decisions for their own material benefit, knowing that they’re doing so by harming others.

    As the old meme goes, those people have names and addresses – not to encourage anyone, mind you – but that’s why we don’t talk about these things.

    If there has ever been a valid way to say “taxation is theft,” this is the true way. Problem is you say that and everyone thinks the thief is “the government.” The government is just the bookkeeper. The thieves are the people who are taking the money – capitalists, oligarchs, plutocrats. The more control they have over every aspect of our lives, the less likely it is that we’ll start looking for those names and addresses, or even know there’s a problem at all.

    Means, motive, opportunity. Capitalism is a dead-end street for the species, and none of the other things we’ve tried are perfect either, so it’s time to move forward into what’s next. I’d hold on tight, because these folks aren’t going to let go easily.

  • TLDR 2.4 – Offensive Comedians

    OH LOOKIT ME IMMA EDGY COMIC I’M GONNA OOOOHFEHND AND GET MYSELF CANSULLED!

    Look, clowns, until one of you walks out on that stage and spends 90 minutes not only insulting everyone in the audience on every fundamental level from family to religion to sex to ideology, forcing them to take a hard, deep look at their ugliest and most reprehensible, repulsive, contemptible tendencies, recognize those tendencies within themselves, and be moved to make themselves better all while laughing at the jokes that are on them AND paying you for it?

    Shut up with the “ooh I’m gonna be offensive” crap. 

    The most offensive thing about you is that you think you’re offensive to anyone.  OH LOOK AT ME I’M GONNA REPEAT CARLIN’S SEVEN DIRTY WORDS AND GET A FACEBOOK BAN FOR 3 DAYS THEN COME BACK AND DEDICATE MY NEXT FIVE TOURS AND THREE SPECIALS TO TALKING ABOUT HOW I’VE BEEN CANCELED AT $300 A TICKET SRO!

    Y’all out there swearing up and down how much you love George Carlin and Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor and all these other folks who went out and did that, but nearly none of you who are blowing this horn even give a plausible appearance of trying to.  Far more of you who are doing it right are vastly more likely to never one time mention yourself as being offensive or edgy or controversial.  You’re gonna go out there and do your material and let it speak for itself, because if it needs you to explain to people ahead of time that they’re supposed to be offended by it, it’s not worth performing.

    You don’t even mean you’re gonna be offensive. You mean you’re gonna troll for whiny entitled egomaniacs who want to complain and draw attention to themselves as victims over every petty little imaginary grievance, often as an intentional and explicit way to gaslight and distract from the very real evils of bigotry and hate they’re guilty of themselves on an ongoing basis and always will be, and you’re gonna do it because you know in the end it keeps your name in people’s heads.

    You mean you’re gonna lay on some easy tropes appealing to your perception of the ideological cant of your core audience whose primary appreciation of your work will not be that it’s funny per se but only the far more base, venal, and banal appreciation of confirming and validating their biases, which they and you will both mistake for really believing you’re funny.

    You’re not “offensive.”

    You’re high on your own flatulence.  And yes, I very much am looking straight at some folks I used to seriously respect, like Chappelle and Louis CK and so forth, to say nothing of these rinky-dink kids working bowling alleys thinking their edgy because they say “fuck” and punch down.

    You’re not offensive. You’re a hack. Sit down and let someone with actual talent have some stage time.

  • TLDR 2.3 – Racism: Unfortunately, Yes We Can

    (Disclaimer: in no way does this article assert that

    • racism isn’t a thing,
    • white racism hasn’t been the root of horrific crimes and sins against humanity,
    • racism is “over,”
    • there is such a thing as “reverse” racism,
    • racism in communities or people of color is “just as bad” in terms of impact and harm inflicted
    • people of color have to “go first,”
    • any of the other nonsense I just know people are going to try to read into it.

    So save us both some wasted time and energy and just don’t. Please: Read what’s written, not what you expect to be. Thanks and I look forward to your thoughts.)

    There’s a popular, informal theory which says only white people can be racists. It’s white supremacist theory masquerading as advocacy for people of color. The appeal of the theory to people of color who are rightly frustrated to outrage at entrenched white supremacist power should be obvious. Unfortunately, it’s also toxic and plays on the very same impulses that fuel white supremacy.

    This notion was probably most prominently featured in the important, worthwhile, and influential 2014 film “Dear White People”:

    Black people can’t be racist. Prejudiced, yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.

    Tessa Thompson as Samantha White in “Dear White People” (2014)

    The people primarily advancing this theory don’t want to end bigotry, oppression, and racism; they want to be the ones benefitting from it. They look to destroy Orwell’s Boot by wearing it, which has always been a misguided and fundamentally evil goal.

    Most insidiously this rhetoric directly fertilizes more racist and bigoted psuedointellectual hogwash from white supremacists (including validating the questionable concept of “race” in the first place), often from cover of academic qualifications that are themselves a result of the very racism being denied by those producing it.

    The theory clearly only considers US and Anglosphere cultures founded on European imperialism in its assertions of dominance. This is immediately obvious from the most basic considerations:

    Even if you make the case for white dominance on a global scale, it still breaks down as you get closer to the ground and start looking at smaller cultural groups like nations. This theory roots itself in supremacist reasoning simply by framing itself as a universal rule when it really only applies to part of the population. So you end up with three problems:

    • White people aren’t the dominant ethnic or social group on this planet, yet in modern history they’re responsible for the most widespread, systematic, and egregious racism at the largest scale. That immediately negates the premise that the “dominant group” is the only one that can be “racist” in the theory’s definition.
    • Attempting to create relative merit distinctions between “racism,” “prejudice,” and “bigotry” not only attempts to justify ignoring racism by people of color, it further stratifies and ranks “types” whereby one “type” is judged more or less “bad” than the other, e.g. prejudice is “not as bad as” racism because, under the theory, the merely prejudiced can’t access abuse-able power
    • These narratives erase the multiracial community whose lived experience often draws from multiple cultures but emotionally identifies with none of them deeply (disclosure, the author is among this group), and often finds them discriminated against for being part of one group by members of another group that they’re also part of.

    Rather than challenging racism, the theory validates, energizes, and promotes it without ever questioning the basic premise that any particular “race” possesses inherently “superior” attributes, trivializes the power (malignant power is still power) of non-white cultures, ignores racist behavior found in nearly all cultures, assumes in contradiction to evidence that the US perspective suffices for the general case globally, and seduces people of color into employing the same excuses for their racism used by the white racists they’re fighting

    If you prejudge someone based on what you perceive as their race, you are a racist. What ethnic groups you’re part of or how much power you have to make your personal racist beliefs into a cultural norm isn’t relevant.

    Don’t fall for it. Anybody can be a racist, even if it never has any outward expression at all. Claiming otherwise is racists rationalizing their own racism and gaslighting anyone who speaks up about it.

    These narratives represent attempts by power abusers to con you into believing you can wear Orwell’s Boot safely.

    You can’t, and to even try makes you one of the bad people, no matter what color your skin is or what language or dialect you speak or what shape your eyes are.

    Don’t be seduced by these bias-pandering theories. They’ll just keep you stuck in the same cycles of bigotry and conflict until the species ceases to exist at all.

  • TLDR 2.2 – The Anger Vote

    Hey there folks I’m a little teapot short and stout and my name is John Henry from johnhenry.us, welcome to TLDR – “Too Long; Didn’t Read” – let’s have a short conversation about “the anger vote.”

    Ran across this meme from Michigan Republicans posted via motivational speaker Matt Fol…er, sorry, that’s Matt Hall, who as it happens is my state representative.

    Graphic: dark gray box with thick horizontal lines in lighter gray scattered across the background, the top left and bottom right corners are cut off on an angle with white. At the top is the word "BREAKING" in white bold all capital letters, below which a red box contains white bold text reading "Democrats are taking money away from the classrooms and giving it to corrupt union bosses." At the lower left using the same color scheme is the logo of the "Michigan House Republicans." I have superimposed the words THIS IS PROPAGANDA in large red text over the lower part of the graphic, and my site logo, so that if it's shared nobody mistakes it for legitimate information.
    The only thing breaking here is my eyeballs trying to find something meaningful in this statement.

    The original post adds a comment about an “extreme partisan agenda” and a comment about “Big Labor,” with a link to more empty verbiage built to make you angry and stop you from asking about the details.

    So first things first: “big labor” is you and me. Working people trying to get a living wage and dignified compensation and conditions for their work. That’s who he’s really pushing against here. Us.

    Second, there are assertions made here that aren’t supported anywhere in the related text or links – “taking money away from the classrooms,” “giving it to corrupt (also unsupported) union bosses.” There’s no direct information path from this graphic to the substance of the issues he’s yammering about; you have to dig into the comments, follow the link to the Michigan GOP’s website article, read all the way through it, almost at the bottom you find the actual bill numbers.

    Then you have to google and go read them, just to find out none of what he’s saying is true. For instance one of the bills he’s talking about repeals a law preventing state agencies from processing union dues as a payroll deduction, making it as annoying as possible to pay union dues.

    Make the lie loud and clear. Make the truth hard to find.

    You aren’t supposed to notice folks like Matt taking money away from public classrooms and giving it to churches and other private school operators, all of whom make political donations and in-kind contributions. You aren’t supposed to notice that’s an end-run around the establishment clause used to con the government into funding religious instruction.

    Eventually you can take religion out completely and pretend you’re just a plucky entrepreneur “improving” education for everyone by privatizing it and monetizing it, and we’ll just ignore that you’re also destroying it and perpetuating outrageous abuses of power and elitism and reinforcements of systemic imbalances of power like racism and sexism…and most importantly, capitalism.

    When I was a kid you had to pay out of pocket to access that privilege, now you just have to know the right people and fill out the right forms and the state will pay it for you – essentially giving you the same thing you were getting directly from the state 40 years ago, except it costs fifty times as much because of all the middle-men taking their cut along the way to pay folks like Matt here, plus it’s been split into separate systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest, and the privileged have stationed themselves as brokers and middle-men all along the way to get paid.

    Told y’all when they started outsourcing the lunch lady to save a buck (which it never did) that it wouldn’t be long before they outsourced the whole school. People like Matt sneered and laughed from his van down by the river, just like they’ll sneer and laugh now because they think he cleverly avoided this whole conversation by simply saying “classrooms,” which helps hide the fact that what he’s really talking about is those privately owned classrooms that ultimately help fund his political career.

    THOSE are the classrooms he’s really worried about money being taken away from – the classrooms that pay for his campaigns.

    Then of course there’s the whole anti-union framing which is normal GOP politics and I won’t go into here other than to notice it.

    What Matt here wants to motivate you to do is ignore the facts and feel like you and your kids are being attacked and robbed. There’s no evidence of that, there’s not even anyone credibly suggesting it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you go for the emotion and that bypasses the critical thinking and boom, half of southwest Michigan is pissed at the Democrats for stealing their schools.

    It works the same everywhere. Stop falling for it. Cultivate emotional detachment from these issues and you’ll be able to see them more clearly.

    That’s it for me I’m John Henry from JohnHenry.US reminding you that I stay independent by being crowdfunded, and that means everything I do here depends on you so remember to like, share, subscribe, and spread the word, and if you can please drop by johnhenry.us/money and you’ll find a range of one-time and ongoing weekly or monthly support options to help pay the bills and buy the gear that makes all this happen.

  • TLDR: A Simple Bias Check

    Hey everyone welcome to another edition of TLDR, I’m the girl with kaleidoscope eyes John Henry from JohnHenry.US, please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe! Today we’re going to talk about bias, why you need to be aware of your own, and a simple bias check you can use to help ensure you’re living up to yourself.

    It’s probably important to note the context here: Ed Whelan is an arch-right lawyer and talking head who clerked for Scalia and write for National Review – we are NOT in the same lane ideologically, and that makes the point that much sharper:

    I strongly disagree with Ed Whelan on nearly everything, but that’s not what this is about. The simple fact is he’s right in this case, and he’s not only right but it’s incredibly important that every human being on the planet knows it. This is an exercise I do constantly myself and believe we all should.

    Why does it matter? Look no further than the dialogue surrounding the ongoing indictments of former president Trump. The current leftist cheerleading for the Espionage Act – one of the most troubling and problematic sets of law in our entire history of law – is frankly more than a little scary, and provides a great example of why it’s important to go through the exercise Whelan describes. Any sort of law that criminalizes speaking against the actions of the government is terrifying and should absolutely be subject to the harshest scrutiny…and all it really takes to understand that is saying to yourself “what if it was Donald Trump trying to use this power to his advantage, rather than it being used against him? How would he be able to abuse or misuse it?”

    Reverse this situation and have the Trump administration prosecuting Joe Biden illicitly under some pretense like the minor scraps that turned up at his home office, suddenly it’s not so cool. When you’ve got a war being prosecuted for unjust or unworthy reasons, suddenly it’s not so cool that you can be sentenced to ten years simply for advocating against war when war is what the government wants, like Eugene Debs.

    That’s not to say I think the prosecution of Trump is at all illicit or even flawed, just that if we were thinking clearly we’d have a lot more conversation happening about the Espionage Act that isn’t driven simply by the former president’s sycophants trying to make excuses for him in the media.

    But it makes someone like me who constantly writes in criticism of power and its abuses and those who hold and abuse it feel really uncomfortable about some of the company I’m keeping, when I start seeing ostensible left-wing activists and personalities getting all happy about the Espionage Act.

    When you turn it around, the flaws in the act become problematic, and we can’t afford to ignore that simply because those flaws happen to be working in a way that is both personally satisfying and morally righteous in the particular case of Trump. I’m not even saying “fix it first, worry about Trump after.” It’s the tool we’ve got now to do the job and the job needs doing, so we’ll use it.

    What I am saying, though, is we’ll keep having problems like him until we build and implement systems that actually do what they say they’re supposed to, like form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

    The only way to do that for sure is to resist the urge to ignore abuses of power when they’re accomplishing things you like.

  • Morning Message 1.16 – Trump & Insanity

    Good Monday to ya folks I am John Henry and you may not know this but I’m actually “a guy.” Like when someone says “I know a guy?” That’s me they’re talking about, I’m the guy they know and I’m the guy you know right here with another Morning Meeting.

    Today I want to talk a minute about two great tastes that go great together: insanity, and Donald J “The J Is For Jesus Jumping Christ Is There No Bottom To This Man’s Character” Trump.

    I’ve observed for a long time that I felt like Trump was ultimately setting himself up to be declared non compos mentis – that is, not mentally fit to stand trial. His fundamental defense for everything is that he genuinely believes he didn’t do anything wrong, a proposition so ludicrous it’d be laughed out of a sitcom writer’s room as being too unrealistic.

    I want to be clear that I think he does know, he just doesn’t care – and I think that’s the difference between criminal and crazy. The one thing he may be insane and or stupid enough to believe is that if he sticks with his story, the courts will fall for it. There’s even precedent – fans of true crime stories will be familiar with noted gangster Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, who spent three decades running a NYC mafia while wandering around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers.

    I suspect Mr. Trump will find the courts less susceptible to this ruse than they once were, but that’s his problem. I figure it’s an even shot that he’ll manage to stay outside of a cell until he dies of natural causes; what the ultimate decisions will be in the courts is anyone’s guess as always but the man’s 76 years old and visibly unhealthy. That said under the circumstances a posthumous conviction isn’t off the table either; certainly there’s a solid argument to be made that the historical record must be clear and unambiguous so we can stop arguing over whether he’s a fascist and start talking about why so many of us fell for it.

    Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am mentally ill, and I use that phrase deliberately. There are times when it’s almost as though I’m a passive observer outside my own head, watching helplessly as the rest of me refuses to cooperate with what I want to do. It sucks. It makes my work inconsistent and the likelihood that I’ll stay on a schedule for anything pretty slim, among other real-world problems that, when they’re at their worst, make me think I’ve got a legitimate case for disability.

    I don’t think Trump is mentally ill in that sense at all. I think he’s mentally ill in the sense that he’s a psychopathic narcissist. I say “psychopathic” rather than “sociopathic” deliberately as well. As an old friend who’s also a psychologist once put it, a sociopath doesn’t understand that other people have feelings just like them; a psychopath just doesn’t care.

    In that sense, I think Trump is legitimately mentally ill. I think he knows what what he’s doing is “wrong” in the sense of being illegal or morally reprehensible to most reasonable people. I think he doesn’t care because to him all that matters is him, and he’ll do whatever benefits him first and worry about the legalities later. Every moment is spent finding ways to cut a corner here or refuse to pay a bill there or split a hair in this other place, all backed with the bluster and bravado of a half-literate rube who’s watched too many crime shows on television.

    When you view his actions through this lens you start to understand that this is the only play he has left. He has to go down swinging, even if he’s carried out of the courtroom in a canvas overcoat with extra-long sleeves, the most important thing to him is maintaining that “reasonable doubt” in the public eye, that little bit of fluff that can be spun into a mountain of high-quality bovine excrement about how he was really taking a principled stand and he deserves credit for that even though he was fundamentally wrong, he just didn’t get it because he’s mentally ill...oh, and also he’s not mentally ill at all, it’s just the corrupt state that’s persecuting him because he’s a dangerous truth-teller.

    That is quite precisely where the line is drawn for me, as someone who struggles daily with mental illness and who has loudly and proudly advocated against stigmatizing it.

    There are people in this world who can’t help themselves. There are times when you could light a fire under my ass and it wouldn’t get me out of bed.

    Then there are the people who say they can’t help themselves because fundamentally being insane is more socially acceptable than being just plain evil. Like the domestic abusers who “lose control” but never seem to have a problem keeping themselves in control when faced with someone bigger than them. That’s what Trump is.

    I understand the arguments about his ego making it impossible for him to accept a judgement suggesting he’s mentally unfit, but you need to understand that in his mind that gives him an out. It gives him – and the acolytes and sycophants who he believes will point to him as inspiration in future history – that back door to say “see, I wasn’t really insane, the evil government just made that up to persecute me.”

    Pretending to believe his own BS is the only way he goes down as anything but a petty, faithless, crook and traitor, and that’s what he’s thinking about right now. He only cares about what’s being said right now to the extent that it undermines his viable long-term legacy as a strong, shrewd leader who refused to bow to the almighty government.

    To imagine that his ego would stand in the way of allowing himself to be deemed unfit for trial or incapable of being held responsible for his actions is to radically underestimate the depths of his ego. He’s thinking more about what people will be saying about him long after we’re all gone, than what they’re saying now. That’s why he’s so angry about going to court is that it’s not a malleable record; it’s much harder to claim that something did or didn’t happen when there’s clear, objectively verifiable evidence that the opposite is true.

    Sometimes you’ve got to be a little nuts to really understand how crazy people think. Lucky for you, you know a guy…

    That’s it for today’s morning message folks, thanks as always for your ongoing support and engagement! Please don’t forget that I am 100% crowdfunded so I can remain 100% independent, if you can help via PayPal, CashApp, Patreon, you can find links to all of those and lots of other options for both one-time and ongoing contributions at johnhenry.us/money, and of course as always the best support is engagement so keep on liking and sharing and commenting and helping spread the word, and I’ll see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!

  • Morning Message 1.15

    Welcome to another Friday, hailing from Parts Unknown and weighing in at 226 pounds I’m John Henry with the Morning Message, lots to talk about today so let’s get right to it!

    First, big shout-out to festering social disease Pat Robertson who made his contribution to Pride Month after a lifetime of blaming gay people for hurricanes by dying yesterday. Perhaps more than any other minion of evil in the American Theofascist movement Robertson, taught people how to weaponize religion through mass media to spread hate, ignorance, and fascism throughout American culture for profit and power. We note Robertson’s death is tragic primarily in that it didn’t happen fifty or sixty years ago.

    The big news today of course is the return of a seven-count indictment against tribble hatchery and ongoing refutation of Darwinian theory Donald J “The J Is For Jeenyus” Trump on charges related to his illegal and deliberate removal and sharing of classified intelligence.

    The most serious of these charges is being filed under the federal Espionage Act, and that’s super important for two reasons that aren’t being talked about much in the coverage I’ve read.

    First, a conviction of espionage lays the groundwork for a much more serious charge of treason. Article 3 Section III of the US Constitution spells it out clearly: treason is committed when a person a) makes war against the United States, b) “adheres to” enemies of the US, “giving them aid and comfort.”

    Without getting into the weeds on it, “espionage” generally involves spying on or stealing information. “Treason” is when you communicate that information in a way that is harmful to your nation (or attempt to harm primary officials). There’s a lot of overlap there, but it’s not complete.

    Any given act has three requirements to be considered treasonous. First, it must be an act that harms an order to which the actor has a duty of allegiance – a citizen spying on their own country for a hostile foreign power, for instance. Second, the intent to violate that duty; you can’t accidentally commit treason. Third, there must in fact be an “act” or “action.” Without actually “doing something,” you’re talking about sedition but not treason.

    If a conviction under the Espionage Act is secured, that establishes as a legal fact that “something” was “done.” This is key to prosecution for treason down the road.

    The second thing that isn’t being talked about is the extraordinarily problematic nature of the Espionage Act. This act is one of the few clearly defined legal lines in the US where your right to free expression stops, cold. That such a line exists, and must exist, has been upheld repeatedly by courts left and right over more than a century now.

    As with any such tool, it can – and has been – readily weaponized to oppress reasoned dissent against abuses of power. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced ten years in prison under the Act in 1918; noted anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman was deported to the Soviet Union in the same year. The Act has also been used to stifle speech critical of war, or which portrayed US wartime allies in unflattering ways, and prosecuting a case under the Act was a key moment in the early career of infamous “Red Scare” senator Joe McCarthy.

    This is one of those moments when there is no clear black and white picture. What we do know is that if the GOP gets the chance, they’ll attempt to use the same sets of laws against their enemies, because that’s what they do – they corrupt and bend and twist everything that can be made bad, to their own favor.

    I’m absolutely on board with Trump’s indictment and I hope he, his enablers, and everyone who supported him ends up doing time over it. They are traitors to all our trust, and there must be a reckoning if the idea of trust is to have any merit at all.

    I would be very, very careful about getting sucked in to cheerleading authoritarianism or the application of power that can readily be abused when held by someone who’s more like Donald J “The J Is For Jailbird” Trump than not.

    That’s your Morning Message I’m John Henry reminding you that I am completely crowd-funded because it keeps me completely independent. You can help via PayPal, CashApp, Patreon and more at johnhenry.us/money, and don’t forget the best support is engagement so stay on those like, share, comment and subscribe buttons. Thanks again and have a great weekend!