Tag Archives: activism

My dear fellow liberals: PLEASE stop being know-nothing dumbasses

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A short while ago, CNN published an explosive story about a group of men coordinating with each other on Telegram and porn sites in what CNN calls an “online rape academy,” exchanging tips and techniques to drug their wves and then rape them or invite others to rape them. These men exchanged photos of their wives being raped along with adivce on drugging them.

Horrifying stuff. Decent people all over the internet are reacting with shock and sorrow and rage. As they should.

And yet…and yet…a lot of folks in social justice communities are doing what folks in social justice communities do, getting so worked up into a towering inferno of rage that they behave like the most ignorant MAGA dumbasses they deride, spouting absolute rubbish that is not only not true but cannot possibly be true, and of course shouting down anyone who tries to correct them.

Folks, don’t do this.

Yes, a large group of men did this. Yes, it’s abhorrent. No, it was not 62 million men. If you’re one of the countless people taking to the Great Online to scream your moral outrage that sixty-two million men could do such a horriffic thing, you are being a dumbass, you do not care about truth, and you are playing into the hands of conservatives who wish to mock, ridicule, and ultimately trivialize moral atrocity.

This is a trend I’ve noticed in social justice communities in North America over the last decade or so: moral outrage first, fact-checking later, truth never.

So let’s take a look at the CNN article and figure out where this “62 million men” idea comes from, shall we?

Here it is, in black and white:

Now, yes, this is poorly written (shame on the CNN editors!) and could have been much clearer. So, in the interests of fact and truth, let me spell this out clearly:

There is a site called Motherless. It gets about 62 million visits a month.

On this site was a group of people posting rape content.

That does not mean 62 million people were visiting rape content per month. C’mon. If you’re screaming outrage on the internet, you should know how the internet works.

There is a site called Reddit. It gets about 394 million visitors a month. If someone creates a subreddit called “How to Torture Kittens,” that does not mean that 394 million people a month visit that subreddit. It does not mean 394 million people a month want to learn how to torture cats.

Motherless, like Reddit, is huge. Motherless, like Reddit, has communities of people with different interests. Motherless calls them “groups,” Reddit calls them “subreddits.” Nobody visits every single Motherless group, just like nobody visits every single Reddit subreddit.

I thought this was obvious. Apparently it is not.

Yes, this Motherless group is horrific. Yes, any number of men visiting such a group is too many.

Truth. Matters.

Truth fucking matters. Going into hysterical screeds about “62 million men visiting a r@pe academy” makes those of us who care about social justice look like dumbasses. It makes us look like hypocrites when we insist on fact-checking conservatives. “Hahaha lookit these dumbass liberals, always saying ‘facts this’ and ‘fact-check that’ but when it’s their side they don’t give a shit about facts, LOL.”

It allows social conservatives to weaponize our own insistence on truth and facts against us. It allows people to ridicule and dismiss what we say. “ROFL these liberals, yapping about a ‘r@pe academy’ but they don’t even understand how the internet works, you can’t believe anything SJWs say.”

There can be no justice without truth. The truth is that 62 million men did not visit this Motherless group.

If you think I’m trying to trivialize this horror, you’re dead wrong. There can be no justice without truth. It gets right up my fucking nose when social justice liberals insist on facts and reason when we address the other side, then do the same things we accuse the other side of doing: playing fast and loose with reality in order to score cheap emotional points.

Yes, I know that the CNN article is ambiguous. I see how people acting in good faith reasonably came to the conclusion that 62 million men wanted to learn how to drug and assault their wives. But that’s not what happened, and now that you know that’s not what happened, if you continue to claim that’s what happened, you’re practicing accountability for thee but not for me. We are all accountable to the truth. There can be no justice without truth.

My fellow liberals, do better.

I started down this rabbit hole when I saw a comment on Facebook, where someone had posted about how “62 million men want to r@pe their wives” and then flew into a rage when someone else left a comment basically saying “I wish people would fact check, that number is not correct.” I switched over to my mobile browser to read the original CNN article and when I switched back,t hat post had scrolled off my Facebook feed.

If you’re pissed off about being corrected over something like this, you are the reason so many conservatives view us like this:

You may not see yourself in this meme, you may sincerely believe this meme doesn’t describe you, but other people see it.

If you expect the other side to listen to facts when you fact-check them, then you damn well have to be willing to listen and accept accountability when someone fact-checks you.

Do better. Be better. Facts matter. There can be no justice without truth. We do not win a culture war with the cheap emotional tools of the other side.

Anyone coming into the comments to try to excuse or justify deliberate factual misstatements or to argue that it’s okay to say things that aren’t true because our outrage is pure and our cause is just or that insisting on facts is the same thing as “defending rape” will be blocked permanently and without hesitation.

Marry an Angry Woman

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There I was, doom-scrolling social media at half past midnight a short while back, when this piece of AI slop floated through my feed:

I asked Google Gemini to gender-swap the image and the message, which it did without complaint:

Sorta lands a little different, doesn’t it?

There are a couple of things going on here that I find interesting. The first is that the attitude in the top meme is incredibly, bizarrely popular in certain corners of the Internetverse right now. Basically, the memes are all variants on “yeah, I’m a toxic or angry or manipulative woman, but that’s okay, you should put up with it in order to get the benefit of being with me.”

That’s not a new idea—there’s a common meme of Maralyn Monroe with a caption “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” that’s been circulating since the age of dialup Internet—but it’s weirdly popular in some corners right now. Which brings up the second point:

When you flip the script, it’s obvious how toxic this idea is.

We don’t see it when it’s a woman because we (by which I mean soceety as a whole) don’t take violence by women, especially violence by women to men, seriously. We instinctively recognize the danger of marying an angry man, but marrying an angry woman? Aww, she’s so cute when she’s mad! The greatest worry about marrying a woman is not that she’ll abuse you, it’s that you won’t know what’s on her mind every moment of the day. But hey, marry an angry woman, problem solved, she’ll tell you!

As someone who escaped an angry and controlling women, if I could express in words how deeply fucked up this is, your screen would explode. I could write an entire book unpacking how deeply problematic this is. And the fact that so many people can’t see why it’s problematic is one of those problems.

In a world where I had more time, I’d create a social media account where I just posted inversions of these memes to see what happened.

Ask Me Why I’m In the Epstein Files

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A couple days ago, a friend of mine from Quora sent me this button, which I wear on the front pocket of my jacket:

Just for the record, it’s true. I am, in fact, listed in the Epstein Files. Specifically, I’m listed in document EFTA00700657.pdf in DataSet 9.

The US Department of Justice has a searchable database that you can use to look up names. Sure enough, I’m there.

I’m certain that the sorts of people who send rape and death threats to random women because they don’t like me will make some hay over this, which should be fun to watch. Meanwhile, here in the real world, why am I in the Epstein Files?

Glad you asked.

I am in the Epstein Files because I am a Top Writer on the social media site Quora, and most Quora Top Writers are listed in the Epstein Files.

Why are most Quora Top Writers in the Epstein Files?

The Epstein Files are not files of people who were connected to serial child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Or at least, those aren’t the only people in the files. The Epstein Files list everyone ever mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein ever sent or received (including spam emails), along with everyone known to be at any public event he attended (including events like movie premieres).

Jeffrey Epstein was on Quora for a time. That means he received the Quora Digest, a regular email highlighting popular answers on the site. The digest emails look like this:

Because I’m a Top Writer, my answers are frequently featured in the Quora Digest. (In fact, for a while one of my answers was featured in the screenshots for the Quora appl on the Apple and Google App Stores.)

Because the Epstein Files list everyone mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein sent or received (Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files 101 times; apparently Jeffrey Epstein loved to whine about him), and Jeffrey Epstein received the Quora Digest emails, I’m listed in them.

I wrote an essay on Quora about a convention in the UK issuing a statement banning palentologists listed in the Epstein Files from attending, an excellent example of how easy it is to manipulate people online. The convention isn’t a serious academic event—their website looks almost as amateurish as a Geocities site, it’s sponsored by a toy company, and as near as I can tell only one palentologist appears in the files, a guy who retired a decade ago and would not have been presenting at the convention anyway—but they got a lot of media attention and a bunch of congratulatory “ooh, ahh, you’re so brave, look at you taking a stand for ethics!” social media from the same sorts of people who boasted they were not going to see the new Avatar movies in solidarity with indigenous and aboriginal groups who didn’t like the movies, but were never going to see them anyway.

The Internet hates nuance. People would, by and large and speaking across the left-right divide, rather be told who to love, who to hate, and what opinions they should voice rather than, you know, applying reason to their own positions. (Liberals love to laugh at conservatives for doing this, but in my experience and observation liverals are just as prone to it, or possibly more so).

Yes, I am in the Epstein Files. No, I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited Kiddy Diddler Island. (I mean, c’mon.)

I know this is not a fashionable opinion right now, but: Folks, it’s easy to manipulate people with phony narratives and social media stories. Living in a polarized society makes this even easier, and it’s cheap to make yourself feel good with self-congratulatory “moral stands” that give you a nice hit of dopamine when other people tell you how brave and moral you are for casting out the bad people and sending rape threats to women and whatever it is the social media mob tells you to do today. In such an age, principled, fact-based attitudes are a rarity. Try to be one of those.

[Edited to add] A couple of people have asked me what point I’m trying to make here. I thought my point was evident, but apparently I wasn’t as clear as I hoped. So:

“Being in the Epstein files” does not indicate wrongdoing. There are tens of thousands of people named in the Epstein Files. Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files. Marilyn Monroe is named in the Epstein Files, and Jeffrey Epstein was less than ten years old when she died.

I am concerned about people doing what the DinoCon organizers did, virtue-signaling and gaining unearned publicity by excluding anyone named in the files. I strongly suspect this will keep happening; while I hope I’m wrong, I predict that over the next couple of years this will become more and more popular.

I’m concerned about it for two reasons:

  1. It’s empty, purposeless virtue signaling. DinoCon is not keeping anyone safe; they’re playing look-at-me, I’m-so-great games. I find this kind of empty moral posturing stupid and pointless at best, actively harmful at worst. I believe this is a moral panic in the making.
  2. More important, this empty posturing diverts attention from actual child abusers who are listed in the files. Already I’m seeing a new narrative emerging on social media: “Look, the Epstein Files are a big nothing-burger. Liberals are making a fuss over them, but Marilyn Monroe is in them! Ha ha ha, look how dumb those liberals are.”

Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. The people protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s influential, politically powerful child molesters are monsters. This is a serious crisis, arguably among the most serious threats to American governance in the last century. Let’s not play self-congratulatory virtue-signaling games with it and let’s not get sidetracked. It should be possible to hold both these ideas simultaneously: they are a serious record of deep, systemic abuse of the most vulnerable by powerful, wealthy, connected men, and also simply being named in them is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing.

If we want to see justice, we must be willing to evaluate the evidence critically, rationally, and thoughtfully. Yes, that requires work…but that’s the way it’s always been.

Notes from the Front: No Kings Portland

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I’ve never participated in a political rally before. But then, I’ve never lived under a President as crass, stupid, corrupt, petty, incompetent, and craven as the Mango Mussolini/Vladimir Futon Administration.

October 18 was sunny, cool, and gorgeous, with the typical slop Portland calls “autumn” temporarily at bay…perfect poke-in-the-eye weather to crass little tyrant wannabes. And apparently the rest of PDX agreed.

I saw the sign first, the most clever I’ve seen yet in all the current *flails arms* whatever the hell it is that passes for a government we have, and only after noticed that it was carried by someone I knew. I accidentally met up with a group of old friends I don’t see nearly often enough.

I saw a ton of awesome signs, like this one (though the current balless wonders in Congress cut off their own testicles of their own accord, so I don’t really see them rushing out to get new ones).

Not sure if “Epstein flies” is intentional or unintentional, but I find it hilarious. Epstein flies: the people who clung to the lump of shit Epstein, rubbing their faces in it.

I love that Portland has made protesting funny. The worst thing you can possibly do to an authoritarian is not to disobey him, it’s to laugh at him. Trump hates being mocked; it’s one of the cornerstones of his rapidly disintegrating personality.

You go, strange Portland inflatable creatures.

I love the energy and execution of this sign. Reminds me a bit of Woody Guthrie’s “This machine kills fascists.” Mixing old and new pop-culture references? I’m here for it.

Simple, but oh so true.

Some thoughts on men’s rights

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In which Franklin makes everyone on all sides of the political divide angry

Okay, so. Some short while ago, a question floated through my Quora feed: Should men’s rights be more talked about, yes or no?

The thing about this question is it does not, and cannot, have a simple yes or no answer, because “rights” are not one thing. But even talking about talking about men’s rights tends to get people’s backs up. I will try to be as evenhanded as possible, in full understanding that I should be able to make everyone very angry indeed.

Image: lightsource

Let’s start here: The things people talk about when they talk about “rights,” especially in the context of systemic oppression, fall into two camps: rights everybody should have, and rights nobody should have. Conflating these things eradicates nuance and causes people to talk past each other.

Before I go any further, fair warning: Whataboutism, sealioning, and oppression Olympics in the comments will be terminated with extreme prejudice.

The most common objection I hear to any discussion about men’s rights is some variant of “men already control most of the world’s wealth, men are overrepresented in government and the upper tiers of corporations, men wield disproportionate power, the last thing on earth men need is more rights.”

That’s good sound bite activism, but it’s also a fetid, steaming pile of bullshit that’s irrelevant to any thoughtful discussion of men’s rights.

Yes, it is unquestionably true that men have all these advantages. We live in societies that overwhelmingly advantage men, absolutely. Yes, this is undeniable. Conservative men in the back who are getting pissed off because I said that, sit down. You hold tremendous advantages over women. American society gives you breaks that women don’t have. That’s just a fact.

Liberals, wait your turn, I’ll piss you off in a minute.

Yes, men are advantaged. Obviously. And that has fuckall to do with men’s rights, because those advantages are not rights. No reasonable person is saying that men should have more of that, because those are advantages nobody should have merely because they were born with a certain configuration of genitals.

When I worked as a designer, there was a ha-ha-only-serious notajoke common in the industry: “This would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the clients.”

There’s a similar problem with men’s rights: it would be a wonderful conversation if it weren’t for the men having it.

Men’s rights activists (at least in the US; I don’t see this nearly as much in Europe) include some of the most terrible people you will ever find outside a Khmer Rouge death squad. They use “men’s rights” as a platform to bang on about how much they hate women and whine about how women’s liberation ruined the world because now they can’t find a nice passive sperm receptacle who will fuck them and make them a sandwich. I mean, they’re so awful, malignant narcissists look at MRAs and say “my god, there goes a bunch of toxic self-obsessed losers and no mistake.”

But beneath the self-indulgent whining, they do, and I have to grit my teeth to type this, they do have some legitimate points.

Like, for example, and this is the bit where having alienated a bunch of conservative men, I’ll piss off a bunch of liberals: Abuse of men by women, physical and emotional, is way, way, way, way, way, way more common than most people believe.

Like, we live in a society that trivializes, dismisses, and denies abuse of men by women—so much so that many people actually support abusive women.

Like, we live in a society that mocks male abuse survivors. I’ve experienced this myself.

Like, there are in fact double standards about men who sexually abuse young girls and women who sexually abuse young boys; women who sexually abuse underage victims consistently receive lighter penalties, according to peer-reviewed studies.

Like, men are more likely to die by suicide than women. Like, men are disproportionately victims of violence, though to be honest that’s a bit of an own goal because we’re more likely to be perpetrators of violence as well.

Ideally, conversations about rights are independent of the identity of the person having them. All rights—men’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Black rights, trans rights, religious rights—are human rights.

In practice, we cannot always frame the conversation that way, because patterns of institutional oppression mean that the abrogation of human rights always, always affects some groups of people more than others. This is why “all lives matter” and “feminism should be humanism” fail. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway; another is they’re disengenuous claptrap, but even assuming they were put forward in good faith, they’d still fail.)

It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the house that’s burning than the one that is not. It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the groups that are more disenfranchised than the ones that have more structural power.

Having said that, the lens with which we look at rights should always start with, is this something everyone should have? That’s a good first-pass filter to separate rights from privileges.

Should everyone have the right to be free of violence and abuse in their intimate relationships? Yes. Obviously.

Does intimate partner abuse disproportionately affect women? Yes. Obviously,

Does that make it okay to declare intimate partner abuse of men a non-issue? No. Obviously not. (Well, you’d think obviously not, but…)

People abuse and people are abused. Men abuse women. Women abuse men. Women abuse women. Men abuse men. We need to acknowledge that and we need to take it all seriously. “More women suffer so it’s okay if men suffer” is fucking monstrous and anyone who plays oppression Olympics that way does not deserve a fucking seat amongst decent human beings, and that’s a fucking hill I will die on.

At the same time, men, listen up.

Yes, it’s true that men can be drafted and women can’t, and it’s totally reasonable to frame this as an issue of men’s rights…

…but here’s the thing. There are 535 people in Congress and 384 of them are men, so please, for the love of God, stop yapping that this is a problem women need to fix. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.

Men passed those laws. Not women. Men hold the balance of power in Congress. Not women. The president is a man, not a woman. Shut your yaps about “I wOn’T sUpPoRt WoMeN’s RiGhTs UnTiL tHe WoMeN tAkE a StAnD aGaInSt ThE dRaFt.” Men, not women, created that problem. Men, not women, have the power to change it.

Same goes for men being more likely to die by violence than women. Yeah, we are…

…at the hands, overwhelmingly, of other men. How do you expect women to fix this, exactly?

A lot of the problems MRAs yap about can be traced directly to toxic masculinity, which is overwhelmingly those beliefs and attitudes held by men that are harmful to men. Don’t shove a stick in your own bicycle wheel and whine about what women did to you, my brother.

Alllllll that being said:

Society is fucked up and unequal and advantages some people over others, and yeah on balance men have a lot of things better than women do, but privilege is intersectional and there are places men are disadvantaged and yeah, if we’re talking about groups that are disadvantaged by structural social institutions we need to talk about places that happens to men too, and if that hurts your liberal fee-fees maybe it’s time to go take some remedial courses in basic human empathy and come back when you’ve grokked the notion that systemic harm is always wrong, even when it hurts people who are otherwise advantaged.

And now that I’ve pissed everyone off, I will say good day.

“I don’t care about your stock portfolio:” A peek inside MAGA

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Last night, whilst casually doomscrolling Elon Musk’s weird hatesite Twitter (if he can deadname his daughter, I’ll deadname his propaganda engine), I randomly came across a long screed from a MAGA True Believer that I screencapped, because it offers such an interesting insight into the alternate reality of MAGA.

Here it is for the benefit of screen readers:

No one in my family who voted for Trump owns any stocks

For all the rich Democrats panicking today- you now know how it must have felt

When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs

When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot

When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis

And When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”

If you see this post, I hope you look in the mirror at some point today and recognize the destruction your own party has played in the lives of working class Americans

This is what liberation day is all about

No one is going to weep for your stock portfolio

Where were you when we lost our American dream?

If this isn’t the perfect example of self-sabotaging, “hurt myself to own the libs” alternate history narcissism, I don’t know what is. It’s absolutely fascinating.

And the thing is, it’s not completely bonkers. It starts with a kernel of truth. Yes, the American dream did bypass a lot of people, especially poor, uneducated workers who were told that factory job would always be there for them after they dropped out of high school, and for generations it was…until it wasn’t any more.

They woke up one day to a bleak landscape of poverty, unemployment, drugs, and complete irrelevance. They have few prospects and no path forward.

They’re angry, reasonably. They’re suffering. They feel neglected and passed over because they are neglected and passed over. They’re unable to put food on the table, they’re spiraling into drug addiction, and whenever they try to say anything about it, they’re treated as the butt of standup comedy jokes, if anyone pays any attention to them at all.

And in their rage, they’re shooting themselves in the gut with a shotgun in the hopes that some of the splash will make life worse for the liberals they blame for all their woes.

So, let’s talk about this post.

This is too long to fit in a Tweet, thanks to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it always takes more work to counter bullshit than it takes to vomit it up in the first place.

So from the top:

Yes, she’s correct that her MAGA family doesn’t own stock. It’s quite likely her MAGA family can’t really explain what the stock market even is or how it works. When you live in, say, rural Kentucky, Wall Street seems like it’s on another planet, utterly unconnected with you or your life. It goes up, it goes down, who cares? Doesn’t affect you. If some rich people (not sure why they say rich Democrats, the people who make money in the stock market tend to be Republicans) lose money, what of it? Doesn’t affect them!

They actually believe this, because they don’t understand how the stock market works, so they see no connection between the price of stocks on Wall Street and the construction of a new factory in Louisville.

But more than that, they are hurt and angry, and their pain and rage has been manipulated to point at the wrong target. (This is easy to do; angry people are always vulnerable to manipulation.)

I’m going to go from the bottom up, because the first bit, the one about Jimmy Carter “destroying trucking jobs,” is especially delicious and ironic, cutting right to the heart of the intellectual dysfunction of MAGA.

So:

When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”

…he was right.

One of the fundamental conceits of the MAGA movement, which is first and foremost a populist movement of low-information voters, is that the President is somewhere between a king and a dictator, with a bunch of buttons on his desk that control everything from the price of eggs to the number of jobs at the local Piggly Wiggly.

To them when Obama said “those jobs aren’t coming back,” he wasn’t stating something that was already true, he was making it so. He decided those jobs wouldn’t come back, and then did…whatever it is they imagine that presidents do to make it happen.

They genuinely don’t get that their jobs disappeared because their boss outsourced to China, not because Obama made them go away. They genuinely don’t get that this is fundamental to how capitalism works. They genuinely don’t get that coal mining is done by machines today, not by dudes in overalls carving coal from dark tunnels. They genuinely don’t get that fewer people want to buy coal now.

It’s easier to blame the brown person than to learn basic economics. They genuinely don’t get that the president doesn’t decide how many people the mines hire.

Given a choice between the person who said “your coal mining jobs will never come back, but I will pay you to learn something else!” and the person who said “durr, I love coal, durr,” they chose the latter.

And guess what?

The jobs didn’t come back. Obviously.

When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis

This is a common narrative on the Right. “Bill Clinton signed a law that stopped banks from redlining Black people to keep them from buying houses. A bunch of Black people with no money bought houses they couldn’t afford and boom.” Simple, easy to grasp, easy to understand if you don’t have an education.

Problem is, that’s not what happened. For one thing, if it was all Bill Clinton’s doing then why did the housing crisis happen everywhere in the world, not just in the United States? (Easy answer: MAGAs tend not to know or care what happens in the world, the USA is the only thing they know about.)

For another, if it was all about those dumbass poors buying houses they couldn’t afford, how come it overwhelmingly affected lenders who weren’t covered by Bill Clinton’s law? And how come the overwhelming majority of foreclosures happened in suburbs, not inner cities?

There’s a whole dive into this here, but the tl;dr is: It wasn’t Clinton. The truth is complicated; “Clinton did it” fits on a bumper sticker. If you’re poorly educated, bumper sticker logic wins every time.

When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot

Classic MAGA, right here.

The idea of a free trade agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada started in 1984 with Ronald Reagan. In 1988, Reagan signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement.

But what about NAFTA?

One of the things we see among MAGA over and over is this idea that the president who signs a bill is the president who made it. They don’t understand how laws or agreements work; they don’t know how long it takes to egotiate complex treaties.

Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. He did not negotiate it. NAFTA was negotiated by…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…George H.W. Bush.

Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA.

Mexican President Carlos Salinas (L), President George H.W. Bush (center), Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (R), October 7, 1992, negotiating NAFTA: The photo MAGA doesn’t want you to see

Typical MAGA, blaming Democrats for what Republicans do, and too incurious, too fundamentally uninterested in understanding the world we live in, to do even the tiniest bit of research. A Google search turns this up in ten seconds, which is nine seconds longer than MAGAs typically want to invest in their knowledge of politics.

And finally, the pièce de résistance:

When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs

One of the articles of faith amongst the right, one of the pillars of the right-wing ideology, is “government bad, m’kay?” As the holy Prophet and Saint Ronald Reagan, peace be unto him, said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

So in light of that, let’s talk about “Jimmy Carter destroying 400,000 trucking jobs,” because oh, man, this is delicious. MAGA doesn’t know what it wants.

Let’s talk about shipping before 1980. Specifically, let’s talk about how the government regulated shipping:

  • Trucking companies could only use routes approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the government agency overseeing trucking
  • Truckers could only apply for new routes if they could demonstrate that nobody served those routes, and the ICC approved
  • Truckers could not add new stops to existing routes without ICC approval
  • Trucking companies could not take over another company’s route without ICC approval
  • Sales of one route to another company demanded astronomical prices
  • Truckers could only charge rates approved by the ICC; requests for rate changes had to be submitted to the government for approval at least 30 days in advance
  • New trucking companies could not start shipping without government approval; you could not start a shipping business unless the government allowed it
  • Shippers in an area could object to new companies trying to get started in that area, and could object to new routes being added in their area—which they often did

In other words, trucking was pretty much the exact opposite of what conservatives wanted: No competition, no free enterprise, nobody allowed to start a business without government permission, government approval required for any changes, government setting the price.

The thing about MAGA is it wants what it wants until it wants something else.

There’s too much government regulation in oil drilling! We need to cut the red tape! Drill baby drill!

There’s too much regulation in home mortgages! We need to end government meddling in free markets! Redline, baby, redline!

There’s not enough government regulation in trucking! We need to bring back those old regulations! Protect our truckers’ jobs!

MAGA trying to decide if government regulation is good or bad today

Wait until next Tuesday and they’ll want something else. The only thing all their conflicting, contradictory desires have in common is it’s all the liberals’ fault.

No, that’s not fair. That’s not the only thing these conflicting desires have in common. The other thing they have in common is you have to be utterly ignorant of the basics of how the world works to believe any of this garbage. My God.

This is the fundamental contradiction of populism: populists don’t know what they want, but they sure are passionate about having it.

So there you have it. Insight into the MAGA mind, from a MAGA. Rage, fear, spite, all wrapped up with a neat bow of fundamental ignorance and incuriosity, weaponized against targets they truly do not understand.

Where were we when you lost your American dream?

We were telling you that your anti-intellectualism, your hatred of education, would destroy you in an advanced, technological society.

We were warning you that the world was changing and anyone who didn’t change with it would perish.

We were offering you free education and free training to make your lives and the lives of your children better.

That’s where we were.

The people who destroyed your dream are the ones telling you to blame the libs.

Holy shit, y’all, 1500 free stickers!!

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This afternoon I crossed an amazing threshold: I officially shipped out my 1,500th free “Resist” and “Empathy” stickers.

I started this project because I felt helpless about the wholesale dismantling of the United States government and the slide into authoritarianism. I designed two vinyl stickers, one saying “Resist” and one saying “Commit the Sin of Empathy,” which I started sending out for free.

I had no idea this little project would run away from me like it did. Fifteen hundred stickers! Wow.

Today, on the day I passed the fifteen hundred mark, I received some Resist enamel lapel pins. These are now up on my online store too. They’re $10, including shipping in the US and Canada ($3 shipping elsewhere in the world).

I have rainbow holographic foil versions of the stickers, also.

I’ve been absolutely blown away by all the support you all have given this project. I’ve received so many donations so that I can keep printing and distributing more stickers. I would never have been able to do it without this amazing outpouring of help.

I’ve set up a Tips capability in the shopping cart, and I can also take donations at franklin@franklinveaux.com on PayPal or @Franklin-Veaux on Venmo. All of the donations go to printing and distributing more stickers.

Want some? Want to help out? You can find the Resist and Commit the Sin of Empathy designs and the new lapel pin here!

Some thoughts on propaganda

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We are living through historic times right now, and I mean that in the worst possible way. We’re witnessing, in real time, a slow-motion coup against the United States government, one that may already have reached a point of no return.

We’re also seeing unparalleled propaganda, Soviet-state-level propaganda, become woven into the social discourse, which is terrifying but also fascinating to watch.

Some of the propaganda has historical parallels. Ssome of it does not. Unfortunately, those of us who care about the preservation of the Union tend to play into the propaganda. We reinforce it without intending to, without even knowing that’s what we’re doing.

O Canada

Image: edb3_16

The current Administration makes no secret of the fact it wants to annex Canada. The idea seems laughable on its face, but nearly every war, every act of atrocity in human history, starts with an idea that’s laughable on its face.

This is what propaganda is for: making the absurd seem inevitable.

It starts, of course, with demonizing the Other. That’s how atrocity works. You never go from zero to this:

Image: mikdam

without first passing through this:

Right here, right now, we get to see the start of the process.

Of course, I’m not comparing Trump’s rhetoric about Canada to anti-Jewish agitprop in WWII, but I am saying that the ideas, the fundamental process of propagandizing a society, are the same.

In both cases, the target is made out to be an enemy, inflicting ruin on the peaceful citizens of this great nation, without cause or pity—ruin that demands retaliatory action (in the name of self-defense, of course), ruin that constitutes a national emergency…and with it, emergency power.

The current Administration is in the process of declaring a national emergency against Canada on multiple fronts: there’s an emergency because Canada didn’t like Trump’s tariffs, there’s an emergency because fentanyl something something, there’s an emergency because Canada isn’t keen on selling electricity to the US after the Administration talked about conquering Canada to make it a state. I wish I could say this was all a South Park parody, but it’s not.

It’s fascinating, in a morbid kind of way, to watch this unfolding before our eyes, rather than reading about it in a history class.

Let’s talk about just one part of it: “We need to protect ourselves against Canada because they’re sending fentanyl into the US.”

This ticks all the ticky-boxes for effective propaganda:

✅ We have to protect our children from the evil scourge!

✅ They’re poisoning our people!

✅ The enemy is at the gates! They’re right at our border!

✅ We need to secure our border from the invasion!

The problem, of course, is the fact that less than 1% of the fentanyl coming into the US flows across the Canadian border; we send far more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us (though of course that doesn’t make us the bad guys; we’re the USA, everyone knows the USA is never the bad guys).

Liberals play into this propaganda

I’ve seen a lot of liberals try to push back against this narrative with information about fentanyl smuggling into the US, like the fact that almost all of the fentanyl coming into the US originates in China, or that the fentanyl that doesn’t originate from China tends to come in from Mexico and Central and South America. “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada!” they say. “Canada is barely a rounding error on DEA statistics!”

Please stop doing that. It doesn’t work. It only reinforces the propaganda.

How?

When you say “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada,” what you think you’re saying is “stop demonizing Canada. They aren’t the problem.”

That isn’t what die-hard MAGA hears.

What die-hard MAGA hears is something more like this:

See? Trump is right! Canada is the problem! Even the liberals agree! Oh, sure, the liberals want to argue about this percentage or that percentage or blah blah blah percentage, but they don’t deny Canada is sending us fentanyl that’s killing American children. They quibble over numbers, but they still admit he’s right. Fentanyl is coming from Canada. We have to defend ourselves from the Canadians poisoning our children.

And boom! By pointing out facts that you think prove Trump wrong, you have reinforced the propaganda.

This is about feelings, not fact. Feelings don’t care about your facts.

In fact, countering false narratives with facts is likely to make the false belief stronger, thanks to a psychological phenomenon called “entrenchment” or “the backfire effect.”

Put simply: When a person encounters a fact that contradicts a belief, that person is likely to rehearse—that is, to replay in his mind, over and over, all the reasons he believed that thing in the first place. Reinforcement strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain that correspond to that belief; it literally, not figuratively, reinforces the false belief.

The stronger the contradictory evidence, the more the person rehearses, and the stronger the false belief becomes.

What’s the answer, then?

Stop quibbling over facts and statistics. Facts and statistics don’t matter. Too many people don’t make decisions based on empirical reality.

The University of Pennsylvania has an excellent article on countering propaganda and entrenched narratives: bypass, don’t refute.

Instead of contradicting the false narrative with statistics that directly refute the false belief, find other avenues, other paths to the truth.

If people hold the false belief that GM food causes allergies—a common bit of misinformation among anti-GM circles—don’t talk about allergies. Find other ways to highlight the advantages of GM food.

If people hold the false belief that we need to retaliate against Canada for poisoning our children with fentanyl, don’t attack the idea that fentanyl is coming from Canada. Talk about the other sources of the drug problem. Talk about the reasons Canada, our largest trade partner, is vital to the US economy. Talk about the people who will suffer if Canadian trade breaks down.

Bypass the issue of “Canadian fentanyl.” The people who believe the narrative about “Canadian fentanyl” will only entrench in their false belief if you try to approach it head-on.

Don’t reinforce the propaganda you’re fighting against.

Today in American Anti-Intellectualism

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Almost exactly two years ago, when I was in Florida helping care for my mom who had terminal cancer, I tweeted a photo of myself wearing a Stand Up for Science T-shirt. Cape Coral, Florida is antivax central, ground zero of the know-nothing Ron Desantist anti-intellectual craze, so I made a point of wearing that shirt around town.

Three days ago, that two-year-old tweet went viral, which was weird. Retweeted and commented on all over the place. So, curious, I took a look, and apparently it got picked up by the antivax/moon landing deniar/flat earth crowd. Here’s but one of the threads of retweets and comments, posted by a person who’s a moon landing denier, antivaxxer, and Reptilian conspiracy nutter:

The US has a long history of weird anti-intellectualism, going all the way back to the vicious streak of religious Puritanism that runs through American society. We’re so used to it we don’t even see it, but my European friends who visit are always a little shocked by how deep know-nothing, Fundamentalist Protestantism runs in US culture.

Evangelical religion is inherently incompatible with science. A lot, a lot of Americans truly, sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old, all the animals were made exactly as they are now, and people and dinosaurs once lived side by side. This is not in the least bit unusual in US society.

This has led to an ongoing, generations-long war against science education in the United States. The Scopes monkey trials are just the tip of the iceberg.

In the last 40 years, that war on education has been joined by American populist political conservatives, who see value in an uneducated population. It used to be that American conservatives, all the way up through Ronald Reagan, were 100% behind cold-eyed, factual science education; this fit with their idea that the US should lead the world in science and technology, because you can’t do that without an educated population.

It took a liberal in the form of JFK to promise to get us to the moon, but the engineers and rocket scientists who made it happen were overwhelmingly conservatives. Not in the current “populist know-nothing party” sense of conservatives, but old-school, pre-Reagan conservatives.

Nowadays, what passes for a “conservative party” in the US is isolationist populists. They want to withdraw from the world stage, so American technical and scientific leadership doesn’t matter to them. They openly embrace the most extreme Evangelical Christians, the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Dominionist movement that seeks to create a theocracy to replace the US government. Their goals are aligned: Education has got to go.

That’s created a huge backlash against science education. Educated people are “elitist.” Universities are “liberal indoctrination centers.”

This isn’t new, of course. What’s new is the alliance between political conservatives and the Evangelical right on opposition to science and knowledge, an unholy union where each of the two sides sincerely believes it is using the other for opportunistic gain.

It exists at least in part because we live in a time of prosperity and unprecedented safety. Very few people alive today remember a time when children weren’t expected to live to be adults, even though that was a frighteningly short time ago.

One of the people in my polycule, who wishes to remain nameless, rather brilliantly calls conspiracy thinking “idiot mantras for dopamine mining” and puts it like this:

It’s literally: Step 1: Confusion about actual science Step 2: read/hear confident idiot talk about how everyone is wrong except you, because you are listening to him so you must be smart Step 3: think “I don’t want to believe I’m stupid so I’ll believe stupid things to feel smart” Step 4: I are smart! I’ll just repeat the same things over and over like some sort of argument cheat code, and anyone who disagrees must be stupid, so I will ignore them”

This enshrinement of the idiocracy, this reflexive anti-intellectualism that has its roots deep in the fertile soil of the American ideals of exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism™, is fundamentally at odds with a post-industrial society in an interconnected economy.

As we turn away from learning and knowledge, craving the certainty of the Age of Superstition, we cede our role in the world. But not to worry, someone else will take over. I’m guessing China.

New sticker available

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Price: free (donations accepted but not required). I only have a few, but there are more on the way.

The Resist stickers are also back in stock, though I expect to run out of them quickly again.

Get them here!