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.
To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”
The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.
The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)
The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.
The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.
That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.
(NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)
It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.
There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.
The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.
Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.
(In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)
This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.
Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.
In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.
I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.
People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.
The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.
The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.
The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.
No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally
It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.
* In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”
The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.
If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.
By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.
(NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)
In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.
Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.
No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).
We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.
That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.
If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.
And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.
When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.
(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
Introduction
It must be said at the outset that the behaviors and tactics described below aren’t limited by any means to the social media sphere other than the raw mechanics of using social media as the delivery mechanism for disinformation. Nor are they limited to high-powered international politics, or even professionally organized information management firms.
These behaviors are fundamentally those engaged in by those who see life as competition and are set out to win even if it hurts someone else along the way. Whether it’s musicians and comedians competing for ticket sales, actors competing for roles, nations competing for resources, politicians competing for office, there is a moral calculus in every decision as to whether one human being or the next, making the decision for themselves hundreds of times every day, chooses to compete against their fellow human beings, or to work with them against the greater challenges facing the species as a whole.
Those who choose to put themselves above others are absolute master artisans with these behaviors. Even to the level of family dysfunction and relationship abuse patterns, it all shows up the same way in the end, and it’s all corrosive to our individual and collective well-being and health.
That’s why It is absolutely crucial to understand and teach yourself to identify and reject social media disinformation. The damage done just in the last few years by this problem includes millions of lives lost.
One classic tactic of disinformation campaigns is “counter-intelligence.” This phrase gets thrown around a great deal in online conversation these days, often by conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizen types and the like, but it very much is a thing, and you are very much being bombarded with it.
I recently ran into a good example of aggressive counter-intelligence with a high likelihood* of being a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign via a message posted by a page labeling itself with leftist, anti-capitalist terminology.
*One of the core problems with online disinformation campaigns is that you can often never hope to be 100% certain that your instincts are correct. That’s why it’s critical that you keep them razor-sharp.
I won’t link to the page or the displayed content, but I don’t have to hide the page’s name, either. The piece immediately caught my attention, not because oh a swastika or I care what some neofash has to say, they all say the same things anyway. What caught my attention is that this page is “calling out” the Biden administration, treating this ridiculous and obvious display as thought it were in any way meaningful to a thoughtful consideration of…well, anything.
I didn’t even pay attention to what page this appeared on until after I’d commented, and while I wasn’t ridiculously aggressive I also minced no words. What I said was, in short: this is absolute nonsense for a million reasons. I laid my case out firmly, clearly, and without flinching, but also without profanity or threats or aggression.
I did this deliberately, and I try to do it consistently, because the first response of the source nearly always tells you everything you need to know. We’ll get into that, and more details about all the specific disinformation tactics being employed here, why I have a high degree of confidence that this is deliberate behavior by willful neo-fascists, and how you can be better equipped to wade through the onion-layers of online disinformation without falling prey to it.
So the first question, obviously, is “how do you know? Let’s look at that on the next page.
How do I know?
How do I know this image is disinformation? How can I determine the intent of the poster, the writer, the man in the photo, in a brief interaction?
Obviously to fully answer this question you have to read the entire article; that’s why I wrote it, but in a nutshell, given all the factors at hand, there are only two conclusions to be drawn about this information as it is:
The person who posted it genuinely believes what they’re saying. Somewhere, they’ve managed to convinced themselves that what’s written in the text is true. If that is the case and their genuine goal is to work against capitalism, they are simply incompetent to do so. I don’t mean I disagree, I mean they are blatantly and directly working to propagate information that works directly against their publicly identified and self-stated intentions and interests.
They do this in the very act of attempting to advocate for those intentions. There simply can be no other word: they are not competent to do what they are doing, and if they genuinely want to advance their cause they would best do so by sitting down, shutting up, and letting someone competent do the talking. Have all the opinions you want, but don’t present yourself as some kind of expert when you clearly aren’t. It causes great harm – millions of deaths just in the last few years. When someone points it out to you, makes their case clearly, and you want to argue? That leads us to…
The other possibility, which is that the person is fully aware of what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. That makes them a deliberate and willful disinformation agent. In the case of this image, it makes them a deliberate and willful neo-fascists advancing a obviously constructed pro-Putin narrative with eyes wide open.
I repeat: there are no other reasonable explanations. It may very well be that the person really believes what they’re doing, but in refusing to stop doing it when they’re told what they’re doing they are actively advancing the agenda of autocracy and totalitarianism. In immediately jumping to a fevered and meaningless rationalizations of their behavior and attacking the messenger, they reveal their priorities to be other than truth, no matter what those priorities may be.
Exactly who is this person? Exactly what are their priorities? Exactly why did they choose to share this story and then stand by it? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. What matters is regardless of the answers to those questions, you know with a very high degree of certainty that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t worth dealing with and should be ignored. Why? Because as we’ve already outlined, either they’re incompetent or deliberately lying. We’ll discuss this more in a later section of this article.
But what makes the story nonsense? That’s important because if the story has reasonable merit then my response to it did not, so let’s talk about that next.
The Story Itself
Let’s start with the first thing that caught my eye about this story: the premise. In short: a known neo-Nazi “endorsed” the Biden administration and praised their decision to send arms to Ukraine. Therefore, asserts the post and poster, the Biden administration should be opposed in every way because clearly they are Nazis.
While it’s very difficult to find specific examples and citable scholarship in a casual search on the open web, this is a well-known and widely discussed tactic of manipulation that nearly any of us will recognize. The “bad” actor deliberately associates themselves with an enemy. In doing so, they deliberately create an opening for the suggestion this proves that the person they want to discredit surely must be a bad person.
(There’s a variant of this thinking that you see in abusive relationship patterns and gaslighting, which can be loosely rendered as “you must have something wrong with you, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be with me.“)
Fundamentally this relies on exploiting a logical fallacy called “association fallacy.” It has various types and synonyms – well-poisoning is a type of this fallacy, for instance. In the case of the piece we’re looking at today, the specific type of association fallacy is “guilt by association.”
There are a couple of reasons this logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The first is because Biden has no control whatsoever over who endorses him, nor what they give as their reasons; assuming there’s any responsibility for any of this on the part of the Biden administration is childishly silly in that aspect.
The second reason is the endorsement is obviously not made in good faith. This bad actor knows what he’s doing, so much so that he’s nearly winking at you as he does it – is winking at his ideological comrades. They know there’s no way to conclusively prove he’s deliberately lying for the overt purpose of associating the Biden administration with neo-Nazism, that would require mind-reading. So they lie with just the thinnest pretense of believing their own BS, knowing that calling them out on it directly would just end in inconclusive bickering.
Millions of abusers and tyrants and bullies and bigots throughout human history have manipulated association fallacy the same way, and we’ve all seen it in our lives many times if you give it some thought. Being able to recognize this level of manipulation and cunning is critical to protecting yourself against it on all levels.
The Premise
It’s also important to say out loud that part of what makes this effective is that you can make reasonable arguments for different dimensions of the argument – “People KNOW Biden is a fascist,” because it’s only a shade off the truth. You can build the argument quite easily. Certainly Joe Biden could be characterized as pro-Capitalist. I’ve said myself many times (and will probably have it on a shirt or something here in a minute), the win condition of capitalism is fascism. You can’t escape it when you play it out, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.
In the mean time, in the full context of the world and life and history and everything else that’s relevant, Biden is just not plausible as a marauding autocrat deliberately burning the world down to put money in his own pocket. Biden is not plausible as even deliberately evil most of the time. But if you get baited in to trying to argue with the idea that he has the approval of neo-Nazis and that makes him evil, you’ve already lost because you’ve validated the idea that this assertion is sufficiently credible to require counter-argument.
Truth is, in some ways Biden’s very progressive – one can hardly overlook how he forced the Obama administration’s hand on gay marriage, for instance. In other ways, he’ll likely never catch up completely. The ending of capitalism is one of those latter things. I think he’ll never stop believing that there is some way to engage in capitalism – not commerce, mind you, capitalism – without ending up breaking everything beyond repair. He has made decisions in the past that I believe had evil consequences. I believe that in particular some of the decisions he made, votes he cast, etc., early in his political career displayed much more of that tendency to make decisions that were hurtful to innocent people.
That also doesn’t make him “a fascist,” at least not in the intentional and deliberate sense intended by the writer.
Fascism requires deliberate, willful, hostile intent to establish or defend autocracy. Biden still believes the whole “American Dream” thing he grew up on. You work hard for a fair wage, you make enough to live on and enjoy a hobby, and if you care to and want to you can even go do something other than wage work to live on, you know the drill. He’s not ready to think post-capitalism. Neither is most of the rest of the world. That doesn’t make him a “fascist” in any but the most technical of senses, and most importantly that doesn’t make him an irredeemable soul like some of the great monsters of history, which is the narrative this whole mess is trying to sell.
The Propagator
Having reviewed the message, now let’s take a look at the messenger.
The first thing you notice is that it appears to be a radically left-wing page – the name “Capitalism Kills” is a giant dogwhistle of course, but they referred to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” and the other content on the page falls in to the same far-left tropes and symbolism.
“We attack both US political parties” isn’t a meaningful rebuttal in the least. Nor is the assertion “we’re marxist-leninsts here.” If anything they seem more like people out to make the general public think of “Marxism” and “Leninism” as these radically anti-American ideologies, foolish and extreme.
Not to say there is no -ism involved here, but if we credit the speaker for good faith belief in their own words the -ism is “egotism.” No reasonable person sweeps with this broad a brush; nobody who’s interested in real progress or discourse is going to spend all their time throwing around the idea of “condemning all US presidents past and present” as though it’s a meaningful and carefully considered position. It’s intellectually lazy and logically invalid, a position taken solely for the emotional satisfaction of the person taking it.
That’s if we credit the speaker with believing their own words, which I’m not entirely sure is a good idea. If I was going to create an identity to make leftists look ignorant, radical, aggressive, and unreasonable, I could hardly do better than this set of messages.
The assertions about “Biden and Obama helping the Nazis in Ukraine” is also, at very best, a radical misrepresentation of reality. While there has been aid from the US to Ukraine this has been consistently a matter of assisting their defense against ongoing Russian aggression into the territory. There is simply no reasoned basis to hold forth the notion that the Ukrainian government or any more significant portion of its people that could be found in any other country are “Nazis” or fascists of anything of the sort.
This is typically where the propagandist will start gloating little factoids and trivia bits. In the context of Ukraine, invoking the Azov Battalion is a constant go-to, as though the existence of an isolated group of right-wing extremists is evidence the entire country is corrupt. This is illogic on the level of pointing to the Westboro Baptist Church as evidence that the entire US are raging fundamentalist religious bigots.
In this case they went with a video showing a trident patch on a Ukranian military official’s uniform and then portraying this as evidence of Nazi control, in spite of the fact that the symbolism is at best ambiguous and focusing on it is ridiculous on the level of conspiracy theorism.
The point however isn’t that the symbolism is ambiguous or that the Azov group was like thirty people; the point is to get you talking about those things rather than the fact that Russia is conducting an entirely unjustified and illegal war against another sovereign nation. The point is to focus negative attention among the hard left in the west against their own leaders by building accusations of their allegiance to far right, fascist, and or Nazi ideology.
Then as a final nudge, we add a little social proof to validate ourselves by having another account – again, with the clear dogwhistle right in the name – come in and validate us without actually adding any substance or clarity to the conversation, or even trying to make an argument in support. Just say “nope, that one’s right” and get a little heart react and everybody’s warm and fuzzy while the person pointing out the propaganda is discredited and run off.
In Conclusion
This message was crafted to stoke anti-war sentiment and progressive distrust of the status quo Democrats into pro-Russian sentiment that also inflames internal opposition to Biden. The “left” in the US has never been particularly cohesive to begin with, and it’s quite easy to invoke anti-war noisemaking to create conflict among us. Start throwing around exaggerated and baseless but emotionally appealing claims and you’re certain to ensnare those whose egos far outpace their intellect.
This, assembled guests, is just one example from the millions and millions of social media messages sent out every day with deliberately manipultive and malicious intent. The Russian government does a great deal of it to garner support for Putin’s imperalist aspirations; the plutocracy does it to herd us back to work in a pandemic; various and sundry interest who profit from confusion and strife are filling us constantly with well-designed nonsense – usually based on appealing to our egos in some way because that’s where we’re weakest – in order to weaken the entire concept of “democracy” because they believe that, being ruthless and having some access to resources, they believe they will benefit from the fall of democracy just like the Nazis benefitted from the persecution of Jews in the sudden availability to “good Germans” of fully furnished homes and fully stocked stores that had been appropriated by that persecution.
Of course the great truth of hard-right ideology is that the monsters these people are feeding will be perfectly happy eating them for lunch when they run out of “others.” You can always create more “others,” just pick a new group to scapegoat – Jews, leftists, people of color, religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill – as long as you can maintain that us vs. them pretense and con enough people into believing they’ll always be an “us” and never a “them,” you’ll not lack for targets for persecution until there’s nobody left to persecute at all and we’re reduced to a state of social development that makes feudalism look like egregious liberty.
They always believe they’re driving the machine until it runs them over.
Those of us with the perception to understand this is a losing strategy for everyone must ensure we are well armed and with eyes wide open. A startling percentage of leftists have been sucked in by this narrative.
Now (writing in October 2023) we’re seeing a whole new set of social disruption and argument in the wake of the recently escalated conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people – an argument with no possible “clean” resolution that’s been going on in one form or another literally since pre-historic times. We’ll be encouraged to pick one point or another in the past when things were “right,” then blame the “other” for making a mess of it.
Of course the only solution there ever was is for people to learn how to live peacefully and cooperatively together, but instead we’ll be continuously baited into these pointless arguments, we’ll become ever more radicalized against each other, and in the end the real objective – creating further factiousness and dissent among the free nations of the world, particularly those on the left working toward every more refined and effective democracy – will be gained unless we start taking the problem of disinformation seriously, right now.
Clearly we need further discussion of the two-party myths that are rampant in our discourse.
I ran into this on Facebook. For those of you with screen readers or other visual impairment which makes it difficult for you to read text in images, it reads as follows:
“We won’t be able to elect third parties if we never vote for third parties.
It doesn’t make sense for someone in a deep red state to theor their vote away on Biden when they can try and run up higher numbers for Cornel West
If they reach 5% of the popular vote, that guarantees ballot access and funding in the next election cycle.”
It doesn’t guarantee a platform though. Nor does it circumvent Duverger’s Law.
It’s important to point out at the top that this has been the operating strategy of “third parties” in this country for decades and it has yet to bear meaningful fruit. The two “third” parties that have made any headway at all, the Greens and the Libertarians, have yet to seat a federal legislator, and have only had spotty, inconsistent, and functionally useless success at the state level.
You won’t be able to elect “third” parties in an electoral system based on single-member districts decided by simple majority vote until one of the two existing major parties decays so much on one end of the spectrum that a challenger from the other end can rise effectively, while the party in the middle drifts into the space formerly occupied by the fallen second party. That’s what we’re seeing right now as the GOP implodes and the democratic party continues sliding to the right under neoliberal capitalist-plutocrat stewardship and patronage.
When serious leftist candidates have the confidence they can split off from the Dems and have a viable challenge from the left, it will happen. Then you’ll have a few cycles when the DNC basically runs the show while the GOP desperately tries to save itself by doubling down on plutocracy and the “new left” gets organized and gathers power from within the current Democratic party. We are probably in the early stages of this right now.
It’s never one time happened any other way, even the direction of the shifts and rises are consistent – a leftist party becomes one of the two “majors,” and in the process of trying to protect and grow its power begins compromising and sliding to the right.
As that slide – frequently called the “Overton Window” (* see below) – happens, the current right-wing group keeps moving further right until they hit the point of no longer being able to plausibly deny they’ve gone fascist/totalitarian. As the old left calcifies and stagnates it slides into the “moderate” right position. In every functional democratic system that has existed, it ends up either like this or with the hard right being so successful they rise to a level of power where they’re functionally capable of imposing the autocracy they crave and then you have a big war and a reset to more or less the status quo that existed prior to the rise of the right.
Examples of the earlier process can be found in the demise of the Whigs in the US in the 19th century; examples of the latter can be found in Germany and other nations in the mid-20th century. It always goes one way or the other. Not once in human history has a populist left-wing movement coalesced into a viable party from outside the existing party structure.
Focus on empowering your genuine leftists within the democratic party and helping them gather strength and viability so when the GOP finishes falling off the edge of fascism the new left has the confidence to believe they can step up. Your only other realistic option is sitting around carping about “third parties” and voting for almost universally unelectable candidates until you’re left with a one party system, and nobody wants that.
Short of everybody getting off their asses and actually learning their individual candidates and deciding on an individual basis who they’re going to vote for, which absolutely will never happen because people are generally lazy and love to be part of an in-group, that’s the only way you’re going to find a viable pushback against the fascism and autocracy that has wholly swallowed the GOP and taken in a horrifying portion of the DNC as well.
I know that’s not easy to hear and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the truth, and when we acknowledge it and work within it instead of trying impotently to fight the weather because it gratifies our egos to feel like we’re “too smart for that,” we’ll continue losing this country to fascism until we have to fight – literally – to get it back, and I don’t think anyone wants to go through that except the fascists, who think they’ll win that fight too.
(* We shouldn’t use the “Overton Window” labeling. Overton’s description is deliberately malformed to present the process as being unrelated to left or right but rather, disingenuously, as a question of what is “socially acceptable.” Fundamentally it’s an attempt to advise right-wing politicians how to avoid social disapproval and loss of electoral power by being too honest about their intentions. Overton was a fellow of the radical right-wing, plutocratic, self-described “think tank” The Mackinac Center For Public Policy.)
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.
Hey there folks I’m a little teapot short and stout and my name is John Henry from johnhenry.us, welcome to TLDR – “Too Long; Didn’t Read” – let’s have a short conversation about “the anger vote.”
Ran across this meme from Michigan Republicans posted via motivational speaker Matt Fol…er, sorry, that’s Matt Hall, who as it happens is my state representative.
The only thing breaking here is my eyeballs trying to find something meaningful in this statement.
The original post adds a comment about an “extreme partisan agenda” and a comment about “Big Labor,” with a link to more empty verbiage built to make you angry and stop you from asking about the details.
So first things first: “big labor” is you and me. Working people trying to get a living wage and dignified compensation and conditions for their work. That’s who he’s really pushing against here. Us.
Second, there are assertions made here that aren’t supported anywhere in the related text or links – “taking money away from the classrooms,” “giving it to corrupt (also unsupported) union bosses.” There’s no direct information path from this graphic to the substance of the issues he’s yammering about; you have to dig into the comments, follow the link to the Michigan GOP’s website article, read all the way through it, almost at the bottom you find the actual bill numbers.
Then you have to google and go read them, just to find out none of what he’s saying is true. For instance one of the bills he’s talking about repeals a law preventing state agencies from processing union dues as a payroll deduction, making it as annoying as possible to pay union dues.
Make the lie loud and clear. Make the truth hard to find.
You aren’t supposed to notice folks like Matt taking money away from public classrooms and giving it to churches and other private school operators, all of whom make political donations and in-kind contributions. You aren’t supposed to notice that’s an end-run around the establishment clause used to con the government into funding religious instruction.
Eventually you can take religion out completely and pretend you’re just a plucky entrepreneur “improving” education for everyone by privatizing it and monetizing it, and we’ll just ignore that you’re also destroying it and perpetuating outrageous abuses of power and elitism and reinforcements of systemic imbalances of power like racism and sexism…and most importantly, capitalism.
When I was a kid you had to pay out of pocket to access that privilege, now you just have to know the right people and fill out the right forms and the state will pay it for you – essentially giving you the same thing you were getting directly from the state 40 years ago, except it costs fifty times as much because of all the middle-men taking their cut along the way to pay folks like Matt here, plus it’s been split into separate systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest, and the privileged have stationed themselves as brokers and middle-men all along the way to get paid.
Told y’all when they started outsourcing the lunch lady to save a buck (which it never did) that it wouldn’t be long before they outsourced the whole school. People like Matt sneered and laughed from his van down by the river, just like they’ll sneer and laugh now because they think he cleverly avoided this whole conversation by simply saying “classrooms,” which helps hide the fact that what he’s really talking about is those privately owned classrooms that ultimately help fund his political career.
THOSE are the classrooms he’s really worried about money being taken away from – the classrooms that pay for his campaigns.
Then of course there’s the whole anti-union framing which is normal GOP politics and I won’t go into here other than to notice it.
What Matt here wants to motivate you to do is ignore the facts and feel like you and your kids are being attacked and robbed. There’s no evidence of that, there’s not even anyone credibly suggesting it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you go for the emotion and that bypasses the critical thinking and boom, half of southwest Michigan is pissed at the Democrats for stealing their schools.
It works the same everywhere. Stop falling for it. Cultivate emotional detachment from these issues and you’ll be able to see them more clearly.
That’s it for me I’m John Henry from JohnHenry.US reminding you that I stay independent by being crowdfunded, and that means everything I do here depends on you so remember to like, share, subscribe, and spread the word, and if you can please drop by johnhenry.us/money and you’ll find a range of one-time and ongoing weekly or monthly support options to help pay the bills and buy the gear that makes all this happen.
Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!
In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.
I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.
The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.
On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.
Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.
“The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.
So.
A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.
I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.
Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.
Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.
It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.
I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.
There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.
I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.
We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.
Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.
So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.
And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.
That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.
I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.
So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!
Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.
(Note: today’s MM is not good content for video/audio, so text only today.)
Good morning everyone, welcome to the Morning Message, and let’s start today with yet another douchebag who wants you to think he’s like me. He isn’t. I’m not a clickbaiting douchebag.
This is “Brad The Rambler”
And like any ass, he is very much full of crap.
For those of you on audio, we have a screenshot of Brad – a guy who very much looks like the kinds of people who decided to start wearing flannel and growing goatees right about the same time he heard of grunge music, that is to say two weeks ago. Which pisses me off because all of those people try way to hard to look like I’ve looked since about 1988, and then people think I’m one of them, and that sucks. He’s lip-syncing terribly over a currently popular sound clip that says “Remember kids, the next time somebody says your government wouldn’t do that, oh yes they would!” Then they wrap it around half-assed BS like this, it gets nuked or muted by the algorithm because it’s disinformation, and now the WAKED UP SHEEPLE get to claim they’re being censored.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!! EMBRACE THE TINFOIL HAT BECAUSE THAT MEANS YER AN INDEPENDENT THINKUR!
No, it means you’re an arrogant mark for yourself.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about his little bit of BS up there and get the truth of it out into the world. Not only is that truth worth understanding, but understanding how half-asses like this troll your attention away from people who actually bother knowing what the hell they’re talking about before they talk is also very much worth the effort.
For the benefit of the visually restricted, the caption on the video reads as follows: At the top, overtext reads “Did you know that Quaker Oats in collaboration with the US gov. and MIT fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally challenged kids while telling them they were part of a science club? They won a settlement of 1.85 million in 1998. Loyal to the foil.” Then the caption says “Remember the Fernald school and their part in the eugenics movement along with these terrible experiments that were done under the approval of the GOV…” and a bunch of clickbaity hashtags targeting the easily manipulated and not terribly bright.
This is one of those cases where someone is taking a kernel of truth, conflating it with a bunch of other kernels, and coming up with vapid clickbait bullshit that serves primarily to trivialize and humorize the thing they’re pretending to be angry about while also pandering to the literal tinfoil hat set.
Side note: If it’s supposed to be satire, it sucks, but I don’t think it is. When your “satire” is indistinguishable from actual kookery, it’s not satire anymore; it’s kookery. I suspect it’s supposed to be satire somehow because who seriously wears a tinfoil hat? But man…you sure can’t tell from the content.
There’s a clear, bright line between the mass of dumb clickbait like this and what I and other good-faith writers do, and that line is precisely the difference between acting in the interest of public knowledge and disclosure, and acting in the interests of stroking your own ego with bullshit while putting yourself off to other people just as gullible as you are for profit and social attention.
There’s no question that the US government engaged in non-consensual testing of radioactive material on various human subjects over a period of decades, and that it was ethically obnoxious and tended to mostly target the poor, minorities, and those institutionalized with mental health disorders.
That said, this is not some groundbreaking revelation of government malfeasance. This is a clickbaiting douchebag jumping on a trendy tiktok audio with a half-assed lip-synch and a misrepresented bit of unpleasant historical trivia because he thinks he’s cool and smart but he’s really just another attention-mongering twat on TikTok who can’t get his facts right and doesn’t care what polluting the information stream with feces does to discourse.
He’s also got way more money in tinfoil than any reasonable person ought to.
First, the specific event he’s speaking of happened during WWII. That’s not an excuse for the horrible ethics involved, but it also tells us that this happened in a context when such things were normal and even considered laudible by the mainstream of science, medicine, and government at the time. Horrible? Absolutely. Relevant to anything in 2023? Not in the least. Certainly there’s no action or demand to be made of GOV or “Quaker Oats” here, and again it’s not a historical secret or something that’s just been sitting around unknown until Chad The Scruffy Dudebro ferreted it out.
Certainly the US government has done far worse before and since. One example that comes immediately to mind which first surfaced as conspiracy theory and proved true was the illegal, clandestine, non-consensual dosing of US citizens and military personnel with LSD and other substances under the MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973. The Tuskeegee Syphilis murders were conducted for another 25 years after the Fernald School experiments ended. In the Fernald case the radioactive material was “tracer” material – basically inert, like barium before an x-ray or that stuff they put in you for an MRI that makes you feel like you’re wetting your pants. They give someone a tiny bit of radioactive calcium via injection or in their food, then study their bodies to find out how human beings process radiation, how long it takes to leave the body, etc.
Now I want to be clear that we are talking about non-consensual human medical experimentation, which is unquestionably horrible. Problem with this asshat trying to make money and attention from it is that we knew about all of this thirty years ago. Two entire whole-ass congressional committees were assembled to look at the whole question, reports were issued, condemnations sent forth, and compensation made in many cases (but not all). The problem of medical experimentation without informed consent not only isn’t secret, it’s been an ongoing high-profile conversation for half a century.
Another problem is that in his arrogance-besotted rush to be Mr. Social Media Star he overlooks a ton of information about this case that is far more contemporary and problematic. For instance, the fact that ostensibly progressive and leftist governor Deval Patrick forced the closure of the Fernald facility against the explicit wishes of patients and their families (after two decades of high-quality reform). The reason given for this was that it was “too expensive,” which is disgusting to me. There’s no such thing as “too expensive” to keep innocent people who are institutionalized living with dignity. The 1993 class action suit resolution explicitly specified that the facility was to remain open and a “guaranteed level of care” provided “regardless of cost,” Patrick’s administration fought this order and continued working to close the facility, refusing to negotiate with patient families and advocates, in order to save money. That’s ugly and wrong.
To me, that is the real story here: that yet another progressive champion, when faced with a question of putting people over profits, chose profits. That “the government,” when called to account, passed the buck and protected its own while throwing its minor minions under a bus.
But our boy didn’t get that far, or even close to it, because he’s worried about attracting the attention of credulous, easily manipulated rubes with anti-government agitation and the pretense of some kind of insider knowledge of a big secret conspiracy. Another aspect of the story that Detective Holmes here overlooked is that while Quaker Oats and MIT were ordered to pay $1.8M in restitution, the government agencies and programs that drove the experimentation weren’t held liable at all and suffered no sanction.
This of course just feeds in to the idea that this was some kind of corporate experiment done with the clandestine cooperation of rogue elements within the government, rather than the truth: it was a federal program in which a single individual commissioned by Quaker was involved, along with a couple of students and professors at MIT. That they were involved is absolutely problematic; that they’re the only ones held responsible is stupid and deceitful.
That this chode is trying to drum this up like it’s something relevant today beyond being a footnote in the long history of covert power abuse by the US government in the 20th century remains the most problematic part of this.
What convinced me to deconstruct this is that it’s a bit more nuanced than the usual handwaving “GUBMINT EVUL” clickbait. It’s not that it didn’t happen per se but rather a) it didn’t happen in at all the way this dork is claiming and b) it’s been revealed, examined in great depth, publicized, and dealt with for three decades now. There’s a PBS documentary about it that’s old enough to vote, although regrettably it’s inaccessible online unless you’re affiliated with a college or want to pay $200+ for it…which seems rather exploitative itself, to me.
This is the equivalent of a TikTok video breathlessly exclaiming that OH MY GOT THE GUY WHO SHOT KENNEDY USED TO BE A MARINE! SURELY THIS NEWS MUST BREAK THE INTERNET!
That’s the result – a congressional investigation in 1994 complete with condemning final report, and that investigation was ignited by the awarding of a Pulitzer prize to the reporter, Eileen Welsome, who first uncovered the information that led to the disclosure of condemning details related to the program. It was first exposed in a science newsletter in 1976, and Mother Jones ran a story about it by Howard Rosenberg in 1981 which led to an even earlier congressional investigation and report, driven largely by congressman Ed Markey and resulting in congressional hearings in 1986. However at that time the Reagan administration refused to cooperate with the investigation.
The problem here is this chump is trying to further exploit and abuse these people by blowing it up into “eugenics,” which was never the purpose of the experiments, and by appealing to vapid, stupid “waah government” garbage that I’ve discussed the problems with many, many times in the past – primarily that it acts as a smokescreen to prevent us from asking whose government that was, who elected them, who trusted them, and who failed to raise an objection when the abuse was happening.
That tends to piss me off because now in order to get the facts right my dumb ass has to look like I’m defending non-consensual medical experimentation, which I’m not. It’s absolutely abhorrent that we as humans ever looked at one another as suitable for non-consensual experimentation because we were “other” – in the case of the Fernald school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Fernald_Developmental_Center), children with mental or behavioral dysfunctions. While it’s indisputible that the school’s namesake was a eugenicist, it’s very much disputable that this was in any way the purpose of the experiments conducted on their students given that the man had already been dead for a quarter-century by then.
The sensationalized implication of Quaker Oats amounts to their sponsorship of a single research fellow in all of this. This Hermoine-headed bloviating dumbass turns that into Quaker Oats just woke up one day and said “hey let’s inject a bunch of mentally challenged kids with deadly radiation for funsies! We’ll get the GOV in on it, they just love turning people into glowing green soup for no reason!”
I find the summary of the ACHRE to stand sufficient for a level-headed, non clickbait analysis:
“In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.”
The Wiki points out elsewhere that by “low” they mean “less than the annual background radiation absorbed by a typical resident of Denver, Colorado.” – 330 millirems (3.3 millisieverts), for those keeping score at home. That’s about 3/4 of the exposure from a single mammogram.
If homey wasn’t trying to BS his way into cheap clickbait traffic he’d have done five minutes of work and found the REALLY outrageous stuff, like the case of Ebb Cade or the systemic forced sterilization – mostly but not entirely of poor, Black, women – conducted under the aegis of law in North Carolina. That was still happening until 1977, the laws empowering it weren’t repealed from NC law until 2003, and it had a hell of a lot more to do directly with eugenics than anything related to the Fernald School experiments.
So now instead of some shocking revelation of government abuse, what we’ve got is some sketchy dudebro telling the world what a genius he is because he stumbled over a Wikipedia article about some things that happened before most us and indeed most of our parents were even born, and he’s desperate for traffic so he’s gonna act like it’s any cooler for him to exploit these people by using them to troll for internet traffic than it was to exploit them by testing them to find out how the human body handles radiation.
Plus we’ve got a couple of added bonuses: by shifting focus away from the far more obnoxious practices in the South to these events in Massachusetts, we deflect the problem of racism – which was a key component of eugenics laws – completely out of the picture. Can’t imagine why a white guy would want to do that! It’s also a subtle play into the typical hyperdefensive line of “the North is more bigoted than the South” games played by southern bigots to minimize the intensely disgusting nature of their bigotry, and of course distracts from other issues as previously discussed.
LOOKIT MEEE I’M SOOOO SMRT N CLEVUR I FOUND THE BIG SECRET! No, chump, no you didn’t. What you did is find a seventy year old crime that was federally investigated thirty years ago and the victims compensated, and now you’re blowing it up because it’s obscure and you think it’ll draw attention to you as some deeply thoughtful and well-researched anti-authoritarian warrior because it’s not one of the more widely known abuses of government power in US history.
This is hubris on the level of Columbus “discovering” the Americas.
The reason for that is that all things considered it was about the least abusive and obnoxious of the abuses committed by the US government against their people in the mid-20th century. No injuries, no long-term damage found, no resulting health problems. The kids weren’t beaten or forced to grow tumors or forcibly sterilized against their will.
Certainly there’s nothing here that merits trying to validate a broad-stroke “anti-government” message in 2023, thirty years after the legal system already addressed the issue and fifty years after that process began, against a background of far more egregious and troubling abuses including some related directly to this incident that the clickbaiter doesn’t even touch.
It was a crime. That crime was punished and the victims compensated. One may certainly argue the value and propriety of that compensation, but acting like this whole thing is some deep dark secret that nobody knew about and now ol’ Inspector Bradget here is gonna tell you who’s behind the curtain is just the most outrageously self-serving bunch of bullshit ever.
This guy doesn’t give the first damn about abuse of power, institutionalized kids being abused, or revealing dark secrets of our culture; what he gives a damn about is whether he can con some freshman sorority pledge into sleeping with him because he’s oh so edgy and counterculture. It’s written all over his face and attitude, and mostly it’s written in the way he’s taken what could be a pretty decent story that encourages people to look more closely at their government and how they make political decisions, and turned it into a covert dating advertisement.
As a sidebar it’s a pretty good example of why it wouldn’t bother me in the least if TikTok and its analogs disappeared from the ‘net entirely. Issues like this aren’t made for 30-second explanations.
All of this took me about fifteen minutes to ferret out in Google searches enriched by prior education and reasonably well-developed critical thinking skills…and that tells me that rather than a substantive and meaningful effort to bring attention to an obscure violation of human rights, this author’s primary purpose is drawing attention to themselves, and that’s no more ethical, honorable, or even useful than the crimes they claim to be revealing.
Always check. Even my work – I’m not infallible either.
Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!
In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.
I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.
The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.
On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.
Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.
“The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.
So.
A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.
I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.
Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.
Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.
It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.
I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.
There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.
I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.
We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.
Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.
So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.
And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.
That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.
I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.
So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!
Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.
