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.
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.
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.)
While this curated article was originally written in 2010, the subject of school dress codes continues rearing its ugly head – if anything even more frequently now as the Trump-empowered autocratic-fascist contingent in our culture feel confident in their victory over the evil forces of individual identity. There are few more overt and clear mechanisms of deranged, malicious powermongering than bullying a little kid for how they look. While this odious, evil behavior is most often directed at young women showing “too much skin” they’re not the only ones targeted. Anyone who gets behind this particular type of oppression and suppression is a mortal enemy of everything good in the world.
Now here’s a story that’ll get you raging against the machine like a gutter punk in short order. It seems that a four year old boy in Texas has been suspended from school…for having long hair.
The school district responsible for this pornographically obscene attempt at powermongering, mandatory indoctrination to the status quo, and non-consensual behavior modification is Mesquite, Texas. According to the news story from the AP, their dress code is justified as follows:
“students who dress and groom themselves neatly, and in an acceptable and appropriate manner, are more likely to become constructive members of the society in which we live.”
I have a whole list of problems just with this sentence and the thought processes behind it. Who is to decide what constitutes “neatly,” “acceptable,” “appropriate,” and “constructive?” Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Jim Jones, and Bill O’Reilly all dress well. I would hardly call any of them ‘acceptable,’ ‘appropriate,’ or ‘constructive.’
And let’s look at the other side, shall we? In the early 19th century the works of Beethoven were derided as ‘longhair music.’ If our world only counted as valuable that which the Mesquite School Board finds acceptable, here’s a quick list off the top of my head of people who would not have done the things they did. Each of these people was, at one time or another, longhaired, unacceptable, and inappropriate:
Beethoven
Edgar Allen Poe
H.P. Lovecraft
George Orwell
H. G. Wells
Robert Heinlein
Issas Asimov
Jesus
Moses
Abraham
Lot, and especially his daughters
Hippocrates
Socrates
Homer
Shakespeare
The entire musical genres of blues, jazz, rock and roll, rock, rap, hip hop, country after 1956 or so, and all their derivatives, plus half their roots, and every artist in them from Robert Johnson to Miley Cyrus.
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
John F. Kennedy
Barack Obama
and thousands more
While I recognize the need for the school district and their teachers and employees to be able to maintain order, I submit that it would be much more valuable an exercise for an educational body to work diligently at the task of teaching kids to understand WHY maintaining order is important, and WHAT actual order is (versus sullen compliance under duress), and then the kids will tend to choose and respect order to a healthy extend (and to reject it to an equally healthy extent).
It is very possible to have a mob of angry, well-dressed schoolchildren trash a school.
It’s equally possible for a bunch of long-haired, starry-eyed idealists to change the course of human history forever and create the greatest framework of human liberty ever known.
Across our nation our schools are failing miserably to educate our children. This has been a problem for generations, and it continues to be a growing problem that long ago reached epic proportions. Not only are we falling behind the rest of the world in the classic “three r’s,” but five minutes on the ‘net or reviewing current popular culture trends will make clear that we’re failing to teach deductive or inductive logic, ethics, critical thinking, complex reasoning, independent thought, or genuine self-respect (as opposed to regurgitated slogans from 12-step groups that kids just roll their eyes at), and in some families we’ve been doing so for five generations or more.
I am hard-pressed to think of any recent example that more clearly and completely demonstrates Where And How We Have Gone Wrong than this story. “YOU!! FOUR YEAR OLD!! YOU ARE DOOMED TO A LIFETIME OF INCOMPLETE EDUCATION BECAUSE YOUR MOM THINKS YOU LOOK CUTE WITH BANGS!!”
The best part is the actual dress code, which you can find here. (Click the paragraph headings, and don’t feel bad – it took me a minute, too.)
Do me a favor. See that little “share” button up at the top of the page? Click on it, and share this with everyone you know. Enough is enough. I can’t and won’t speak for anyone else, but I’m sick to death of seeing the “land of the free” usurped by a collection of self-important, mediocre failures, lacking in passion and clarity of thought and consideration of others while loudly decrying everyone else’s ignorance and selfishness. Seriously. Spread this around. Enough is Enough.
Great things are rarely, if ever, comfortable. Nor are they generally safe, acceptable, appropriate, or neat. The United States Constitution was conceived of, written by, defended by, and ultimately enacted by a collection of longhaired miscreants who had the unmitigated gall to think for themselves. That gall, that drive, that chutzpah, that underdog-to-the-top dream of living comfortably simply by being who you are and doing what you do best and enjoy…that is America. Every last bit of it. Not one single man, woman, or child among us would be here – would even exist as we are – if it wasn’t for the long-haired, the socially unacceptable, the ones who refused to let others think for them, and this blue-nosed attempt to turn children into little automatons is child abuse on it’s face, and absolutely un-American at it’s heart.
I will not stoop to speculating on the personal psychological defects that drive the individuals responsible for writing and enforcing this policy; I don’t know what individuals are personally responsible, and if I did know their names I know nothing about them personally. The individuals involved should not be attacked personally by word or deed; they are merely the mindless yeast-like propagators of the failed system that spawned them. Anything directed at them other than genuine pity is about as useful and meaningful as spanking a dog dropping because it’s on the living room rug.
(They SHOULD, of course, be immediately removed from their positions, along with all their friends, family, college roommates, and so forth whom they have hired, and replaced with competent personnel. That’s not a personal issue; it’s a functional one.)
But I know that they are wrong. Wrongest, even. This whole situation is a perfect encapsulation of the nature and scope of our failures in education over multiple generations.
Dearest School Board, and all the School Boards like you: Your job is to teach children to THINK, not to OBEY. Children who can think, will obey any rule that makes sense to them…and if you are incapable of explaining the rules to them without falling back on “because I said so,” then you are a miserable failure as an educator and should retire immediately. If you and everyone like you clears the system, those of us who believe that teaching should be among the highest-paid, best-rewarded, and most-respected positions in any developed society can begin making our case credibly.
My forever longhaired, unacceptable, inappropriate, and unconstructive thanks in advance for your collective compliance.
Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.
Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.
This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.
In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.
Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions
These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.
So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?
Family Pride
I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example
In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.
The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.
Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.
However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.
In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”
So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!
Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.
Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.
So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.
That brings us to…
The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice
Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.
Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.
Pictured: The ultimate participation trophy, symbol of losers since 1865 (far left of the image), shows up at another lost cause: the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Government by violent coup in Washington DC at the behest of President Donald Trump
Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.
I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.
And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia
Erasing History
This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.
Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.
“Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.
Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.
(Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.
In 1970.
This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.
To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)
THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.
In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.
I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.
But it’s time to accept reality.
Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.
Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.
I’m sorry, they’re not.
The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.
I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?
No.
That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.
Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.
But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?
No.
We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.
And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.
It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.
Among the large-scale scammers, grifters, harassers, trolls, and losers who have been trying to drag me down, play me against my allies, and sabotage my work over the years is Omar Rivero, founder of Occupy Democrats. (Incidentally he had exactly nothing to do with the Occupy movement, he just co-opted the name as a marketing strategy.)
A few days ago another of these big pages ripped off some content from me, so I wrote about it – loudly. One of the things I wrote was this article on Medium. While doing my normal maintenance I noticed a new comment on that article, and of course it’s a newly-created sockpuppet account repeating the same old stupid lies trying to con people into believing that the guy whose annual income has been less than 10K for years is the grifter and it’s really the guy paying himself hundreds of thousands a year to clickbait the left who’s on the up-and-up.
I have been holding this conversation in an archive since 2015. I’ve mentioned it before and even posted a couple of screenshots with information redacted. And of course it gets ignored because by and large people (including you, and for that matter me) are egomaniacs and hate finding out they’ve been conned, so when faced with the evidence of the con they ignore it and get mad at whoever showed it to them. We probably ought to break that habit, since it’s literally killing us, but that’s a different article.
Anyway with all that backstory in mind and remembering that the latest sockpuppet’s claim was that “Omar Rivero doesn’t know who [I am],” here’s the ENTIRE conversation in which Rivero attempts to stir up contention, bait me into throwing popular leftist Manny Schewitz under the proverbial bus, and make all kinds of logically broken and entirely baseless accusations.
If Omar’s got a problem with that, he can sue me for defamation and we can go to court and he can tell the judge these screenies are fake, at which point I’ll just pull up the archived conversation on my FB account and win the countersuit. But he won’t do that. What he will do, on the off chance this gets any visibility, is make a bunch of excuses how it was 2015, he didn’t know any better, he’s not the same person he was then…but if that was true, he’d have ended the blackballing of my content, and he hasn’t. He’d have stopped the grift, and he hasn’t. What he has done is continue sucking up to the center-right power core of the DNC in the hopes of furthering his political “career.”
These people are lying, grifting scum – Occupy Dems, Other 98, Being Liberal, Addicting Info, and EVERYONE in their sphere. The only reason anyone would work with any of them is because either that person/entity is unaware of all this garbage, or they’re part of the problem. Either way, enough is enough. If we’re ever going to have a real left wing in this country, we must flush our commode and get these floaters down the drain so they stop stinking up the place.
Let me be clear: no genuine progressive, nobody who respects independent activism or progressive values or leftist values or anything else they’re pimping for bucks would ever have engaged in any of the behavior I’ve been subject to by them over the years. If you are following these people, if you are sharing their content, if you think they are in any way liberal (in the colloquial sense used as a synonym for “left wing,” the real definition is an entirely different matter), leftist, or progressive, you are the victim of a long, deep, con game that has extracted millions of dollars from the real left and deliberately neutered left-wing social media for the explicit purpose of co-opting grassroots leftist energy to direct it at fakes, frauds, sockpuppets, astroturfers, liars, and thieves. I know that’s hard to hear. I know plenty of folks will just hate me for saying it out loud, and frankly those people are no more “progressive” than the people they’re following – they’re pretending to be progressive for social approval and/or profit, and they will absolutely abandon any genuine leftist principle in a heartbeat if it becomes too inconvenient, expensive or socially challenging to uphold.
I thank you for your time. And yes, I’ve verified this is legitimate THAT Omar – not a sockpuppet, not a fake account, not a troll that’s pretending.
“A lot of people” = “nobody, I went googling a new site that was set up to be the antidote to my bullshit, now I’m gonna try to troll you with this random auto-scraped entry that means exactly nothing” First off, people working above board don’t play this backchannel crap.The explanation is you don’t know how Zoominfo words and you’re a creepy little stalker.OMG THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!Hahaha isn’t anti-Semitism funny? Your “leftist” hero. Your “liberal” standard-bearer. Your “progressive” warrior. Your buddy of Elizabeth Warren.For the record, he never sent me jack shit. But ask yourselves what kind of progressive or leftist or liberal engages in poverty shaming and ridiculing people who have to eat ramen.“If you have to cheat to win…” “We make mistakes.” See the gaslight there? Also the obviously backhanded, snotty remarks about “nobody watches” and “nobody reads.” “They hate me because I’m successful (defined as ‘making money by bullshitting people’)” – another common refrain of the plutocracy. The only thing left about this clown is he should’ve left the political activism to people who live their values and believe in progressive ideals.Incidentally that article remained on the site, uncorrected until sometime between Sept 2020 and April 2022. At the time of writing this article AI appears to have gone 404. Ironically it was stolen from Raw Story, which is probably what Matt Desmond didn’t want people to notice and that’s what set him off like a coke freak on a four-day bender.This me explaining to a guy I know is part of the problem why he’s part of the problem, while pretending I believe he’s acting in good faith. That’s my way of making sure “I didn’t know” isn’t a plausible excuse anymore. He knows. I told him. He doesn’t care because grifting makes him money.“Just news blogs.” More gaslighting. This is also how they rationalize themselves. It’s “just a mistake.” Then they find someone like me making an honest mistake and scream SEE YOU DO IT TOO! Nobody is so stupid as to not understand the difference, but the pretense gives them plausible deniability. Now who else can I think of that’s staked the whole game on pretending they really believe their own bullshit? Clue, it rhymes with Trump.How many progressives do you know who think maintaining ethics in their sphere is “beneath them?”Another gaslight – diversion tactic. The fact we were exploiting a sensationalized story about a murder wasn’t really exploitation because there was a minor factual error in the website we copied and pasted the story from before applying a fourth-grade rewrite to avoid obvious copyright infringement. God these people are scum.“Yeah dude I’m a nobody,” but a few panels up he’s bragging about five million visitors a month to his website. False modesty that he clearly doesn’t believe; it’s a show of ersatz humility leveraging the human tendency to feel bad about distrusting people who act humble. I’m not saying he’s not VERY GOOD at being a lying manipulator. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have made so much money doing it.“So are you saying that…[insert attempt to go back to the narrative you’re trying to control]” Pure manipulation.Just in case anyone thinks I’m afraid to “say that to his face,” this is me telling him to his face he’s a sleazy self-aggrandizing money-grubbing dick pretending to be a political activist, to his face. Small woncer the conversation ends immediately after.
That’s the entire conversation. The discerning reader will clearly see the attempts at manipulation, the plays to plausible deniability, the fake “oh I’m not important” modesty performance, etc. ad nauseam.
THIS is the attitude that has been “informing” left-wing politics for the last decade or so, I’ve told you and told you and told you what was happening, and nobody wants to hear it. I’ve resisted putting this out for nearly a decade because I just don’t need the BS, but you know what? I’ve got the BS anyway. I’ve spent the majority of the time since this conversation happened destitute, desperate, begging to survive, and STILL doing more in any give series of random grunts than these scamming pigs have done for the left in their entire lives, collectively.
I’m done playing.
https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/videos/805871634614882/ Livestream where I establish beyond question that these messages came from the real Omar. (Don’t forget to like my page – unlike Omar, I need an audience that appreciates being respected. You can also use the widget on this page if you don’t have it blocked somehow.) If it disappears I’ll upload the archive to YouTube…and if THAT disappears I’ll just host it myself.
I’ve been trying to tell people for over a decade that these bad actors were bad actors, and they’re damaging our hope for a progressive and successful future. I’ve been largely ignored. It’s time to stop hiding your heads in the sand and face reality: if you’re on board with these pages, you’ve been had, and it’s cost the left and by extension all of us far, far too much.
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.
You say you want a evolution, well, you know. We all want to change the world.
There can be no serious question that right-wing authoritarian structures like fascism and autocracy are on the rise around the world, even in places once thought to be resistant or impervious to them like the United States.
This isn’t merely happening within governments but also in the media, both news and entertainment.
There can be no serious question that the interests not only of human liberty but of human survival lie in resisting those structures with all our energy.
I need you to listen to me now:
The best way to fight fascism is, first and foremost, to simply not be a fascist.
To not be a fascist means doing the hard work of understanding that human thinking has been broken since day one, and it means understanding what we can do within ourselves and out in the world to fix it, as best we can with whatever resources and ability we may have.
Not being a fascist means being consistent and firm and honest within ourselves about how and what we think. It means being the voice in our own head that asks hard questions like “wait…that’s a little racist, isn’t it?” or “am I really being fair here?” and answers them honestly, even when we don’t like the honest answer.
Not being a fascist means resisting that urge to “go along” with microaggressions that aren’t targeted at you…or that may even benefit you.
It means not allowing yourself to fall into the trap of believing that your freedom lies in your ability to imitate those who enslave you by enslaving others, by declaring others less than (or greater than for that matter) by virtue of some ridiculous external characteristic like skin color, gender or gender identity, or sexuality.
It means not merely “class solidarity” or solidarity with some other identity group like our ethnic heritage, gender expression, or sexuality, but life solidarity: understanding that we are all nodes in an incomprehensible mesh of interacting interactions interacting with interactions ad infinitum, and fundamentally we *must* all work together, as best as we can understand how, to ensure that life exists and persists.
That IS the “meaning of life.” To create and propagate more life. It’s what we’re “here for,” one way or another, and as a much wiser man than I once wrote, “all things serve The Beam.” Sagan: “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Hicks: “We are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively…we are the imagination of ourselves.”
The grand procession of Life is all about keeping live alive and evolving so we can imagine ever more wonderful selves as we grow and evolve over time, always knowing that fundamentally there is no finish line to evolution. Either you keep evolving, or you go extinct. (Except you, mister horseshoe crab. Contrary bastard.)
It’s fairly ludicrous to suggest that in an effectively infinite universe, intelligent life only exists on this one backwater rock…but it’s also a non-zero possibility.
We may be IT. We and our companions here on this rock, could be the only developing intelligent life in the universe. I’d say it’s much more likely given the span of time that we’re not, but it’s possible – *someone* had to be first.
It is our duty to life, to do our best to keep life moving forward. That is what we’re here for, in whatever ways our individual lives present the possibility.
You know this, and we know this together, but we are steeped in literally *our entire history* of thinking differently. We’ve gone through all the things we’ve gone through from the caves and treetops through all manner of strife and abuse and thousands of years of struggle, and now we are here. This is the moment when humanity becomes Next. It’s happening around you, and to you, every minute.
Keep moving forward. We are breaking the chains of the past and writing the direction of the future all at once, and we owe it to ourselves, to all who came before us, and to all who will come after, to get it right as best we can.
Part of that process is eradicating fascism and the dark human tendencies that fuel it as completely and irrevocably as possible.
That starts with each one of us, in our own minds, every day.
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.
(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:
“white people” are no more a monoculture than any other color of skin
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.
