#AND THE BERKELEY USA? FUCK OFF

[satiricaily]

this one's for the vampire enjoyers (edward cullen girls)

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

From Peoples Park to Echo Park

(Post- Trump era, Part 3)

March 26th 2021

By Stephen Jay Morris

©Scientific Morality

It was Easter 1971 in Berkeley, California.  I was visiting the Bay Area and I wanted to see the place where the students had fought the police. The park was small, maybe an acre; it looked like any other city park.  A couldn’t-be-overlooked wooden sculpture of a giant clenched fist assaulted my view.   Other than that, it was very nice and banal.  Some kids with backpacks were attentively listening to a guitarist.   He played a song I’d never heard of, “18” it was called.  I really liked it.  I asked who did the song and the guitarist said, Alice Cooper.  I thought it was a chick.  Boy, was I wrong!

By this time, the New Left was dying a slow death.  Much has been written about the Peoples Park riot.  Click here for more information. I wont rehash the entire history here, however, it was the strangest trip I’d ever been on.  It’s recounted in my one of my manuscripts.

In the City of Berkeley, homeless encampments are protected by city ordinance.  However, 500 miles south of there is a different story. Echo Park is an area northeast of Los Angeles where my mother grew up.  She lived two blocks up the hill from the park itself.  At the time, my grandfather co-owned a grocery store called, “Pioneer Market,” located nearby on Sunset Boulevard.  Echo Park was a white neighborhood.  How white was it?  Well, my mom’s family consisted of the only Jews on her block.  My grandfather wanted his two daughters to marry Jewish guys, so he moved his family to the Fairfax District, about 20 miles west.  Success!  They both married Jews, although my aunt eventually divorced her husband and my mom suffered with my dad for 50 years!  But, hey—stick to your own tribe! (Sarcasm 101)

Now, Echo Park has a large Latino population and LGBTQ residents.  The park itself is right next to the Hollywood Freeway.  When I used to take the express bus home from work on that freeway, I would see that man-made lake to the left.  It looked similar to that of another park, MacArthur Park, on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, only smaller.  There were boats on the lake you could rent, just like at MacArthur Park.  There are many old growth shade trees, perfect for picnics and just relaxing.  There were grills for barbecuing, and bathrooms. The bathrooms were not very nice but, they were there should you really need them.  On the park’s south side, there was a public swimming pool.  In the distance southward, you can see LA’s downtown skyline.

Berkeley is a small university town.  When the college administration threatened to tear down Peoples Park to build college dorms, word got around and, within hours, protests emerged.  The protests soon became riots.  That was when conservatives ran the universities.   Today, conservatives still own the university, but liberals run it.  Finally after a few years, the college left the property alone.

Los Angeles is a huge city, now run by Democrats.  It used to be run by Republicans, until they got voted out of office because of mass corruption.  Back in the 40s and 50s, Los Angeles had a massive transportation system known as the “Red Car.” You could ride an electric train car all the way from Pasadena to Venice Beach on that system.   Then, the Republican city council acquiesced to the oil companies and auto manufacturers and destroyed the “Red Car.”

Now to the “homeless problem.” Because of Southern California’s mild climate, it is easier to be homeless in LA than, say, in Chicago. Most of the homeless are mentally ill, alcoholic, and/or drug addicted.  Enter the COVID 19 pandemic, followed by the economic depression and, like an avalanche, it quickly caused average citizens to lose their jobs and businesses.   Subsequently, their homes were foreclosed upon and/or they were evicted from their apartments when they could no longer make their mortgage and rent payments.  These average, working class citizens became homeless.

There are hundreds of homeless camps in LA, many of them under freeway overpasses.  There are homeless camps on Venice Beach and in public parks.  One park, Poinsettia Park, was where I used to hang out when I was a preteen.  East of that park, you could see the United Artists Studio movie sets stored behind their studio walls.  That park is now a homeless camp.  It looks like a Boy Scouts Jamboree.  

Echo Park became a homeless camp.  The city council representative for the area decided he wanted to clear out the park of encampments because of the many complaints he’d received.  Since LA  is a left-of-center government, they didn’t want to be seen as Fascists preparing to evict poor people into the streets, so, they found a loophole.  “We’ll tell the public that we will be clearing out the park to do needed repairs.   Having people there while the work was ongoing, would present a safety hazard.”  Thus, under false pretenses, the City evicted the homeless from the park and fenced it off for construction purposes.  

Millennial protesters showed up to protect the modern day itinerants from the heartless state.   Homeless residents joined them. They practiced non-violent resistance by standing, their arms locked together, in front of a line of an LAP.D riot squad.  They marched and chanted, but they were outnumbered.  The homeless became nomadic.

A Lumpen proletariat like me knows that, when the Middle Class becomes unemployed and homeless, they are not worried about the “Red menace.” Do you really think that if they utilize the Protestant work ethic, they will, by free enterprise magic, ascend from poverty like superhero's?   And, if they pray to Jesus, they will be saved?  Fuck, no!  What they will find out when they unite and become a revolutionary army is, that they will rise above property rights by targeting their true oppressors, the Ruling Class!

History, once again, is repeating itself.  We now have another Eisenhower mixed with Truman in the White House.  President Biden will be remembered, by history, as the savior of the USA.

It is a two party game.  I am so sick of it!  Republican bad cop and Democrat good cop.  The pendulum will swing from left to right again and again until America has a left wing revolution.  What is happening in Echo Park is happening globally.

[bigskydreaming]

Okay, I knew Alistair the Dream-Keeper wasn’t the first time I’d written the idea of magically weaponized dreams, so I went hunting through old email accounts and found a whole fucking manuscript I wrote like, twelve years ago and totally forgot about. WHOOPS. (This happens with me more often than you’d think actually possible). I’m only a third of the way through my re-read of it, but it holds up surprisingly well IMO, I’m pretty pleased. I can actually do something with this, I think. 

Course, it was apparently written back during my whole “every thing must be hetero otherwise there will be no publishing” period, before the beginning of my personal Age of LOL Nah, Fuck That, Everything Must Be Gay. So, first things first, Jez definitely needs a girlfriend, and also a different name. I can’t believe I named her Jez, like, wow, I was really trying to get YA Bingo, wasn’t I? In my defense, this was when I was twenty-three. Also, this first chapter here has a character named Scott and this was before Teen Wolf even premiered, so apparently I just like the name Scott? Huh. Did not know.

BURNING DAYLIGHT

Jez O’Neill knows she has three years, two months, and sixteen days to live.

She’s had visions for as long as she can remember. She knows they’re never wrong. And when the boy her visions say will someday kill her comes into her life, she knows to stay far away.

But somehow he gets close anyways. Because Nathan is perfect. He’s handsome, he’s charming, he’s utterly, unbearably sweet. And when he learns of Jez’s visions, he promises to cheat Death for her. An interest in New Age turns into an obsession with the occult, and that leads to tiny cracks in the walls of the world, where strange and untrustworthy spirits wait to barter with anyone desperate enough to try.

Magic, however, always comes with a price. The higher the reward you seek, the more you can expect to pay, and the spell Nathan thinks will change their destiny instead puts them on a collision course with Fate. It changes him, twists him in mind and soul, transforming the boy Jez loves into the madman who will someday take her life.

With only three years left until the day she now knows she can’t avoid, Jez discovers she and Nathan share the same zipcode again as he sows death and destruction in the streets of LA. But rather than flee for another city, Jez pits herself against the monster she once loved, the monster she helped create, determined to make sure no one else gets caught in the crossfire of their attempt to cheat their fates.

Call it redemption if you want. Jez calls it Tuesday.

Chapter 1

Dreams are doorways if you have the right key.

That’s why I’ve wasted a perfectly good Sunday night perched on the edge of Scott Kinley’s desk. It’s awkward, uncomfortable, and I’m sure I look like a gargoyle in the pitch dark of the two o’clock hour, but every chair in his bedroom is covered in dirty teenage boy laundry. I’ll stick with my perch, thanks.

I kick my legs out and arch my spine, stretching my arms over my head with fingers laced together. Cramped and aching muscles voice their protest. Something cracks in my neck when I roll my head back. Meanwhile, Scott Kinley snores contentedly in his sleep in the bed across the room. I shoot him a glare that’s best described as withering.

Spears of pale moonlight slip through the slatted blinds covering the window above his bed. They stab the length of his body, highlighting a strong jawline and tousled blond hair, not to mention a chest and set of abs that frankly, I just find obnoxious on a fellow teenager. It’s L.A. in early September – code for unbearably hot – and he’s sleeping with the bare minimum of sheets, a loose span of cotton that’s only covering him up to his waist. I’d enjoy the cheap thrill more if it didn’t make me feel like such a perv.

After all, I’m a total stranger who broke into his house and has spent the last four hours going through his things and watching him sleep. It’s kinda hard to feel good about that. In my defense, I’m only here to save his life from a creepy magical serial killer. Course, I have strong doubts that would hold up in a court of law should he wake up and have me arrested for breaking and entering. But I still feel it’s worth mentioning.

A yawn and a glance at his alarm clock confirm that it’s 2:07 am and I have no life. I lean back on the desk and rifle through his homework some more as I go back to invading his privacy. My only defense here is I’m really bored.

His handwriting’s slightly more legible than your average garden-variety chicken scratch, but I’m still not one hundred percent his name’s Scott Kinley. The Scott part is clear, but the ‘I’ in what I think is Kinley could be a really jacked up ‘o’ I guess. Whatever. It’s a pre-calculus assignment, and the last yearbook on his bookshelf is from his sophomore year, so I’m guessing he’s a junior like me. Or like I would be, if I still bothered going to school. Hmm. Eleventh grade and already in precalc? Someone’s a smarty-pants. Interesting.

A row of trophies and a couple of team photos declare him a water polo jock, and not too shabby of one according to this MVP title. Explains the abs. I roll my eyes around the rest of the room. Small TV so old it has a VCR player built into it. An even older Sega Genesis console is hooked up to it, so either Scott’s big on nostalgia or his family’s not big on luxuries. There’s a couple of movie posters tacked to the wall, but the puddle of light leaking across the floor doesn’t reach far enough for me to make out any details. Then a freestanding bookcase, a good five shelves high, filled with actual books. Above it is a college pennant with a bear on it – I think that’s Cal Berkeley, right? Possible destination, I’m guessing….

God. And he was in bed by ten. Smart, good-looking, athletic and ambitious. Did his parents just win the baby lottery, or if I go down the hall will I find the altar they used to bargain with the Devil?

Not that it matters. I stretch my legs out again and dip my toes into the pool of moonbeams, watching them spill across my feet when I wiggle. It’s only been six months since my last boyfriend went all dark side on me and turned into a spell-wielding slaughterhouse. I’m kind of not dating right now.

So it’s only natural my visions would lead me to the most eligible teen bachelor in Los Angeles – I cast another quick look around the desk for the requisite ‘me and my girlfriend’ photo – nope, most eligible teen bachelor in Los Angeles. Ugh. It’s like announcing your diet and inheriting a pastry shop the next day. I feel a sudden urge to grab one of his dirty shirts off the floor just to make sure his one human flaw is real and not an illusion.

Wow. I can’t believe I just thought that. Apparently sleep deprivation makes me weird. Besides, there’s no way that smell could be imaginary.

I throw another withering glare in Scott’s direction. It’s his fault I’m a weird, sleep-deprived pervert in his stinky bedroom. My baleful stare bakes the air above his bed. It bends and twists like a summer heat wave on asphalt. Wait. That’s not right.

I shake my head, peering through the fog that shrouds my tired mind. Somewhere in my snooping I failed to notice Scott’s happy snores had turned into frantic whimpers. He’s writhing on his bed; sweat beads all over his restless body, glistening like fragile pearls in the faint light. The room is abruptly a sauna. Heat climbs the walls and steam mists the glass of the picture frames.

“Shit,” I whisper, and I’m in motion, leaping off the desk into a crouch. I dip my hand into my hoodie and whip out my knife, steel slicing moonbeams to ribbons as the blade springs free. A low keening shreds the silence, hoarse spectral shouts as faces flicker through the knife, reflected in the steel. I cross the room in three steps. Scott cries out. His fingers scratch at the air like crooked claws.

Somewhere a door opens, and something steps through. Between the space of one second and the next, a heavy silhouette takes shape on this side of the dream.

I slam into the figure with all my weight, blade aimed for the midsection where I’m hoping vital organs will be. The knife sinks in too easily. The sandman-born beastie is still in that transitive state where its dream wrought form has yet to shift all the way down the spectrum to vulnerable flesh. Then my knife catches and scrapes against bone. The nightmare screams as it sinks its roots into our reality and feels pain for the first time.

It’s tougher to pull the blade free, but I’m stronger than any normal seventeen year old girl has a right to be. More specifically, as long as I’m wielding that knife I’m as strong as all the monsters it’s killed combined. And I’ve racked up a decent body count. Blood and bile sprays in slow motion, a cresting wave of black tar. A few drops land on my arm. There’s a hissing sound and I feel like I’m on fire. I grit my teeth and swing again. It dodges and I miss. We both regroup, and I get my first good look at it.

Damn. Mr. Perfect Teen USA has one hell of a fucked up subconscious. I’m just saying.

The nightmare swallows what dim light comes near it, refusing to be illuminated. It’s thick, ridged with protrusions of bone and slick scales that shimmer with their own dark radiance. A trunk-like torso gives way to stocky legs. At certain angles they seem to merge into a single column similar to a snake. It has four arms, except for when it has six – and then two and then twelve and then they’re not arms at all, but tentacles. The head is a gaping chasm of teeth and forked tongue surrounded by a lion’s mane of mottled skin. It’s dizzying and hard to look at. Confusing and chaotic. The only constant is its ugliness.

I charge at it, because I’m just that dumb. Hey, only the good die young.

It dips to the side, cobra-quick, and its tail snaps out like the crack of a whip. I take the hit square in my ribs and I’m lifted off my feet, flying back across the room. My breath flees from my lungs, my head slams back into a wall. I bite my tongue and taste copper.

“Rude,” I gasp.

Scrambling up to snatch my knife from where I dropped it mid-flight, I steal strength from its macabre magic. Even still, regaining my feet takes effort and time I don’t have to spare. The nightmare’s turned its attention back to Scott. He’s finally awake and sitting up his bed. Pale, frightened, and totally out of his league. Considering we were dealing with his worst nightmare in every literal sense of the word, I cut him some slack. I’m a good person.

I roll forward and rake my cursed blade along the creature’s side on my way. It rears and screams again. Dimly I hear footsteps and distant shouting.

“What the hell is that thing?” Scott asks, eyes locked on the beastie like a man entranced. Oh good, he can talk. I was starting to wonder. I duck around the nightmare and stick myself in between it and him.

“Don’t ask me. It’s your childhood trauma,” I say, hefting my knife and gauging distance. “Now shut up, don’t die, and for god’s sake put on some pants.”

I lunge and bury my knife in the thing’s throat. I’m liking my odds less and less when it still finds the strength to knock my grip loose and drop me on my ass. More blood drips down on me, igniting nerve endings everywhere it touches my skin. Let’s recap. I have spunk, pizzazz, seven spells and a cursed knife on my side. It has burning blood, a build like a freight train, and claws and fangs that seem to multiply every time I look at it. It leans forward and roars its hostility right in my face.

Also, it has halitosis.

A swipe of its many tentacle-arms knocks me back and to the side again. I land on the floor, staring up at the bookshelf. It’s tricky reading the titles from my upside-down vantage point, but I hazily make out the collected works of one H.P. Lovecraft. That explains a lot.

“You know, there are worse things in the world than being a cliché,” I complain, glowering over my shoulder at Scott. He has the decency to look ashamed, over where he’s huddled on the other side of the desk. Course, I’m sure he has no idea what he’s ashamed of, but my tone conveys the point rather well, I think. “Seriously. The dumb jock thing. Just give it a try.”

Mano a mano isn’t working out too well for me so I switch tactics. I toss a quick ‘Hail Mary’ skyward, kick off my shoes and chant the most powerful – and dangerous – of my seven spells. It’s a nasty little sucker I bartered for in the second sphere, the Circle of Fire. I rattle off short, harsh syllables that climb reluctantly from the base of my throat, guttural utterances that were never meant to be made by a human voice. I dip my fingers in moonlight and etch glowing hieroglyphics in the air – they hang there for a moment, sharply luminescent in the seconds before they fade to black.

Staccato snaps and pops ring out. The alarm clock short circuits. Streetlights flicker and die. Every electronic in a fifty meter radius develops a sudden terminal illness and the air feels flooded. Thick and heavy with static as thousands of wayward electrical impulses conduct themselves through the atmosphere to me. I dig my toes into the heavy carpet and feel the hair on my head stand on end. Then I’m running, my nervous system supercharged with too much speed and power to contain long. I duck past the nightmare’s swinging arms – it might as well be lumbering at tortoise speed – and plant a single palm flat on its back.

My touch hits it like a thunderbolt, lightning barreling down the synapses in my arm and ripping into it with hurricane fury. It squeals and goes airborne, crashing into the desk and reducing it to kindling. Scott falls back, mouth open, and smoke wisps up from the creature’s motionless body.

For a second, I dare to hope it’s dead. It would be really awesome for me if it were. That was my most powerful offensive spell and using it comes with a one in ten chance of killing the spellcaster. So, you know. I’d really like to not have to use it again, please.

The nightmare heaves itself to its feet-tail, sending spears of desk turned firewood flying about the room. Some of the shrapnel heads my way and I cover my eyes. Splinters gouge at my palms. I peek past my fingers, and in a blur of motion the creature crosses the room and throws itself through the window. It rips through the blinds and shards of glass fountain into the hot summer night. The darkness outside swallows it whole.

“I hate you,” I casually inform the universe.

I pick past debris and make for the window. Or what’s left of it anyways. The house is on a hill, high enough elevation that glass from the window is still showering to the ground below. Chiming, delicate drops of crystal rain. City lights gleam from one horizon to the next. A pitch-black shadow makes its way across distant rooftops, dark even against the darkness, like a spreading oil stain spilling towards the downtown metropolis. Lovely.

“What the hell is going on?” Scott finally finds his voice again, but I have no time to soothe his shattered nerves or offer an introductory course on Things That Go Bump in the Night 101. I run my hands through my frizzy, static-damaged hair.

“That was disgusting, you need therapy, and the pants thing was not a suggestion,” I inform him, bending to retrieve my knife. Scott flushes and grabs the sheet off the bed. He doesn’t even try and peek at my ass. A piece of the Scott Kinley puzzle clicks into place, and I feel a tiny bit better.

“Hey, quick question. Are you gay?”

His jaw drops, but he recovers fairly quickly. “What – how did you – I mean, why?”

I shrug. “No reason. Just won a bet with myself is all.”

Hey, it’s the little things in life. I turn back to the window and track the nightmare’s course. Picking a rooftop a few buildings ahead of it, I prick my thumb and whisper a spell from the seventh sphere, the Celestial Circle. I sketch bloody sigils in the moonbeams cascading through the open window. They turn pale and faint and I grab their remnants like door handles. The silver light parts, a gauzy curtain opening on a window to a distant rooftop far below.

I cast a sigh at the bewildered boy behind me and step through. It’s probably for the best. Like I said, I’m kinda not dating right now anyways.

The curtain falls shut behind me and I resume my hunt.

[clementineviolet]

mexican and asian food are ok but have y’all ever tasted brazilian food???? and when i say brazilian food, i’m not talking about those restaurants in the usa with meat, rice and, idk, beans. brazil has an amazing culture and basically every state has it’s own type of food!!!!!! honestly i love my country and latin america in general so much, we have the best food and only my opinion matter thats the tea

damn go off anon !!! 

I’ve had Brazilian food ONCE it’s this place in Berkeley that i really enjoy but i don’t know if its like ~authentic~ i need to have some of that brazilian food you’ve experienced

i will fight to the death to defend mexican food tho listen that shit is BOMB. like have you had chilaquiles??? best fucking food 

[sinesalvatorem]

Related to my description of being relatively conflict-averse and closet-friendly:

I’m not sure if I should keep a log on Tumblr of all the times I encounter homophobia? Because, like, it’d be kind of depressing if I had a post about it every week, as opposed to just times when it’s unusually bad. (I’m definitely not going to keep a log of every time I’m catcalled, because I wouldn’t want to post about that multiple times a day.)

So, like, the sort of experience I’m thinking of is this: When I was riding the BART yesterday, the carriage I was in entirely filled up with people, such that about two thirds of the passengers were standing. While standing on the train I can’t really hide my height or make up for it with my voice. (People who hear me speak often have a visible “Oh! She’s actually a girl!” reaction.)

And, while passing through Oakland on my way to SF, a group of black women with their kids got on the train and stood surrounding me. And, well, they weren’t happy to see me. They glared at me, so I kept my eyes down. Every now and then, it looked like one of them might want to say something rude to me, but then they’d think better of it. If their children wandered too close to me, they’d be pulled away, to avoid being near a queer. Every now and then a jolt of the train would cause one of them to brush against me, and they’d recoil in disgust from having touched me.

But this is just what it means for me to pass through Oakland. Occasionally people actually harass me or threaten me or try to steal from me, but it’s usually just the glares and disgust. Being on public transit that goes through Oakland is kind of necessarily like this, so I either deal or use Uber instead, y’know? (People who think everyone (who can’t afford a car, of course) should only be able to use public transit can get beaten by a gaybasher, though. Like, seriously, fuck them so hard, I can’t even.)

Anyway, my anger at limited options aside, the point is that this is a really common life experience for me. Honestly, the worst part was the anxiety that they’d try to interact with me. As long as they just kept glaring and I just kept my head down, it was nbd. But, if I blogged about every time I had to take a train,  I’d never have anything nice to say on Tumblr. It’d just be “This is your daily reminder that homophobia is alive and well in the San Francisco bay area - if you’re black”.

And, yeah, times like that are pretty much the only times I wish I was white. Like, usually I like being black, and I’d find it incredibly disconcerting not to be. However, the same way I want to be perceived as a woman to become invisible, it’d be nice to walk onto the train and shed my melanin so I could just do as I pleased.

When I got on the train in Berkeley, there were white boys being gay together. When I got off in SF, there were white girls being gay together. It’s only people who are black like me who can’t, and only in Oakland/EPA/etc, because we have higher standards (ie, more hate) for each other.

(This is also a reminder that I’m really happy to be in the USA. I experience so little homophobia here, even with the above, that every now and then I’m awestruck. Oakland is lovely compared to my expectations. EPA is safe by my standards. And, if someone spit on me and called me a faggot just once a month, I’d take it as a blessing.)

[lets-talk-about-politics]

I Attended the Boston Counter-Protest. This is What I Saw.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”  -James Baldwin

1. “I’m Shipping up to Boston”

There was a nervousness in my stomach as I drove with my fiancée towards Waltham. We were meeting a couple friends at the Brandeis/Roberts commuter rail, taking it to the red line at Porter Square, taking that to the stop at Park Street, which sits at the northeastern corner of the Boston Common. We were going to a counter-protest against an alt-right “free speech” rally featuring speakers like Joe Biggs of Infowars fame and Kyle Chapman, an alt-right figure lauded for his use of violence on an Antifa activist. Needless to say, “free speech” wasn’t really what this was all about.

This was also all happening exactly one week after the chaos in Charlottesville, where a white supremacist rally was met with a strong counter-protest force, both sides clashing in a chaotic mess of violence and fury. Shields and clubs were swung around and brought down on bodies. Those that fell to the ground were stomped on. Isolated counter-protesters were mercilessly beaten by angry mobs of white supremacists. And, at the end of it all, after both sides had dispersed, James Fields rammed a car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more in a gruesome display of white supremacist terrorism. After Trump’s comments, where he blamed both sides for the murder and said that some at the white supremacist rally were good people, the entire nation was on edge. It was noted that white supremacists were emboldened and were planning more rallies across the country. Things were getting worse.

My fiancée and I both knew this, but we both also knew that there was a duty involved with standing up for those with marginalized identities who are threatened by white supremacy. That was the feeling that we held as we drove towards Waltham: nervousness and duty.

2. “If I Ever Leave This World Alive”

The train ride there was uneventful, but occasionally the voices of counter-protesters would fill the train car. Two girls behind me, couldn’t have been older than 18 or 19, were laughing as they decided what to put on their sign. They seemed lighthearted, carefree, like they thought they were invulnerable, but maybe I was getting them wrong. Maybe they were nervous, terrified, needed some humor to mask the fear. I didn’t blame them either way. You have to forget about the risk to do something like protest a hate group, especially after the events at Charlottesville.

The group that was putting on the rally, Boston Free Speech, isn’t really a hate group, but it collects a lot of people who are more explicit in their hatred. John Medlar, the 23-year-old man who runs the organization, started the group of students in response to the events at colleges such as Evergreen State and Berkeley, where protesters pushed for far-right speakers to cancel their appearances. He says that the organization is steadfast in its defense of the First Amendment. Really, Boston Free Speech, a group full of 17-23-year-old kids, is likely a bunch of kids softly radicalized by the internet, kids who watch bad YouTube videos where people like Sargon of Akkad, Armoured Skeptic, and Stefan Molyneux make bad arguments that are oddly persuasive to the uninformed. They’re not neo-Nazis. They’re not arguing for a white ethno-state. But they’re fools that believe that leftist mobs and antifa warriors are trying to destroy free speech, and they likely believe it because some other fool on the internet told them so.

It all sounds rather benign, until you see the kind of people that associate themselves with Medlar and his group. There were KKK members that said that they would attend the rally. Augustus Invictus, a far-right libertarian who said that he would lead a second Civil War, was slated to speak at the rally until recently. If freedom of speech was the defining characteristic of Boston Free Speech, you would think that you would get a broad collection of left and right political ideologies. Instead, freedom of speech is just an excuse to elevate the voices of radical right-wing extremists that have no place in polite society. It’s bullshit piled on top of more bullshit.

With KKK members and “Alt Knights” and ex-Infowars writers comes a group of white supremacists, people that hold similar ideologies to the ones that showed up in fatigues with semi-automatic assault rifles at Charlottesville, people that hold similar ideologies to the man who drove his car into a group of protesters. It was entirely possible that violence would break out, that someone with a gun sneaks into the Common, someone with a couple knives that could just start swinging. How many people could be killed by a man wielding two knives before the police took him down? 10? 15? 20? What if the man planted a bomb, or just walked into a crowd with a bomb strapped to him? Maybe 100 would be killed in the blast? Who knows?

I thought about that when I sat on the train, listening to the two girls behind me laughing about their sign. What are the chances that one of them could die today, that her mother and father would lose a child, that her brother or sister could lose a sibling, that her boyfriend or girlfriend could lose a partner? I knew that what I was thinking was just the effect of the terrorist attack last week, but I couldn’t help but think it. It was the same thought that went through my head the night before, when I wanted to duck out of going to the counter-protest, when I snapped at my fiancée when she wasn’t acting nervous enough or when she talked about writing her mother’s phone number on her arm in case she was grievously injured and needed an emergency contact to be called.

I knew that Charlottesville was only the beginning. More would die. I just hoped that wouldn’t be today.

3. “No Trump. No KKK. No Fascist USA.”

We exited the train at Park Street and made our way into the common, past the concrete barricades and garbage trucks that haunted the perimeter, making it so that no driver would repeat the tragedy at Charlottesville the week before.

Boston had taken precautions. Mayor Walsh and the Boston Police Department said that there were no weapons of any sort allowed, that anybody was subject to a bag check, that there would be clear points of entry into the Common. Undercover cops would patrol the crowds. Small cameras went up all over the Common the day before. Metal barricades would separate the counter-protesters from the rally-goers, and dozens of police would patrol the 20-25-yard no-man’s-land that would separate the massive crowd of counter-protesters from the few at Parkman Bandstand. On Facebook, maybe 300 were RSVP’d for the rally. Over 12,000 were RSVP’d for the counter-protest. And that was just one of the organized counter-protests.

The four of us were early; we had gotten to the Common at 10:30 when the rally was supposed to start at noon, so we first walked to a rally point for counter-protesters. A dozen men and women in their twenties stood equidistant from one another, wearing neon green safety vests, forming a perimeter around the rally point. I don’t know what they were planning to do if a violent group were to try to breach their perimeter, but they did make me feel more at ease. At least the thought was on their minds. There was an interesting array of counter-protesters there; some had signs that said “Black Lives Matter”, others with witty phrases like “The only wall I support is a wall of death” (if you like metal music, you’ll get that one), and others had more explicit phrases like “Fuck Trump” or violent memes where cartoon characters beat Nazis. One counter-protester was dressed in a wolf costume and held a sign about showing respect for furries.

The violent signs were unnerving at first, but I was pulled in two different directions the more I thought about it. The first issue of Captain America had the hero punching Hitler in the face. Punching Nazis is patriotic; hell, we killed thousands upon thousands of them during the Second World War. But there’s also an alarming looseness to which some use the term “Nazi”. I heard many saying that we were protesting a Nazi rally, when the rally-goers certainly weren’t Nazis. Calling people Nazis also makes political violence more acceptable. Who would be called a Nazi today and deemed worthy of violence?

We all chatted for a while about school (everybody in my group but me was in grad school at Brandeis), and with that there was a certain mundanity to the day. We were just hanging out, waiting to see what would happen next. We chanted “Black Lives Matter” when it started up. We chanted “No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA”. These were the popular ones. But I looked over towards the bandstand, saw the crowd begin to form, and I pulled everybody that way.

4. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”

We reached the bandstand around 11:00, where a thick cluster of counter-protesters had already completely enveloped the perimeter.

The counter-protesters were wildly diverse in age, in gender, in race. There were old married couples carrying “No hate in Mass” signs, young kids in black clothing with red bandanas over their faces, black men carrying around Bluetooth speakers, blasting A Tribe Called Quest, queer women with the rainbow flag across their backs.

Everybody was hot, sweaty, the sun was out and the humidity was high, but they all seemed to be in high spirits. There were a couple guys who had set up a speaker system maybe 10 yards from the barricade, blasting Rise Against and Dead Kennedys, screaming “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF” and jumping in the air. They later switched genres, where a couple women joined them in dance, along with an old man with a scruffy white beard and a worn US Marine Corps t-shirt. One man in a loose purple button-up danced for hours, his eyes closed, shaking something, making noise. There was a sort of beauty to the unity of the dance; everybody was smiling, laughing, dancing like fools and loving every second of it. I kind of wished that the whole counter-protest would be like that: dancing, singing, laughing, showing that we feel love and that’s enough to stop them. There was a lot of that at the counter-protest, a lot of “Love Trumps Hate”, a lot of people talking to strangers about why they’re there, why they care, who they care about. Lots of smiling. A man with a “Free Hugs” sign walking by, embracing those who needed some comfort.

A large group of antifacists marched past, all of them in black, with patches pinned to their vests and red or black bandanas over their faces. Their eyes were squinted as if focused, as if on a mission, as if nothing else mattered. They carried with them a flag, their signature red and black dual flags forming a seal in the center, and a banner with “Antifascist Action” scrawled on it. Everybody cheered as they walked by; they said nothing and marched resolutely towards a destination of which I did not know. I was shocked by the homogeneity of the group. Many were white, many were men. It made sense: the ones least likely to be harmed for being visible in their resistance were the ones most likely to step forward and be visible. I commended the one or two black men that walked with them, the one white woman, as I knew they would be the most heavily targeted.

The crowd started to fill out, so we backed up, stood in the shade on a nearby hill. There must have been four, five thousand counter-protesters outside the barricade surrounding the bandstand, while the bandstand itself only had a few dozen rally-goers. They were holding up some miscellaneous flags, the Tea Party’s signature yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, a US flag, a Canadian flag (weird), a Betsy Ross flag, and a flag I couldn’t recognize. The rally-goers were inside the bandstand; there were so few of them that they didn’t need to leave it.

As it got closer to noon, I saw a short man holding up a Trump/Pence flag, screaming something incoherent. Nobody seemed to care for a while, it was as if he was invisible. But eventually one person saw him, stormed over. It was like a spotlight had been flashed on him; a dozen more stormed over. Cameras descended upon the man, taking pictures, taking video, waiting to see what would happen. I heard him continue to scream, and I could feel my stomach drop as he was engulfed in the crowd of counter-protesters.

I ran over to see what was happening. He was by himself in the middle of this circle, yelling about Hillary Clinton and her emails, yelling about North Korea and their nuclear weapons, yelling about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It was nonsense, and I rolled my eyes at it, because who cares what some Trump supporter had to say about Bill Clinton. But one man stepped into the circle, black t-shirt, black shorts, didn’t read as antifa, and started chanting “This guy’s a Nazi” over and over again, getting closer with every step. He was at least a foot taller than the man with the Trump/Pence flag, who just shook his head, quietly said no, I’m not a Nazi. I started to say “He’s not a Nazi, please stop”, but nobody could hear me. Another man stepped forward, grabbed the flag, yelled “Anybody have a lighter”, at which point everybody cheered, the man the flag frozen in the middle, didn’t know what to do. It looked like another person was going to step in, but a policeman came over, escorted the man with the flag away, who knows why. Everybody just kind of stood there for a moment and then walked away, went back to what they were doing before they were about to light this man’s flag on fire, push him around.

It was 11:45. The rally hadn’t even started yet.

5. “Don't Take the Bait”

Another chant broke out, “Don’t take the bait”, “Don’t take the bait”. It was 12:20, the rally had been going on for 20 minutes, and the number of outside agitators had vastly grown.

A man in a blue t-shirt was slowly strolling through the sea of counter-protesters, a red MAGA hat like a beacon in the crowd. He was grinning, muttering at a large man who was screaming in his face, loving every second of it. He wanted to be hit, spat on, punched in the face, screamed at, anything to make him look like the civil one and the counter-protester look like the lunatic. For a group of people that talk endlessly about liberals being victims, he wanted so badly to be a victim.

Outside agitators didn’t have to do much to agitate. Donald Trump had already done their work for them. All he had to do was put on the MAGA hat and every Muslim could think of the travel ban, Latinx people could think of the wall, black people could think of the inner city American carnage, women could think of sexual assault and rape. It was so easy, people took the bait every time, and it was tough to blame them for it. Even so, with all of the finger-pointing and screaming, there was a shocking amount of restraint. Nobody pushed him. Nobody punched him. Nobody beat him with a weapon. He made it through the crowd in one piece.

Counter-protest groups are very cognizant of the possibility of violence when emotions are high. Black Lives Matter hosted de-escalation workshops prior to their march and counter-protest. There was a man dressed up in a gingerbread man costume, who would dance when a fight broke out near him. Fights rarely broke out near the music and the dancing. Safety marshals and medics were scattered throughout the counter-protest to make sure that people weren’t getting sick, weren’t getting hurt. Black Lives Matter made a lot of this happen; they know that if violence breaks out then people of color will be targeted, so they work unbelievably hard to make sure that a riot doesn’t break out, that agitators are safely ushered out of the crowd.

For the most part, all protesting was relatively peaceful. We couldn’t hear the rally at all because, well, there were only a few dozen of them and the counter-protesters had grown to over 10,000 strong. The Black Lives Matter march, which was supposed to be easily that big, hadn’t even arrived yet. There were some jeering chants, “Where’s your rally?”, “We can’t hear you”, “Go home”, “Boston hates you”, all of which ended with a cheer and applause. The rally-goers held signs and were speaking, but they had formed a circle inside of the bandstand, as if they were only speaking to each other.

There were a couple agitators that were quickly ushered through the crowd, screamed at for their MAGA hats or their Trump t-shirts. One had his hat flipped off of his head, thrown into the crowd. A water bottle hit him in the face, soaking his shirt. Silly string got caught in his hair. The police always ushered them through slowly, but if bottles were flying, if people were reaching in at him, they sped up and got him out of there. Protesters, for the most part, were really happy that the police were there. They would walk up to them, shake their hands, thank them, take pictures with them.

If antifa was responsible for some of the unrest at the protest, I wasn’t aware of it. I rarely saw them except for when they walked as a group through the crowd. Whenever an agitator was harassed, it was typically an average-looking white guy ready to start a fight. For all of the shit that antifa gets, they weren’t throwing trash cans or beating agitators.

Around 12:40, I heard somebody next to me telling people to look towards the bandstand. Two men in white were being ushered out of the bandstand, towards police escort vehicles. Whispers of excitement rose up around me, “Is it over?”, “Are they done?”, and then everybody inside the bandstand just left at once, got into police vans and drove off. The bandstand was empty. And everybody erupted in cheers and applause.

6. “We Gon' Be Alright”

If there’s one part of the counter-protest that won’t be covered, it’s what happened after the white supremacists left.

Everybody was louder, laughing, more excited than before. The Black Lives Matter march started to make their way into the Common, and everybody was on their feet applauding, screaming, embracing one another. The music was bumping, a group dancing and jumping to Migos’s Bad and Boujee. Every now and then, I would look over at the bandstand, empty, and think: “we all did this”. They wanted to use “free speech” as an excuse to elevate white supremacist voices, and we stopped them.

It was like this throughout the city. Later on, when we stopped at Sal’s Pizza on Tremont, we looked at a television that was playing local coverage of the counter-protest. Police in riot gear were pulling people away from each other, it was absolute chaos. I rolled my eyes; yet another portrayal of a peaceful protest as embodying its worst characteristics, as being only the fringe that started fights. A couple of women next to me saw me roll my eyes, told me that they were so happy with the protest, they it was calm and peaceful, that it was beautiful to see so many people come together. One woman told me that she was proud today to be an American; I told her I was proud as well.

That was a common feeling among the counter-protesters: pride. Black people, brown people, queer people, disabled people, women, white men were all proud of something, whether it was their identity and their experiences or their participation in the protest. They came out to the protest for more than a sense of community and an affirmation of identity. They came because they believed themselves to be on the right side of history, because they knew that they could look back in 50, 60 years and be able to tell their grandchildren that, during the Trump years, they fought back against the white supremacists. There’s a reason that Boston Free Speech stayed huddled inside of that bandstand, and it wasn’t because they were in danger.

As the Black Lives Matter march continued to pour into the Common, as Bad and Boujee came to a close, Kendrick Lamar’s Alright came on next, and the crowd in front of me erupted. Everybody crowded around the speakers, rapping along, all of the lyrics memorized. They bounced up and down, black people, white people, brown people, men, women, an old man, some kids, everybody was bouncing up and down, singing, over and over again, “we gon’ be alright”, “we gon’ be alright”.

7. “This Was Real People”

When I think of protests and rallies, I think about ideas.

People protest ideas, not people. Even protests against Trump aren’t really about the man but about what the man believes, what he preaches. People will protest Trump hiding his tax returns, but they’re really protesting corruption in politics, the ability for powerful men to commit crimes with impunity. People will protest Trump signing his travel ban, but they’re really protesting how Islamophobia is gaining more and more traction in America, how Muslims are treated as if they’re second-class citizens. Or look in the other direction. The white supremacists at Charlottesville were protesting liberals and the removal of a Confederate statue, but they were really protesting how inclusive politics is giving more political power to marginalized folks.

But protests and rallies aren’t just made up of ideas. They’re made up of people. Behind a Black Lives Matter banner are people with husbands, wives, children, careers, hopes, dreams, loves, desires. And the same is true of those on the side of white supremacy. They also have those who care about them, have trajectories that they would like their lives to take. It’s the only true way that we can look at them as equivalent, as the same. They’re all people with lives, and when we see a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand of them, we forget the value of an individual life. We’re more likely to look at each other with anger, distaste, malice, murderous convictions. We’re more likely to commit violence against one another.

Here’s the thing though. In this fight, there’s one group that, at its core, understands that this is about people, and another group that doesn’t care.

Those that argued that this was for free speech, that they want to hear out the extremists, are full of shit. Go to John Medlar’s Facebook page, where he exaggerates about a “frenzied mob” that wanted to kill him, where he talks about the “alt left” that is threatening America. It’s clear that he is just regurgitating the nonsense he’s heard elsewhere, probably on the internet. He believes that he’s a paragon of justice, defending the constitution, but there’s a reason that counter-protesters were talking about a wide array of social justice causes. It’s because people like John Medlar are using the cause of “free speech” to elevate voices who are radical and dangerous, voices that embolden the people at Charlottesville. And it’s because people like John Medlar know that and play dumb to maintain some semblance of plausible deniability for those that would use him to deepen their own radicalization or those that would call him out for radicalizing others.

When James Fields drove his car into that crowd of protesters at Charlottesville, killing Heather and injuring over a dozen others, I doubt he was thinking about Heather’s family, about the job she had, about the coworkers that wouldn’t see her ever again, about her mother, who had this to say on CNN:

“This wasn't a video game, buddy," she said in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper. "This was real people. There are real consequences to what you did. I'm sorry you've chosen to do that. You have ruined your life and you've disturbed mine, but you took my child from me.”

We live with a news media that loves to draw equivalencies between two sides. The antifa, Black Lives Matter, the counter-protesters are just as bad as the white supremacists, right? But white supremacists want violence. They crave it. After Heather Heyer was murdered, many white supremacists celebrated her death. Many white supremacists said that it was likely that many more would die before all of this is over. Compare that to the Black Lives Matter protesters that de-escalated fights, that kept riots from breaking out. Compare that to the mothers that brought their babies to the counter-protest because they wanted to build a better future for their children. Compare that to the young kids holding up “Black Lives Matter” signs, “Love Trumps Hate” signs. There was anger, there was rage, but there was also love, there was joy. We were all there because we wanted something better for this world, something that would help everybody live their lives as fully as they could.

The Boston counter-protest was 40,000 people of all ages, races, genders, backgrounds, coming together to fight back against a growing force in American politics that seeks to destroy those who are vulnerable. It was a wild success.

[duanecbrooks]

The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think We crunched the data on where journalists work and how fast it’s changing. The results should worry you. By JACK SHAFER and TUCKER DOHERTY May/June 2017 How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers. What went so wrong? What’s still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily. The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.” The map at the top of this piece shows how concentrated media jobs have become in the nation’s most Democratic-leaning counties. Counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are in red, and Hillary Clinton counties are in blue, with darker colors signifying higher vote margins. The bubbles represent the 150 counties with the most newspaper and internet publishing jobs. Not only do most of the bubbles fall in blue counties, chiefly on the coasts, but an outright majority of the jobs are in the deepest-blue counties, where Clinton won by 30 points or more. But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed. The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too. The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Parts of the media have always had their own bubbles. The national magazine industry has been concentrated in New York for generations, and the copy produced reflects an Eastern sensibility. Radio and TV networks based in New York and Los Angeles likewise have shared that dominant sensibility. But they were more than balanced out by the number of newspaper jobs in big cities, midsized cities and smaller towns throughout the country, spreading journalists everywhere. No longer. The newspaper industry has jettisoned hundreds of thousands of jobs, due to falling advertising revenues. Dailies have shrunk sections, pages and features; some have retreated from daily publication; hundreds have closed. Daily and weekly newspaper publishers employed about 455,000 reporters, clerks, salespeople, designers and the like in 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By January 2017, that workforce had more than halved to 173,900. Those losses were felt in almost every region of the country. As newspapers have dwindled, internet publishers have added employees at a bracing clip. According to BLS data, a startling boom in “internet publishing and broadcasting” jobs has taken place. Since January 2008, internet publishing has grown from 77,900 jobs to 206,700 in January 2017. In late 2015, during Barack Obama’s second term, these two trend lines—jobs in newspapers, and jobs in internet publishing—finally crossed. For the first time, the number of workers in internet publishing exceeded the number of their newspaper brethren. Internet publishers are now adding workers at nearly twice the rate newspaper publishers are losing them. This isn’t just a shift in medium. It’s also a shift in sociopolitics, and a radical one. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton. So when your conservative friends use “media” as a synonym for “coastal” and “liberal,” they’re not far off the mark. What caused the majority of national media jobs to concentrate on the coasts? An alignment of the stars? A flocking of like-minded humans? The answer is far more structural, and far more difficult to alter: It was economics that done the deed. *** The magic of the internet was going to shake up the old certainties of the job market, prevent the coagulation of jobs in the big metro areas, or so the Web utopians promised us in the mid-1990s. The technology would free internet employees to work from wherever they could find a broadband connection. That remains true in theory, with thousands of Web developers, writers and producers working remotely from lesser metropolises. But economists know something the internet evangelists have ignored: All else being equal, specialized industries like to cluster. Car companies didn’t arise in remote regions that needed cars—they arose in Detroit, which already had heavy industry, was near natural resources, boasted a skilled workforce and was home to a network of suppliers that could help car companies thrive. As industries grow, they bud and create spinoffs, the best example being the way Silicon Valley blossomed from just a handful of pioneering electronics firms in the 1960s. Seattle’s rise as a tech powerhouse was seeded by Microsoft, which moved to the area in 1979 and helped create the ecosystem that gave rise to companies like Amazon. As Enrico Moretti, a University of California, Berkeley, economist who has studied the geography of job creation, points out, the tech entrepreneurs who drive internet publishing could locate their companies in low-rent, low-cost-of-living places like Cleveland, but they don’t. They need the most talented workers, who tend to move to the clusters, where demand drives wages higher. And it’s the clusters that host all the subsidiary industries a tech start-up craves—lawyers specializing in intellectual property and incorporation; hardware and software vendors; angel investors; and so on. The old newspaper business model almost prevented this kind of clustering. Except for the national broadsheets—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and increasingly the Washington Post—newspapers must locate, cheek by jowl, next to their customers, the people who consume local news, and whom local advertisers need to reach. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader is stuck in South Dakota just as the owners of hydroelectric plants in the Rockies are stuck where they are. As much as they might want to move their dams to coastal markets where they could charge more for electricity, fate has fixed them geographically. Economists call these “non-tradable goods”—goods that must be consumed in the same community in which they’re made. The business of a newspaper can’t really be separated from the place where it’s published. It is, or was, driven by ads for things that don’t travel, like real estate, jobs, home decor and cars. And as that advertising has gotten harder and harder to come by, local newsrooms have become thinner and thinner. The online media, liberated from printing presses and local ad bases, has been free to form clusters, piggyback-style, on the industries and government that it covers. New York is home to most business coverage because of the size of the business and banking community there. Likewise, national political reporting has concentrated in Washington and grown apace with the federal government. Entertainment and cultural reporting has bunched in New York and Los Angeles, where those businesses are strong. The result? If you look at the maps on the next page, you don’t need to be a Republican campaign strategist to grasp just how far the “media bubble” has drifted from the average American experience. Newspaper jobs are far more evenly scattered across the country, including the deep red parts. But as those vanish, it’s internet jobs that are driving whatever growth there is in media—and those fall almost entirely in places that are dense, blue and right in the bubble. *** As the votes streamed in on election night, evidence that the country had further cleaved into two Americas became palpable. With few exceptions, Clinton ran the table in urban America, while Trump ran it in the ruralities. And as you might suspect, Clinton dominated where internet publishing jobs abound. Nearly 90 percent of all internet publishing employees work in a county where Clinton won, and 75 percent of them work in a county that she won by more than 30 percentage points. When you add in the shrinking number of newspaper jobs, 72 percent of all internet publishing or newspaper employees work in a county that Clinton won. By this measure, of course, Clinton was the national media’s candidate. Resist—if you can—the conservative reflex to absorb this data and conclude that the media deliberately twists the news in favor of Democrats. Instead, take it the way a social scientist would take it: The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can’t help being affected—deeply affected—by the environment around them. Former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent got at this when he analyzed the decidedly liberal bent of his newspaper’s staff in a 2004 column that rewards rereading today. The “heart, mind, and habits” of the Times, he wrote, cannot be divorced from the ethos of the cosmopolitan city where it is produced. On such subjects as abortion, gay rights, gun control and environmental regulation, the Times’ news reporting is a pretty good reflection of its region’s dominant predisposition. And yes, a Times-ian ethos flourishes in all of internet publishing’s major cities—Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington. The Times thinks of itself as a centrist national newspaper, but it’s more accurate to say its politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan. Something akin to the Times ethos thrives in most major national newsrooms found on the Clinton coasts—CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Politico and the rest. Their reporters, an admirable lot, can parachute into Appalachia or the rural Midwest on a monthly basis and still not shake their provincial sensibilities: Reporters tote their bubbles with them. In a sense, the media bubble reflects an established truth about America: The places with money get served better than the places without. People in big media cities aren’t just more liberal, they’re also richer: Half of all newspaper and internet publishing employees work in counties where the median household income is greater than $61,000—$7,000 more than the national median. Commercial media tend to cluster where most of the GDP is created, and that’s the coasts. Perhaps this is what Bannon is hollering about when he denounces the “corporatist, global media,” as he did in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference. If current trends continue—and it’s safe to predict they will—national media will continue to expand and concentrate on the coasts, while local and regional media contract. Can media myopia be cured? Unlike other industries, the national media has a directive beyond just staying in business: Many newsrooms really do feel a commitment to reflecting America fairly. Sometimes, correcting for liberal bias can be smart business as well. For instance, by rightly guessing that there was a big national broadcast audience that didn’t see their worldviews represented in the mainstream networks, the Fox News Channel came to dominate cable TV ratings. Adopting Fox’s anti-mainstream media message to his political needs, Trump ended up running on a Foxesque platform, making a vote for him into a vote against the elite media—his trash talk was always directed at the national press, not the local. Similarly, Breitbart has seen huge success sticking it to liberals, implicitly taking the side of the “real America” against the coastal bubbles. Breitbart now attracts more than 15 million visitors a month, according to comScore, which isn’t far behind more established outlets like the Hill’s 24 million and Politico’s 25 million. Everyone acknowledges that Trump’s election really was a bad miss, and if the media doesn’t figure it out, it will miss the next one, too. But is this really America, either? It’s worth mentioning that Fox and Breitbart—and indeed most of the big conservative media players—also happen to be located in the same bubble. Like the “MSM” they rail against, they’re a product of New York, Washington and Los Angeles. It’s an argument against the bubble, being waged almost entirely by people who work inside it. Is America trapped? Certainly, the media seems to be. It’s hard to imagine an industry willingly accommodating the places with less money, fewer people and less expertise, especially if they sense that niche has already been filled to capacity by Fox. Yet everyone acknowledges that Trump’s election really was a bad miss, and if the media doesn’t figure it out, it will miss the next one, too. Journalism tends toward the autobiographical unless reporters and editors make a determined effort to separate themselves from the frame of their own experiences. The best medicine for journalistic myopia isn’t reeducation camps or a splurge of diversity hiring, though tiny doses of those two remedies wouldn’t hurt. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.

[fleabite531]

i) WOW air flight

Yesterday I flew WOW air from Edinburgh to San Francisco airport (SFO) via Reykjavik. The seats were pretty spacious, unlike the baggage allowance. Measly even compared to ryanair, the free carry-on was only 42x32x25cm! I decided to refuse to pay for a “large carry-on” in addition, so packed into my day pack:

Top row: laptop, power adapter, menstrual pads and cup, glasses case, torch/battery pack. water bottle was in side pocket and i refilled it in Rekyavik airport (water fountain is downstairs next to the toilets, below the duty free shop).

Middle row: toy bag, spare hoodie, mirror for applying eye drops, kindle (was in other side pocket), micro USB cable, headphones (were around my neck prior to eating picnic, then fitted in bag), toiletries/meds in poly bag

Bottom row: 3 * luggage cubes. 1) a gift, pair of shorts, a dress 2) underwear for 8 days plus swimsuit. 3) 6 * tshirts.

I brought a plane picnic with me, but by time i took photo (when i unpacked today) i’d already eaten it all. It was inside the bag as well so i optimised for filling/protein/fruit per volume : 2 scoops of huel in a sandwich bag (i used the water bottle to mix it in after drinking half the water), 6 cooked fishfingers, 2 hard boiled eggs, raisins and 2 apples. meant to bring nuts as well but forgot. i bought a sandwich at reykjavik airport. Only just managed to finish it all by time i landed at SFO! Will definitely do similar flying again as even on a normal flight the provided food is insufficient whereas this actually had me content. I also had 2 small containers of whisky

The seats were pretty spacious. On the trans atlantic flight they had european plug sockets to charge from. There was no tv screen at all, and it was surprising how much i missed  knowing our position as we fly, and those stats such as speed/altitude/eta. if i’d had a window seat i would have been able to turn gps on and at least know something of where we were.

ii) Arriving at #SFO to arrivals protest

I was actually more nervous about USA immigration this trip than ever before, although I thought (accurately) that my white skin and “western”/high income country passport would see me through, and they did. I looked around for the doors that those deemed unworthy because they were born in the wrong country, of the wrong skin colour were bustled off through but this was hidden for those of us who were allowed in. Fingerprints and photo was taken by the biometric systems at the immigration desk.

Walking out of the doors into arrivals was fucking awesome because from the bleak banal horror of the immigration system I walked into cheers and colourful handmade signs reading “Muslims welcome here”, “This Native American wants you in her country”, “We are a nation of immigrants” and “No ban, no wall”. Was such an upbeat, vocal, cheerful protest, although this was Monday, the day after the big callouts and airport presences of the weekend. And a dozen lawyers had a makeshift legal space set up nearby. Was so beautiful to see a diverse, courageous, visible demonstration of opposition to the white supremacy being enacted by the state.

iii) politics on the streets

Walking around Berkeley there are signs of resistance everywhere. Antifascist posters, stickers, even conversations in the grocery store. People talking about the airport protests with pride and some kind of determination to stand collectively together. Communities of resistance and solidarity to me are like the mother spider plant, nurturing and allowing baby plants to be sent off in all directions to spread this defiance and better way of living afield. I’ll write more about this as days go by.

Berkeley days 0-2 i) WOW air flight ii) arriving to #SFO protest iii) politics on the streets i) WOW air flight Yesterday I flew WOW air from Edinburgh to San Francisco airport (SFO) via Reykjavik.