JohnHenry.US

Tag: integrity

  • My Apology to Bree Newsome Bass

    My Apology to Bree Newsome Bass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Forensic Deconstruction Of Calcified Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I thought I was catching myself.

    I wasn’t catching enough.

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

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

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

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

    —John Henry DeJong
    October 5, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

  • The Progressives Are Winning

    We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.

    We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.

    It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.

    Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.

    These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.

    They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.

    Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.

    We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.

    The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.

    The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.

    These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.

    They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.

    We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.

    The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.

    It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.

    The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.

    With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.

    That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.

    That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.

    That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.

    Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.

    We are right.

    We have the answers we need.

    Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.

  • In My Room S1E03 – Who Is John Henry? Plus Matt Gaetz & More

    [powerpress]

    Due to the nature of what I do online I’m often asked (and occasionally aggressively challenged) to describe who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish here, so I dedicated some time in this show to answering some of those questions. Plus the ongoing scandal with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz trying to hook up with starry-eyed high school girls and other current events, framing a discussion about integrity in both performance and creative work and public service, journalism and other critical social functions, and how all that ties in to Gen X and Obama and progressive ideology.

  • Why Rock Music Has Sucked For 15 Years (2009)

    Introduction & Argument

    Originally posted to LowGenius.Net 6-Feb-2009.  As I’ve been going through this process of tracking down and curating my old content, once in a while I come across something that still makes sense word for word.  This article is now in seventh grade, so to speak – twelve years old – and as I re-read it for spellchecking and so forth I realize that pretty much every word still rings, and I wonder whether that reflects my own stagnation in musical taste, or if I’m unwittingly just being the grouchy old man, or if this is just an ongoing and unfortunate reality that I desperately hope finds a cure. 

    In the end I suspect it’s probably a little of all three.  But I still wouldn’t change a word.

    And for the record I know there’s bands out there that don’t suck.  Some of them are friends of mine.  It’s a hook to get you to read the bigger point about the emotional commitment of the artist to their art and why that’s required for art to be great.

    Yes, I know.  It doesn’t all suck, but there’s not much room for nuance in a headline.

    And most of it HAS sucked, and sucked hard.  There’s always been a problem of style over substance in music, and in every other part of the entertainment business.  Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, the suck has so far outweighed the substance that I’m really afraid a lot of people my daughter’s age (20) [she’s now 32 -jh, 2021] are losing the ability to even recognize quality music anymore.

    Why does it suck?  Oh, let me count the ways.  The world is filled with bands and performers who are, at best, marginally talented.  They rely on studio tricks and technology to substitute for talent, but the talent is only one part of the issue, and it’s a small part.

    No, the real problem is this:  what we’ve got now, by and large, is an entire generation of recycled imitative crap pretending to be the heroes they grew up loving.  There’s nothing wrong with having influences and incorporating those influences into your work; that is, after all, where everything starts.

    All these wannabe’s and pretenders spend years trying to learn how to imitate their idols, getting the chops and the techniques and the riffs and the styles down pat, but they don’t get it.  What makes great music is not how well you play your instrument, or how many notes you can cram into a single beat, or how fluid and tasteful your fills are.  What makes music great is one thing, and one thing only:

    The heart of the musician.

    THAT is what people don’t seem to get anymore.  It’s all just flash and show and technical know-how, and there’s not an ounce of genuine passion involved, except for maybe the passion for money, ego gratification, and easy sex.  Any asshole with corporate backing can make a record that will sell a half-million copies, but it takes something that you can’t buy, you can’t learn, and you can’t imitate, to touch hearts and move souls.

    What’s Missing

    Musicians don’t put themselves in to the music anymore…and what’s worse, the music public doesn’t ask them to.  Instead, it seems like people are going to concerts so they can hear the songs played note-for-note as they sound on the CD.  Not only is that not the point of live music, that’s directly contradictory to the very idea of live music.

    VOLUME does not make music good.  There is nothing even a tiny little bit special about seeing an artist go up and pantomime themselves.  If that’s what music is about to you, then you may as well just say to hell with it, save some money, and start doing “listening party” tours where the musicians aren’t even involved – just get five thousand people together in a hockey rink with a giant PA and play the damn CD!

    No.  Live music is about broken strings and spur-of-the-moment extemporaneous speeches and singers who are hoarse at the end of the night and blood and sweat and tears and most of all, it’s about power.  Not amplification power, but the power to move human beings.  Speaking as a musician, I don’t much care if I get every note right when I’m playing live.  What I care about is whether I can make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry or sad or wistful or hurt or horny.  I care about making you love and making you hate.  Even agreeing with what I say isn’t important, but feeling what I feel, THAT is what matters.

    It seems like today’s crop of musical impressionists have completely missed that point.  You know, Zeppelin had some really terrible shows, from a standpoint of technical musicianship [Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Special anyone? -jh, 2021]…but people loved them because they went out there and put their hearts in to what they were doing.  They reached down, picked you up, and ripped your face off, and they made you come along on their ride for three hours whether you wanted to go or not.

    This is why 4 Peace remains my favorite “Kalamazoo Scene” band even though a lot of people would say they were far from the “best” band on the scene.  Not because they were the world’s greatest musicians – certainly they had legitimate talent and instrumental skill, but that’s not the point.   What made them my favorites was simply that when they picked up their instruments, everything else in their world stopped and for that half-hour or 90 minutes or whatever, their hearts and souls were right there on display, pouring out of their speakers and into your face with all of the fire and fury that four pissed off Gen-Xers could muster.  I don’t take anything away from any of the other bands on the scene, but that’s the band that, for me, consistently grabbed me by the throat and flat-out refused to let go until they’d had their say.

    By the same token on a wider scale, that’s why I’m still a huge Pearl Jam fan, and why I dig Chris Cornell much…and why I absolutely loathe bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd.  I don’t care HOW great they are as technical musicians, all they are is shallow imitations of bands who actually went out and put their balls and hearts and souls in to what they were doing.

    Watch this: Pearl Jam, “Alive” (SNL 1992) [Sorry it’s a FB post; NBC yanks this clip within seconds every time it’s posted to YouTube.  Hilarious note: originally it linked to a file on Google Videos, that’s how old this article is. -jh, 2010]

    That’s what a band looks like when they’ve got their heart on.  More important, that’s what a band feels like when they’re in the groove.  You can almost smell the nerves and excitement – this was by far the most exposure they’d had at that point – but by the time Ed rips that first “SAHHHHHn” out, they’ve forgotten where they are, they’ve forgotten the cameras, the crowd, Sharon Stone, the millions watching at home…all that matters, all that exists in those five minds for that five minutes is the groove.

    The Magic

    You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it.  All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.

    That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic.  That is why I’m a musician.  Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.

    I’m a musician because I have to be.  Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody:  that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.

    I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier.  I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’

    That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out.  It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold.  It just is.  Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.

    And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.

    [All of this applies to my writing, too.  If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now.  I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]