Watch And Learn - About Me - JohnHenry.US [BETA]

Page Contents

Page Preface

This is the “About Me” section of “Watch and Learn.” It has to be said out loud that I’m well aware of the irony/hypocrisy involved in having an entire “about me” section in a project that I keep saying explicitly is not “about me.” That said, it’s reasonable for people to ask who I am and what my background is and what qualifies me to do any of this. This section contains the answers to those questions, to the extent I think it’s appropriate and non-disruptive to the project for me to offer them.

You can find the various sections and clips, with their respective embedded videos, here:

The video embedded on this page contains the entire chapter in one piece.

Video

Basic Bio

Yes, my real name is John Henry. My last name is DeJong, but I’ve been known as John Henry professionally and socially since the early 1990s. I come by the name honestly; my father was John and my mother’s father was Henry.

I was born and raised in southwest Michigan and have spent substantial periods of my life in the Raleigh-Durham and Salt Lake City areas, shorter periods in Milwaukee, WI; South Carthage, TN; Pasadena, TX; and the Winters-Woodland CA area. I currently live in Portland, Oregon.

Politics & Affiliations

Related to my activism, I’m not on anyone’s payroll and never have been. I’ve never registered with a political party, nor been employed by any party or candidate, nor done volunteer work for any such entity directly, although I have advocated for, or against, various candidates over the years on my own initiative and without contact or coordination with anyone involved. I’m not being bankrolled by any billionaires or shadowy organizations. I’m not a Super PAC or a “union” or a “party” or a “front.” The only agenda I have in this work is the survival and evolution of the species. Peace, love, progress, justice, equity, sustainability, dignity, for all.

I work for no one and I answer to no one – if I did I’d look better and be working with better equipment and resources. I do the people’s work for the people as best I can using the gifts and privileges I have, while also trying, like all of us, to live my little life.

Childhood

As a child I was discovered to be what was then called “extraordinarily gifted.” As a matter of personal inclination, I agree with Stephen Hawking: people who brag about their IQ are idiots, but those without much to brag about anyway always insist on first demanding the pedigree and then denouncing you for providing it.

So let’s end that silliness right here, get it over with, and move on.

I am one of “those people,” the “gifted and talented,” the “geniuses.” 99.98^th percentile and all that jazz. I’ve discussed the supporting details many times in public. Anyone with the wit to listen will readily perceive for themselves that I’m no lightweight, amateur or poser. Anyone who doesn’t is welcome to get left behind if they don’t want to come along. Not the choice I’d make, but it’s not my choice to make.

We no longer have time for personality nonsense and ego contests. Listen, and you’ll know.

Aside from that, I’ve been politically active since childhood, often with a focus on environmental, anti-authoritarian, and human and civil rights issues.

Family

My dad was born in The Hague, NL, in 1943. Both of his parents and their families were active on the anti-fascist Dutch underground, helping thousands of people escape Europe during the war. He came to the US at age 4 ½ and later served as a US Marine from 1961-1966 – serial number ending in 7452, for you folks who want to dig, but much of his record was lost in the 1973 NPRC fire in St. Louis, so the full picture may no longer be available.

He often recounted, as his earliest memory, the Schutzstaffel breaking into his home when he was perhaps two years old, looking for his father to arrest him and send him to the camps as a political prisoner. I was only aged two myself when his dad died, and I have no documentation, but the family story has it that he was in fact captured very late in the war – after Hitler’s suicide – and was on a railroad cattle-car for the camps when he and several other men were able to overpower the few guards and escape with perhaps 70 others during a stop.

My mother is Choctaw, Cherokee, Caddoh, Black, and a smidgen of Irish and German probably mixed in there somewhere. Her father’s family, particularly her patrilineage, are the subject of a biography titled “A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas.” by Billy D. Higgins, who is a professor at the University of Arkansas. As far as I know. the book remains in print but may not yet be available electronically.

I was raised with a deep set of values related to authority, power, honor, fairness, responsibility, integrity, and resistance to tyranny. My mom’s people were dirt poor folks from southeastern Missouri who moved to rural Michigan for agricultural work. My dad’s were strangers in a strange land.

Activism

If you need a political label, I am a progressive. I want us to evolve to our best selves. Other labels that may apply only serve to broadly describe the best way to get there.

Much of my work over the years in these areas has related to integrity of actors in the progressive and left-wing information spaces. I believe fundamentally that secrecy and tyranny are closely related – so closely that, as a general principle, you can’t have one without the other.

I have often openly and aggressively criticized “leaderless movements,” ad-hoc “protests” that look suspiciously more like self-promotion than political action, and online fake-tivism whereby people whose only interest in ideology is how they can make money from it pretend to be activists and, using their ill-gotten gains, control the narrative on all sides.

I am usually the person asking, “wait, who says so? who is running the show here and what are their interests?” That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this section of the project: if I was watching someone do what I’m doing, “who the hell is this guy” would definitely be the first question on my mind.

Much of my “career,” if you choose to think of it as that, has been spent encouraging people to ask precisely those questions. As a lifelong matter of personality, I “wear my heart on my sleeve.”

So, questions answered.

Deeper Dive

I’ve always favored the underdog. I have always been one, my childhood a daily trial of near-constant targeting by bullies and brutes who hated me because I used big words and read books faster than they could and was always the first one to raise their hand with the right answer in class.

You’d be surprised how little changes in 50 years. I’m still usually the first one in class to raise my hand with the right answer, and the bullies of the world still hate me for it intensely.

Frankly the feeling is mutual, but they deserve their chances to be better too. I got mine. As long as they’re acting in good faith, forgiveness is always possible.

I’m a musician. I started playing drums at age 8 and have enjoyed varying minor degrees of success and notoriety doing that over the years in various places.

I first became deeply interested in propaganda and social control through mass communication when the US Libertarian Party started trying to recruit me to run for office, in part because of my visibility as a musician. That was when I was maybe 19 or 20 – not old enough to drink legally, for sure.

After having a life including trying my best to be a dad after I became one at eighteen, I attended Western Michigan University starting at age 40 in 2010, majoring in communication and minoring in political science. I completed all my major and minor coursework, but financial incapacity forced me to drop out roughly two full-time semesters short of my BA. I’d like to finish some day.

The Closet

I am not media ready.

I haven’t always been as good a person as I would like to have been. I have faced that, made my amends, and strive daily to be the best me I can.

My hairline’s receding and my looks are fading and I’m nobody’s idea of a politician.

I have complex PTSD, major depressive disorder, adhd, I’m autistic. I’ve been addicted. I’ve been abusive, and abused. There is major crime in my family, some of a nature that forbids public description.

There are plenty of people in the world who will be happy to tell you bad things about me. A few of them may even be true, and fairly spoken.

None of these things are secrets and none of them are relevant to the validity of what I’m going to present to you in this series of videos and in this direct action movement.