Tag Archives: politics

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.

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.

Fear on the Left and the Right

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“If you’re conservative, you’re fearful. Socially conservative ideas are driven by fear.”

This is the conclusion of social psychology, backed by peer-reviewed, published studies and fMRI research. Neurologists can tell you with a high degree of probability whether a person is liberal or conservative just by looking at brain scans1. Conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala, which mediates threat and fear, and a smaller anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain responsible for resolving conflict and detecting deviances between what you expect to see and what you actually see.2

That’s pretty well established in the neurobiology community, but…

I would like to propose it’s oversimplified. In my experience and observation, liberals and conservatives both tend to be fearful, with political ideologies driven by fear; it’s just that conservatives are frightened of people, and liberals are frightened of things.

First, a bit of background.

The amygdala is a small structure in the brain. It’s occasionally described as a memory center” of the brain, but that’s not really true. It regulates emotional association. If you’re near a cave, and a leopard springs out of the cave and devours your friend in front of you, your memories of that cave will be associated with fear. That’s the job (simplifying a bit) of the amygdala.

Image: RobinH at en.wikibooks from Commons, cropped and resaved in PNG format, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5228021

PTSD is essentially the amygdala doing what it’s designed to. If your friend gets devoured by a leopard that springs from a cave, you should be afraid of that cave. That fear has survival value. Our ancestors who weren’t, didn’t survive.

The amygdala in conservatives tends to be larger than that of liberals, suggesting greater propensity to recall emotional associations of memories. The notion that liberals are emotional and conservatives are rational is not supported by science; reality seems to be quite the opposite.

Anyway, fMRI studies suggest that social conservatives experience greater amygdala activation in social situations, are more sensitive to potential threats,3 and have greater in-group/out-group sensitivity than liberals. Conservatives are more likely to see people different from themselves as frightening and more likely to see the world in tribal, us-vs-them terms.

The conclusion from these studies is “conservatives are more fearful.” And if you look at racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on, all of which are more prevalent on the American right than the left, that makes sense.

But there’s more to fear than just fear of people.

Something I haven’t seen, but I’d love to, is fMRI scans and brain studies of liberals and conservatives when shown things rather than people that evoke fear. It’s easy to say that conservatives are hypersensitive to fearful stimuli when they’re shown pictures of people, but what explains the political divide when it comes to fear of, for example, nuclear power?

Nuclear power is one of the safest forms of large-scale power generation known to man, with a human-deaths-per-terawatt-hour-of-energy record that puts it well ahead of almost everything else. The safest forms of power generation are nuclear, wind, and solar, with nuclear power thousands of times safer than fossil fuel power generation.4

If you read that and the first thing you think is “But waste! But Chernobyl! But radiation!”, then you are rehearsing, a mechanism by which the brain clings to ideas that you believe are true in the face of evidence to the contrary. Rehearsing is the core mechanism of the “entrenchment effect” or the “backfire effect,” a system where a person who sees evidence that something they believe is wrong will come to believe the wrong idea even more strongly…and the stronger the evidence against the idea, the more firmly the belief becomes entrenched in the believer’s mind.

If you’re a liberal reading this, and you sneer at conservatives who continue to insist that Donald Trump is not an abuser or sexual assaulter in spite of the reams of evidence in the Epstein Files, while at the same time clinging to fear of nuclear power, well, maybe you have a better understanding of what those conservatives are going through, because you’re doing it too.

The point here isn’t to talk about nuclear power, but to say that there’s more to irrational fear responses than fear of people. Brain studies that conclude conservatives are more fearful than liberals tend to look at threats from people; I think there might be something to the idea that liberals and conservatives are both fearful, and their fear responses might originate in structural differences in the brain, but they are afraid of different things.

Liberals and conservatives are also, I think, highly susceptible to propaganda that reinforces their fears. Conservatives respond strongly to propaganda that reflects vertical hierarchies (“The Hatians are coming to eat your dogs and cats! Mexicans are rapists and murderers!”), while liberals are more receptive to propaganda that emphasizes outside forces attempting to dominate or control society or implement hierarchy or power (“Big Pharma is taking away your access to natural cures!” “Agricultural businesses are using plant patents to control your food supply!”)

I’d love to see more research on this; “conservatives are fearful and liberals are not” seems too pat to me, and doesn’t match my observations.

[1] Scientific American, Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences

[2] Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

[3] Red brain, blue brain: evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans

[4] Earth.org: Nuclear & the Rest: Which Is the Safest Energy Source?

Is It Graft or Is It Cruelty?

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A few years back, I dropped a kettle of boiling water on my foot. The burns sent me to the ER, where I was given a shot of morphine, and then to the burn clinic, where I was prescribed oxycodone. (I have pictures of the burn. They’re not pretty.)

The morphine was awful. I could feel it coming on, like an unpleasant prickly hot surge that passed over my body in a wave. It was a bit like…it’s hard to describe, but imagine being cocooned in a malfunctioning electric blanket that keeps shocking you—a sense of flushed warmth accompanied by extremely unpleasant little zaps like touching a badly grounded electrical appliance with an intermittent short.

Then came the vomiting: vigorous, profuse, and enthusiastic, as if my body, not content with throwing up in a more pedestrian fashion, had decided to twist the spacetime continuum to expel food I hadn’t even eaten yet.

What didn’t happen was pain relief. At all. I was still in exactly as much agony as I was before the shot (and believe me, boiling water burns are awful, the only pain I’ve ever experienced worse than kidney stones).

The oxycodone? Same deal. Spectacularly, implausibly vigorous vomiting, fuckall pain relief.

Finally, in desperation, I tried a cannabis edible, and lo, it was as if a chorus of angels did sing, saying, “let this man’s pain be erased.” It also made me high, which was unpleasant, but every silver lining has a cloud around it, amirite?

Quite a bit of systematic experimentation later, I learned that the sweet spot for pain management for me is 2.5mg of THC and 2.5mg of CBD. That dosage is effective at pain management without leaving me incapable of functioning or unpleasantly high.

I’m probably unusual in that regard. I can definitely feel 1mg of THC. 2.5mg leaves me a little high, but it’s tolerable. 5mg of THC leaves me high AF and not in a good way. 10mg of THC, the one time I tried it, left me curled up on my side hallucinating vigorously.

I use it when ibuprofen doesn’t work, which isn’t very often. This:

is about a three-year supply for me; I cut the gummies into quarters and take a quarter if nothing else works.

I was able to try cannabis edibles thanks to a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” who in 2018 introduced legislation into an appropriations bill legalizing hemp.

Senator McConnell in an undated Senate photo

Fast forward to 2025, when a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” has introduced language into an appropriations bill that would ban hemp products across the board.

Now, we’ve all known for many years that Old Turtle-Face has no integrity, shame, scruples, or backbone. This is not new.

What’s new is that his motivations, usually as transparent as the film wrap over a styrofoam tray of ground meat at a discount supermarket, are completely opaque.

When he first said yay to hemp, before his about-face flip-flop, he raved on and on about how it would help Kentucky farmers…farmers he’s now shot, stabbed, and tossed under a bus.

My take on that is someone with a financial interest in cannabis farming offered him a lot of money, then somehow the deal soured.

My Talespinner disagrees. She deals with chronic pain and, like me, has found cannabis a godsend for pain management…only to have it yanked away, leaving few options between, you know, addictive opioids and over-the-counter pain relievers. Her take: it’s intentional, calculated cruelty. Turtleface gets off on it.

And the thing is, either of those two explanations—political crony corruption or deliberate, calculated cruelty—fits. They’re both within Senator Turtledick’s wheelhouse. They both fit his pattern of observed behavior; the man has never met corruption he doesn’t embrace or pointless sadism he doesn’t indulge. He’s basically a walking encyclopedia of the worst impulses of humanity, a case study in unscrupulous, dishonorable barbarism.

So what say you? Is it merely greed, or is he letting slip is inner spite?

I am tired of that man

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My metamour, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received some absolutely devastating medical news.

The entire polycule has done an absolutely amazing job of stepping up to support her. In two weeks, I leave for Springfield, where I will join my Talespinner to fly out to London and from there travel to Wales to be with her. The extended polycule did an amazing job of pulling this together in a very short time, and supporting each other to make it happen. My metamours and meta-metamours who were able to even helped the rest of us financially so that we could make arrangements to fly out last minute.

Even complete strangers helped. I would not have been able to go without the kindness of people on social media who offered financial support, completely unasked and unexpected. I am overwhelmed grateful beyond measure for the kindness of people I don’t even know who contributed out of the blue to make this happen.

Thanks to the government shutdown, the FAA is reducing flights at many airports, including PDX. It’s not clear yet whether or not my flight will be one of the ones cut, or what will happen if it is.

United Airlines has offered no-questions-asked refunds on flights ahead of the FAA cuts in air travel…but because international travel isn’t affected by the mandated cuts, they’re only offering me a refund on my domestic flight. I have tickets from Portland to Springfield, then Springfield to London and back, then Springfield to Portland, and right now it’s completely up in the air when (or even if) I will be able to get to Springfield.

I am so goddamn tired of this.

I’m tired of him.

I’m tired of the pettiness. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the grift, the selfishness, the pointless purposeless malice. I’m tired of his followers, so eager to hurt themselves as long as the people they hate are hurt more.

I’m tired of trying to have empathy for people who are sobbing that they’re losing their jobs or ther farms because he isn’t hurting the people they think he should be hurting. They voted for the leopard and now they’re shocked their faces are being eaten, too.

The stupidity, the venality, the cruelty, the mendacity, the sadistic malignity, I am just so absolutely sick of all of it.

One day, this will end.

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.

Florida, where work is for chumps

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I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.

As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:

Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.

Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?

I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.

Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.

They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.

I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.

Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.

But I think there’s another part of it as well:

In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.

They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.

And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.

But the absolute freakiest thing?

Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.

Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.

(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)

The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.

“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”

Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.

It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!

Work is for chumps.

“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!

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.