#if you are one of the liberals who still thinks this wasn’t entirely the democrat’s own grave and that it’s somehow third party voters

[samuraisharkie]

I know I’m posting a lot of like. semi-bitter stuff and especially posts with frustration towards the Democratic Party and the liberals who refuse to look anywhere but themselves when it comes to why they failed, as well as acknowledging the fear and anxiety that comes with what we’re about to go through. But I want to say, that despite all of that and the awful feeling in my chest, I have so much compassion for the world. I still think we can fight for a better future, that it’s not over. We got this. It’s bleak but it was going to be no matter what, and we can make it. The results have inspired me to get even more active and try even harder, and I know there’s a lot of people that feel the same. We’ll all support each other, and we will make it. It’s going to suck, and I don’t want to put down the very real fear and danger folks are in— but I also don’t want to give in to that feeling of hopelessness and doom. There are so many people all over the world facing similar plights, or worse, and the least we can all do is keep fighting and supporting each other! Again I don’t want to step on the very real anxieties and fears and sadness from the results of this year’s election, I just feel some encouragement is in order amidst all the fear. For every person that refuses to turn on each other and continues to stand with all those who suffer just like us in our own homes and all over the world, we will be stronger for it. Take care of yourself, and take plenty of time to cry and fear of course, that’s not wrong, but don’t forget it isn’t over. There’s still a lot of love in this world!

[wastedawayagaininmargaritaville]

I'm just curious, so please don't mind me asking.. why interest in the Green Party? I'm trying to better understand this viewpoint as I've voted democratic in the last 2 elections. I was always told a third party vote wasn't a sure thing.

Thanks for your reply!

Hi! First I don’t mind you asking and I’m sorry if the way I post makes it seem like I’d jump down your throat for a question like this. I use my blog to blow off a lot more steam than I used to but it’s not how I want to approach things in general.

I should mention I’m registered to vote in MO, the last time the dem presidential nominee won was the 90s I believe (McCain won very narrowly over Obama in 2008) and we are a winner take all state. As long as the electoral college exists, I’m “throwing away my vote” unless I vote for the republican nom. The blue cities scattered across the midline of the state don’t have enough weight (at least not in my lifetime they haven’t)

If you mean “wasn’t a sure thing” as in it has been a successful way to elect someone who isn’t one of the two parties, yeah I’d say that’s an understatement. I have little faith in a third party running in our electoral process and actually gaining enough momentum and support to win. People talk all the time about how gen Z is one of the largest and most politically engaged generationsin a while, but we don’t have the electoral organizing experience (nor desire tbh, at least for me and lots of people I know) and certainly not the resources.

The only sort of caveat I guess would be a dem taking on the Green Party nom as their VP, but that requires sacrificing most of what is typically on the Green Party platform and I would consider them compromised anyway.

The pipeline post was what I have done and I was wondering how common it is for people in my general demographic (young adult, raised liberal and middle class) who were brought up being taught the Democrat Party is a beacon of progress and the only thing regular people have to fight for the rights we want for ourselves and the people in our communities is to vote for them once every 4 years.

Then…

To be served the Clinton dynasty for our first chance to vote as 18 year olds, become totally disillusioned by the 2016 election (I was too young to remember the 2000 election), becoming radicalized and opened up to the world throughout late teens/early 20s by going away to school or simply meeting more people and viewpoints that aren’t from your parents/family/immediate community, living through and beginning to organize during the 2020 uprising, feeling a slight pull back into the dem party by Sanders and then seeing how the establishment pushed him out, and then saying fuck it my (albeit still shaky and developing) principles won’t allow me to hold my nose and vote again but I guess I like the green party’s platform. That’s honestly as much thought as I put into voting for the Green Party in 2020, i googled their platform and said ok this sounds nice, I won’t entirely feel gross with myself throwing my hat in with people who want to enact this. Reading that back feels very silly and simply an act of wishful thinking. But I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the champion of segregation and the crime bill after what I learned and witnessed in the streets in 2020.

Now we’ve seen what the democrats can and will do for us (very little) and importantly to the world (destruction, extraction, destabilization) I know too much now to delude myself into thinking these parties are functionally different from each other. I know too many people impacted by BOTH party’s policies to throw them under the bus. I understand more clearly what it means to be a citizen of the United States and what it means to vote in a country with so much influence and presence in other countries that I’m basically casting a vote on behalf of those people too.

But again, it doesn’t matter who I vote for where I live. If I was in a swing state I’d maybe be slightly more engaged with the electoral discourse but I don’t have a dog in the fight.

Hope this answers your question or at least gives you some stuff to think about. I didn’t wake up one day after being raised by Obama-loving liberal white people for most of my life saying “fuck the democrats and fuck voting!” It took time, experience, and pushing myself outside of the ideas that comfort me into denying my (and your) agency and power. We can accomplish so so much more life saving and politically altering work expending our energy the other 1,460 days of the election cycle than any candidate or electoral system in the US will grant us.

[qqueenofhades]

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all). 

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

[space-malex]

I know nobody likes the Wyatt and Rosa thing, and I completely understand that, and kind of agree, but I have to admit I also find it to be pretty fascinating. I feel like it brings up all sorts of questions about alternate realities and nature versus nurture. I would never excuse the things that Wyatt has done, and it’s very difficult for me to see real redemption for him, at least not through simply erasing what he did in his own mind. But it’s still super interesting. Who would he have become if Kate hadn’t died? Or if he hadn’t been radicalized? I don’t think he necessarily would have been Mr. Liberal, but he very likely wouldn’t have become the person that he is now either. 

A bit of a personal story. My mother always voted Republican because of abortion only. A single issue voter. For my entire childhood up until my mid 20s, when she voted, and it wasn’t in every election, she voted Republican, but that was the only reason why. She knew nothing else about politics, she had zero interest, and she was…for the most part….a relatively normal person. Not perfect. Had her issues with depression, anxiety, etc. But still…somewhat normal. Then she lost her best friend. And then she lost my grandfather. Pretty close together. The two people that she was the closest to and the two people that she talked to the most. (Also both my grandpa and Jan were staunch democrats). And then somehow, someway, she started making “friends” on Facebook that were extreme conservatives. She started consuming nothing but Fox News and fake internet bs. And she is now one of the most hateful, conspiracy theorist, delusional, and radical people I’ve ever known. She didn’t storm the capitol on January 6th, but she may as well have. She definitely was cheering for it. She thinks Covid is made up. She won’t get vaccinated because she thinks there’s a chip in it. Anti gay, anti blm, anti any liberal or even moderate policy you can imagine. And she was never like that. Not ever. Seeing who she is today compared to who she was 10 years ago is like night and day. She was completely and utterly brainwashed by the echo chamber surrounding her and there is no getting through to her anymore. I realize that’s my own personal story, and it’s very different watching this kind of representation on television, but I often wonder how different things could’ve been if she had taken a different path or if things had not gone down the way they did. It’s like she was looking for connection out of loneliness and sadness and grief and got sucked into a cult.

As for Wyatt, I kind of wonder the same thing. Who could he have been instead of who he is? His future at that time wasn’t set in stone. And this drug has essentially taken him back to who he was before he was radicalized. I think the romantic set up with Rosa is obvious and even though it kinda makes me cringe at this point in time, I’m prepared for it. (Also props to Dylan for genuinely being a completely different person, Wyatt’s entire demeanor, body language, even face has changed and I’m like how). I also think that at some point, Wyatt is going to regain his memories and that is when we are going to see if he has truly changed. And if he tries to make up for his past wrongdoings. I think he’s going to remember who he is and the things that he has done and the things that he has believed and he will be tested. And then we will see. 

The other thing I find to be really compelling about this story is that it parallels Rosa’s own journey. Obviously, the circumstances are very different even if they are related to one another. But in many ways it’s the same thing. Rosa lost 10 years of her life. She woke up the same person that she was right after she had graduated high school. And who knows where she would have been now if she hadn’t died then the way she did. She could have ODed. She could be in jail. Or she could’ve done what she has since she came back- gotten help, got sober, worked on her mental health, and is in a different place now. But there’s a really good chance that wouldn’t have happened. She was on a really destructive path at the time. When Rosa came back, she realized that she had a second chance to do things right. And I think she sees that in Wyatt as well. Rosa relates to what Wyatt is going through because she felt that same kind of shock and confusion when she woke up. I also think that she has some kind of feelings for him or at least did in high school and she wants to help him. She could be wrong that he could change, because she has been absent most of this time, but I think she feels like maybe he’s not too far gone. That maybe it’s still possible that he could change. And I definitely think that a huge amount of that has to do with herself. She relates to what is happening to Wyatt right now with what happened to her. And honestly I am kind of excited to see where it goes.

[shesawriter39049]

|Breakdowns & Bugatti’s| M|

     *****  Headcanon’s for my OT7 AU*****

Genre: Rich Kid AU/ Drama/ Suspense/ Smut/ Angst

AU SUMMARY : The story of 8 heirs, who also happen to be the children of some of the most powerful, and well known political figures in The Big Apple! This is a candid look at all of the sex, lies, drama, scandals, couture and boujee affairs that are caught both on, but more importantly off camera!

OR: Gossip girl meet’s HTGAWM? Essentially if GG was on HBO, darker, and had more depth within it’s plot! Which is no shade, I love me some Gossip Girl, but realistically looking back a lot of the “Drama” wasn’t that...deep lol! But we still loved it all the same!

Note:  The first chapter is called “The Kim’s of New York” So these headcanon’s are solely the Kim boys & the OC! ALSO, I just tried to find the most discrete gif for the Y/N there is NO ethnicity for ANY of my OC’s! Also, it’s set to be a OT7 intertwined plot but the smut with the OC will prob only be 3/4 members deep!

***The sneak peek for part 1 which is Namjoon X Reader will be linked***

~~~~~~~

Name: Namjoon Kim

Age: 21 Birth place: New York, New York

Current Residence: West Village, New York/ Songpa-Gu, Seoul Korea

Profession: Heir, College student, Entrepreneur, Art lover, Smartass, Heartbreaker (Closet fuck boi) 

College: NYU (Incoming Junior)

Degree: Aiming for a Master’s in Journalism & Political communication. Endgame :Political Journalism

Preferred Degree: Opinion, Trade, or Art Journalism, or a Museum Curator   (Namjoon actually anonymously runs a pretty popular art based travel blog)Namjoon also dabbles in that Soundcloud life making beats under an undisclosed name...however that’s just a hobby....so he says...

Business Type:....Co-owner/founder of an exclusive, invite only, dating service....do with that information what you will!

(Bonus Question ) Licensed Business?: LMAO….sure

Net Worth : 10 Figures

Dating Status : Closet Fuck Boi! Wait, is that not an option? Okay fine. He’s single...ish…Kinda? Well to be fair it depends on the time of day honestly! Is it a Sunday? Are we going to Brunch at Society Café? Or, is it Friday night and he’s going to the “Press Lounge”? More importantly is it election season and and does his father need him to not look like a hoe!? This is all crucial information, I need meticulousdetails honestly! So for the time being I guess I’ll have to pass on the question!

Aesthetic : Tom Ford X Hugo Boss X Valentino X Dior X Tommy Hilfiger = Couture Business Casual! I.E Namjoon always looks like he’s going to some business meeting with Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos! Even if it’s like...noon on a Saturday and your going on a day trip to Nappa...He’s still in calfskin loafers and a disrespectfully tight button up. Namjoon’s giving like...hot college professor PornHub realness...Yup His whole “Scholar Student” Aesthetic is a whole ass kink and baby boy knows it! 

Political Tie: Father, Joshua Kim, New York Senator

Parents : Father : Joshua Kim, (New York Senator, son of Billionaire tech Tycoon Sang Woo Kim) Mother: Christine Kim : Luxury Event planner

Siblings : Only child

Political Party: Democratic

Actual Political Party: Liberal Daily : Matte Black Porsche 911/ Satin Red Ferrari 458/ Bugatti Veyron Matte red

Name: Seokjin Kim (Jin Kim)

Age: 23

Birth place: London, England

Current Residence: Upper Eastside, New York/ Chelsea London

Profession: Existing, Retired Editorial Model, Entrepreneur, Occasional influencer (When he feels like it) IE, the influencer that never really asked for the titile...he’s just rich and living his life! I mean let’s be real who isn't curious to see how the -1% lives?!

College: University of Oxford

Degree: Maybe he has a Master’s in Business...maybe he dropped out!

Preferred Degree: Culinary Arts...or honestly...just chillin...maybe eventually open his own modeling firm or something down the line!

Business Type:....Jin casually runs high stakes poker matches...and that’s all you need to know for right now….

(Bonus Question ) Licensed Business?:...Again...that’s all you need to know right now…

Net Worth : 10 Figures

Dating Status : Single, and not in the mood to entertain….unless you’ll like...walk yourself out after then maybe...Oh also it’s a requirement that you’re aware there’s more luxury brands than Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Show up in anything straight monogram and Jin’s going flaccid on command!

Aesthetic : Chanel  X  Dior X Cavalli X Dolce X Fendi  = On Duty Runway Model! It truly doesn’t matter if he’s going to brunch, the movies, or sitting front row at Galliano! Jin always looks like he should be front row at Galliano! Whilst also effortlessly looking 10x’S pretter than half of the bitches in Manhattan even on his worst day! Androgyny at its finest, well Jin and Judge Parks son are kinda tied in that department!

Political Tie: Father, David Kim, Mayor’s Chief of Staff/ “Ghost” press secretary

Parents : Father : David Kim, (Retired Corporate Attorney, son of Billionaire Oil Tycoon Hyun-Son Kim) Mother: Lisa Kim, Co- owner of Hotel Shailla, daughter of Michael Lee, Millionaire Entrepreneur )

Siblings : Taehyung Kim (20), Hae Jin Kim (29) Deceased...( Allegedly)  

Political Party: Democratic

Actual Political Party: Honestly, Jin could give less than a damn

Daily : Matte Pink Aston Martin One, White Bugatti Chiron

Name: Taehyung Kim (Tae Kim)

Age: 20

Birth place: Rome, Italy

Current Residence: Cobble Hill, New York/ Pairs, France (When he’s not in school...or just on the weekends)

Profession: College student, Painter, Podcast Host, unwarranted fashion critique/ Stylist! Tae lowkey thinks his IG feed is the reprise of “Fashion  Police” Joan Rivers bless rest her soul..she would’ve loved him!

College: Bernard (Sophomore)

Degree:  Fine Arts (Painting/ Sculpture)

Preferred Degree: Exactly...what he’s doing...he enrolled at NYU for business. Lasted all of like...5 months before he dropped out!

Business Type:....Tae run’s a very...controversial late night Podcast  appropriately titled “Tae unfiltered”! It wasn’t supposed to be a job, lord knows he doesn't need one...However due to the steady increase in his audience the youngest Kim is on track to ending up on Forbes without his inheritance.

(Bonus Question ) Licensed Business?:...Yup!

Net Worth: 10 Figures

Dating Status : Single, and more than ready to mingle, Tae essentially had the same girlfriend all throughout high school! The pair broke up maybe 7 months ago when she opted to go to college in London. So let’s just say he has a lot of making up to do and he’s very much….open to new experiences…

Aesthetic : Guicci  X  Gucci X Gucci X  Gucci X Gucci = Gucci!? Nah, actually Tae, is fond of anything that doesn't...blend in...so Moschino, GCDS, Vetements, Kenzo, Balmain= If it lowkey looks like it could've been homemade...but it cost like bare minimum 4k! Or he just highkey looks exactly like you’d expect, like a very rich, art student who loves funky. abstract, unethical, clothing! Is he going to Coachella or to the farmers market? We may never know but that’s fine! He’s also young, and well aware that he’s fine as fuck, and that’s a whole ass problem! Tae may not have a ton of experience but he’s far from shy and more than down to learn...

Political Tie: Father, David Kim, Mayor’s Chief of Staff (Ghost press secretary)

Parents : Father : David Kim, (Retired Corporate Attorney, son of Billionaire Oil Tycoon Sang Tae Won Kim) Mother: Lisa Kim, Co- owner of Hotel Shailla, daughter of Michael Lee, Millionaire, Entrepreneur )

Siblings : Seokjin Kim (23), Hae Jin Kim (29) Deceased ( Allegedly)

Political Party: Democratic

Actual Political Party: Liberal AFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Daily : Lime Green Lamborghini Huracan/ Matte Grey Ferrari F60

Name: Yn/Ln

Age: 21

Birth Place: Paris, France

Current Residence: Upper East Side, New York/ Dubai

Profession:...Taking pictures, of both herself and other people, ugh...looking attractive? Does that count? Oh being well dressed...Self taught photographer, Fashion Blogger, Creative Director,Entrepreneur...

College: N/A ...Possible freshman at NYU or Bernard or, FIT for Photography & or Fashion

Degree: N/A... IF, she went it would be for Fine Arts/ Fashion degree for Creative Direction

Preferred Degree: Honestly, none, she lives and breathes fashion and due to her lifestyle Y/n already has the type of connections that up and coming photographers would die for! BUT...said college degree would shut her father up...so it’s a possibility! However, it’s not like he considers photography or being a fashion influencer a real job anyway...sooo she mideswell just not even bother!

Business Type:....Existing? Her main job is essentially...breathing...and occasionally taking pictures of other people! Oh, and herself as well, she get’s paid to post daily content! She runs a website called “MyJobIsToBeWellDressed” Co-owner of an exclusive invite only dating service!

(Bonus Question ) Licensed Business?: Yes and...(lmao)...for the first part, where her blog and all of that is concerned, yes...she’s 1099 the full nine! The other job however...................mmm... next question?

Net Worth: 10 Figures

Dating Status :YOLO

Aesthetic : 90’s Couture meet’s “House of Yes” @ 3 AM ( Back when luxury brands weren’t afraid to have fun and be a little risque)  Chanel X Versace X Dolce X Prada X Gucci X Galliano = Well kept sugar baby??? Or every time you see her your literally like “Dude where the fuck are you even going!!??” Baby girl is always overdressed, she showed up to go on a doggy date through central park with Yoongi and Holly in 7 inch Louboutin’s sooo..we love that! Owns literally every vintage 90′s runway archive you can think of...If you’ve gagged over it on Pinterest it’s in Y/n’s closet. She’s smooth as all fuck...that’s for damn sure, radiating the perfect blend of BD and WAP energy....she’s a bad bitch and she knows it! Fuck the entire upper Eastside knows it!

Political Tie: Father, Christopher L/N, New York Senator

Parents: Father : Christopher L/N, (New York Senator, son of Billionaire Automotive Tycoon/ Real Estate Mogul Gregory L/N/ ) Mother: Ashley L/N, (luxury) Interior Designer & Daughter of Hotel Mogul Michael L/N

Siblings: Only child...maybe

Political Party: Democratic

Actual Political Party: Liberal

Daily : Matte Black Bugatti Divo / Satin Purple Lamborghini Murcielago/ Any car that any of her friends are driving because...fuck that, ridding shotty all day!

~~~~~~~~

There they are!!

The sneak peek is linked below...part 1 is Namjoon X Reader

However Jin and Tae are briefly introduced...and they will eventually have induvial chapters as well!

SNEAK PEEK

[beesandwasps]

A very common strategy in politics, honestly, not limited to queer people at all. The instant I read “when u ask for advice even tho youre deliberately going to go against them anyways” [sic] that immediately reminded me how, back in the 90s, the Clintons stacked their entire “health care reform” team with people who supported private insurance companies, except for one expert who was a single-payer supporter, who was then basically never asked any questions except in the form of “is [X policy decision] better than doing nothing at all?”, so that the Clintons could claim that even people who wanted single-payer supported their “reform” package (which was the first one to insist that people had to buy private health insurance, and failed anyway, but that’s another story).

And then I remembered living for a while in Oak Park, Illinois, which is a Democratic stronghold which thinks it’s leftist but is merely liberal, if you know what I mean. They had a massive volunteer “commission” system where residents can go in and pretend to exercise oversight, but all the executive authority rested with the (unelected) Village Manager, and to a lesser extent the (also unelected) Village Attorney. The system basically existed so that anybody with a complaint would be told to volunteer and get put into a position where they were “official” but still couldn’t actually do anything except make recommendations which were not legally binding. And even that wasn’t enough, because a few of the commissions had to have some legal authority under state law, like the Zoning Board, and so there was an understanding that Certain Types Of People could not be put on Certain Commissions.

And then there’s the entire “devolution of powers” in the UK’s government, where the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Parliament, and the Northern Ireland Assembly are “in charge” of certain issues… but the powers they have can be revoked by the main UK Parliament, which is something like 85% English, and of course they don’t have real control over their budgets. So any time they do something the English don’t like, or which might cost money that could be spent in England, UK Parliament simply overrides them. For instance, Scotland tried to change from ideologically-driven punishment-based drug policy (which was not working) to a more practical, humanitarian approach, which is one of the things they supposedly have control over — and UK Parliament instantly overrode them, because That’s Not The Way England Wants Things To Go.

It’s one way to manufacture consent for bad policy. Create an “official” way to express opinions, but give it no teeth.

idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".

well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah

[kumawrites]

hi!! idk how requests work but coffeeshop au with oikawa as the flirty barista and you're just trying to find a place to study okay bye 😶😶

iced vanilla bean latte

☆ oikawa tooru x reader ☆

☆ - 1.7k words

☆ - a/n: i based this 100% in a local coffee shop in my area that i frequent except i h8 coffee

☆ - taglist: @miceonmars

//

“Y/N, Obama was the last president of the United States, not the third.” Kiyoko looked at you with a pitiful gaze in response to your answer.

“Oh.” You blinked once. Twice. A third time for good measure. So your American Politics class was needless to say, not going very well. Honestly, you didn’t even know why you were taking an American politics class when you lived in Japan. Actually, you knew why. Because of your horrible habit of procrastinating literally anything that can be procrastinated, you foolishly waited until the very last day that you could to register for classes. And unsurprisingly, most of them had been completely filled, leaving American Politics to be the only history class that you were able to take. Which would have been just fine, had you not procrastinated studying and even taking notes.

You stared blankly down at your notebook that was barely a quarter full. Instead of taking notes and actually paying attention in class, you either skipped or distracted yourself playing games on your phone. Your professor never notified you since you sat right in the middle of the lecture hall, not drawing much attention at all. Maybe, that wasn’t a good thing, however. You had no connection to your professor at all, and asking for help this late in the game just didn’t feel right, which is extremely irrational but you really didn’t care.

Your problem would really just have been solved if you did care. Too bad you didn’t. However, you’re stuck in a bit of a pickle now, not knowing even the basics of the class, with midterms coming up and a frighteningly fast rate. You were bound to fail, and your parents would not be very happy about that. So, you decided that it was finally time to actually study. Except studying really meant learning all of the material that you had covered for half of the semester in about a week.

Luckily for you, you had great friends who were super smart and actually studious to help! Kiyoko had already taken the class, being a grade ahead of you, and had graciously blessed you with her notebook full of her beautiful notes. It was truly astounding how notes could be so pretty. Yachi, on the other hand, gave your studying tips and ways to actually study well. Without those two, you would have failed the midterm for sure, and most likely the course all together.

You were currently studying with Kiyoko in the library, well trying to at least. Apparently, you knew less than you actually thought.

“Wait, what’s a Conservative? Is that a branch of Congress?” You weren’t doing too hot.

“It’s a political party. They’re a more extreme version of a the Republican Party.” You nodded your head, slowly understanding. Why were politics so complicated?

“Oh, okay. I think I get it. So, Liberals are Democrats but more extreme?”

“That’s right.” Kiyoko nodded her head as you scratched down some of her notes into your own notebook. Kiyoko’s phone pinged and she grabbed it from the table, turning it on. She read the message, sighed, replied, and began packing up her things. “Sorry, Y/N, but my boss just messaged me. I have to go in tonight, Hana got sick.” You nodded and gave Kiyoko a slight smile and a wave as she left. Now it was just you, left to your own devices. You were half tempted to close your books and play Fire Emblem, but that seemed like a poor long term choice.

You kept at it for a surprisingly long amount of time, around an hour, until a rowdy group came in. Even though it was a library, it wasn’t the most quiet of places on campus, and many groups liked to come in to work on group projects. You had no problem with them, until they set down their bags and their bodies at the table right next to yours, still chatting loudly. Unfortunately for you, you didn’t bring your earbuds with you. Since you assumed you would just be studying with Kiyoko the whole time, you didn’t bother to pack them. The one moment in your life when you needed them the most. A tragedy.

You sighed and packed up your things, considering giving up studying for the day, until you realized you were running out of time and were still extremely confused. And tired. You yawned as your left the library, wondering where to go from there. Going back to your dorm would only lead to you playing video games and ignoring everything else, so that was off the list. Every other place you could think of would be far too noisy to actually study. You were in quite the pickle.

You were really close to giving up for the hundredth time until you passed by a coffee shop that you had never seen on campus before. Was that always there? No, it couldn’t have been. It was in the middle of a route you used all of the time to get across campus. But how did you never notice that this was there? The shop had large windows that you could peek through to see a very classy interior. Everything seemed to be made of a walnut coloured wood, excluding the black chairs and stools. There weren’t too many people in the shop, just a small crowd. It looked peaceful. You stood there for a bit before deciding to walk inside. Maybe this is where you could study in peace.

As soon as you opened the door, you were greeted with the smell of fresh roasted coffee beans. You stopped a vacant table and placed your belonging on it and took a seat. The chairs were surprisingly comfortable, even though they seemed to be made of metal. The vibe in the entire shop was very calm. You could get used to this.

You took your notes out and began to study, creating flashcards and making your notes a bit cleaner and more cohesive. This was the kind of productivity that you needed to have on a daily basis. Too bad that this energy was for sure going to leave your body once you finish your midterm. Another yawn left your body, and you turned your head towards the counter. You could buy a coffee. That wasn’t going to break your bank account. Yeah.

You stood up and headed towards the counter, staring at the menu. Everything on the menu sounded fine, but you didn’t know exactly what you wanted.

“Hey! What can I do for you today?” A cheery voice broke you form your thoughts and you brought your eyes back down to look at who was speaking to you. The barista that greeted you had a charming smile on his face, one that you knew just drew people in. He was pretty, for sure, but you didn’t have time to think about pretty boys, too focused on trying to pass your class.

“Hi there. I’ve never been here, so I’m not too sure what to get. What would you recommend?” You have him a polite smile in return, and shifted your gaze back to the menu. There were so many options that you were a bit overwhelmed with choices

“Hmm..” The barista tapped his chin and scrunched his face a bit. “What about the vanilla bean latte? It’s really good iced!” He suggested and you nodded your head.

“Okay, sure. I’ll have that as a 24 ounce, then.” You ordered such a large drink since you assumed that you would be here for a while, having so much material left to study.

“Oh, it’s Y/N.” You replied and he hummed, typing it into the tablet on the counter. Your total came up and you handed him your card, making sure to leave a tip.

“That’s a cute name, just like you!” You stared at him. It was like someone had just stopped a record right in the middle of a song. What? Did you hear that right?

“Sorry, um, what?”

“I just think you’re super cute. We’ll have that vanilla bean right out for ya, Y/N.” He winked and walked over to his coworker who was making your drink. You vaguely remember his coworker scolding him, telling him to ‘stop flirting with the customers shithead’, but you really weren’t listening. Were you just, flirted with? Is that how this works? You for sure were not expecting that to happen.

You returned to your seat and opened up your notes, trying to forget the flirting(?) and focus on your studies. That’s what you came here to do, not flirt with a cute barista that you would for sure go on a date with. But, he was probably just a flirty person, you figured. If his coworker scolded him like that, it was probably a common occurrence, meaning you shouldn’t take it to heart or anything. He was just super cute.

Only a few minutes after you began to actually focus in on your work, you noticed that a large plastic cup full of iced coffee and a plate with a muffin was placed down at your table. Looking up, you saw the cute barista with a beaming smile on his face.

“Here you go, Y/N. Hope you like it.”

“Oh, I didn’t order a muffin.” You tilted your head up at the man who chuckled in response.

“I know. It’s on the house.” And with that, he gave you a tiny wave and disappeared into the back room, leaving you shook. Was this protocol? No, definitely not. Was this protocol for him flirting with every female customer? His boss wouldn’t let him give out that much free food. Was he really, for sure, actually, flirting with you? Was this real? Are you real? Okay, not time for an existential crisis.

You picked up the muffin on the plate, and noticed a small note that was placed under it.. It read, ‘text me!!!! :) xxx-xxx-xxxx - oikawa’. At this point, you were pretty damn sure he was flirting with you. Holy shit. He was flirting with you. Oikawa, you assumed his name was, still hadn’t come out of the storage room, so you couldn’t gauge his reactions or anything. You stared at your phone that you picked up like it was an explosive, ready to detonate. Were you actually going to text him? Was this actually a good idea? You know what, fuck American politics, you had something far more pressing to deal with at the moment.

y/n: hey is this oikawa? this is y/n

oikawa: hey cutie!! ;)

[freakscircus]

i don't know who to talk to about this but i respect you a lot so i hope you don't mind my rambling. i'm a 17 year old girl in the united states and the more i think about our government the more frustrated i get. it's not even a matter of "x needs to happen to make it better," i think the government is inherently corrupt and broken and i have no faith in democracy as an institution. i feel like we need to get rid of everything entirely but i don't know what to do with these feelings. idk

17 yr old girl still: for clarification, i've felt this way for a while but i'm only acknowledging it now because i've been reading about like garrisonian abolitionism and how they believed the constitution is inherently flawed and the government is run by immoral people and so all government participation is corrupt and supporting a corrupt system... and it's how i feel to a t. fixing the government is a waste of time because america is inherently immoral... idk if i am just crazy or what to do

this is totally not crazy and completely 100% understandable. i think we all struggle to come to grips, especially these days, with the fact that the government we grew up trusting and believing in is not actually what it seems to be. i apologize for the personal political tangent i’m about to go on here, but for me this break came as i was continuously frustrated with the cruelty and suffering that could either by stopped by or was even fostered by the state. to me it made no sense that democrats, the seemingly liberal and rational compassionate party, sat around posturing while people died from lack of healthcare. stories about people being evicted because of medical bills or rationing insulin seemed completely ridiculous in a “”first world”” country that was wealthy enough to be spending billions of dollars on defense and weapons for “protection” but didn’t care about its own citizens wellbeing. as i got older, i started looking into works critical of capitalism and realized that at the heart of it all, the system wasn’t broken but working exactly how it had to in order to benefit the wealthy and powerful in this country. there’s a reason we can afford enormous “defense” spending but we “can’t afford” stimulus checks. we don’t get jeff bezos and other billionaires without stolen labor and resources. for example, amazon not paying taxes while elsewhere schools are closing and governments claim to have no money to reverse the seemingly permanent austerity we live in these days. the stock market hits records constantly but when was the last time the economy was good for everyone? why do so many top democrats have wall street and huge corporations as enormous donors with a ton of leeway? it all seemed very corrupt and rotten.

this is when i started reading about communism/socialism/anarchism. i had to unlearn a lot about what i was taught about all of this, as we are taught negative things for a reason. it really seems to some people that the choice is what we have now, or an authoritarian state complete with bread lines and factory work for the one party. which of course is not what communism is and many argue that communism the way karl marx intended does not look like anything we have seen yet because we need the capitalist powers that be to no longer exist to meddle and to suck up the world’s resources. ANYWAY reading more about anarchism and socialism made me realize that a better world is possible. i honestly do not trust the state and i think things get corrupted easily. i hope i am wrong and i hope without capitalism involved, a state could be more compassionate. however, i really loved the idea of small democratically led communities that existed without a centralized state. i think this pulls us away from corruption, isolation, overcommodification, and many things that make us sick and feel like our needs are not being met. but realizing a better world is possible in theory made the idea of scrapping it all not feel like such a hopeless failure.

however, the socialist revolution or the erasure of our current status quo will not happen overnight and isn’t happening anytime soon. really makes you feel frustrated and powerless right? my advice to you would be to take a break from theorizing about fixing absolutely everything before our system collapses in on itself. instead, i honestly find that the best thing for that frustration and powerlessness of living under this crumbling empire is to realize that on a small scale, people are doing so much good. i would get involved and look into mutual aid groups (not charities necessarily, but  community centered mutual aid groups like food not bombs run by locals for locals in a very compassionate way)  and see how they are changing their communities independent of the local or federal government. even picking a candidate that you think can give you any glimmer of hope (like me and bernie who i canvassed for in february when things seemed so much brighter lol) and do some grassroots work there. organizing on a local level for leftist groups even independent of politics and just for making people’s lives better can also really make you feel like good is still possible. even changing the life of one or two people who have been crushed by the callousness and unkindness of our system can really restore your faith that something can improve, even if its not our federal government. hope you don’t mind MY rant and hope this offers some insight into how i deal with the exact same feelings you have.

[arcticdementor]

I’ll be transcribing select podcasts from now on. The one I recently did with Misha Saul had a lot of great insights, so I thought it was a good place to start.

It’s been lightly edited to make it more clear and legible, and sometimes for grammar, while maintaining the general ideas.

…

Richard has hit the spotlight in a big way over the last year – he’s been on Tucker Carlson and is increasingly known for his iconoclastic style. His podcast is excellent, and his essay drawing out the mechanism for how Wokeism grew out of the Civil Rights Act in the US has made waves.

This conversation picks up on a strand that I’ve been thinking a lot about. Diana Fleischman in my conversation with her said: Institutions are increasingly reflecting the values of middle-aged women. Tyler Cowen often writes about the feminization of society at Marginal Revolution. No one, as far as I’m aware, has really buttoned down what that means and what it looks like.

I don’t think that’s quite what we do here.

It’s a pretty free-flowing exploratory conversation about what we might call the feminization of society. What do we mean when we talk about it? Where can we see it? What are its benefits and derangements? We have a crack at the subject, anyway. Think of this as an experiment in chatting through some observations, live.

…

Richard: Sure. This is going to be a very American-centric analysis because it goes back to American history and American law but a lot of Americans don’t actually know this story. A lot of liberals have this idea of the Civil Rights Act… there used to be racism, they still think there is racism, but there used to be official state-sanctioned racism, Jim Crow, private businesses would discriminate against blacks and women to a lesser extent, or the same extent in some people’s minds. Then you pass the law of the Civil Rights Act and things got better. And a lot of Republican politicians, those doing the most superficial kind of analysis, don’t have much of a different story than that. They just think that “whatever, now the wokeness has come and now maybe it’s something a different and that’s a problem.” And they’ll throw in “oh and by the way, those who opposed the civil rights were Democrats." They try and claim the mantle for the civil rights movement for the Republicans, which is nonsense because a lot of those people left and became Republicans specifically over that issue, and a lot of their voters left the party. So it’s really a nonsense narrative they try and throw back at them.

It says you can’t discriminate in government and you can’t discriminate in private business. And most people at the time thought that basically meant you couldn’t put up a sign that says no black people. Even the gender thing they say was added as a joke actually. Somebody was trying to kill the bill, they didn’t want the racial equality parts. They said, “it would be so absurd to have a society where you didn’t discriminate based on sex” so they put sex in there hoping to kill the bill. And it ended up passing. I’m not 100% sure, I was told this by a law professor at the University of Chicago, so it’s not like I read it on Twitter somewhere. It’s credible though I haven’t looked into it.

Misha: American politics is basically a rerun of the producers, like hilarious accidents that keep escalating forever.

Richard: Right. So what does not discriminating mean? It wasn’t long after that that the phrase affirmative action comes along. It comes along in a series of executive orders. Government contractors first under Kennedy and then LBJ in the 1960s. Under Nixon for the entire federal government. Basically it said that the government would have to keep racial and gender statistics and make sure there weren’t any disparities between groups. You also had development of these other legal doctrines developed from the Civil Rights Act which includes a hostile work environment, sexual harassment law, stuff like that.

And lots of people have raised questions about free speech: If I think men and women are different and I’m in a private business and I want to say that, that’s of questionable legality… mainstream conservative views on things. They went after a lot of companies for this. There were some major corporations, I think Mitsubishi was one, they ended up paying a lot of money to the government, that made examples out of certain places.

Another doctrine, which was invented by a combination of the courts and executive agencies, is disparate impact. So if you give standardized tests, Grigg vs. Duke Power Company, this was a case early after the Civil Rights Act. It said if you give an IQ test and it has a disparate impact between groups… you can still use it but it’s a little complicated, it has to be related to the work, but it becomes harder. Everything you do that has a racial disparate impact, and by the way everything in the world has a racial disparate impact, if you find something that doesn’t I’ll be surprised, they can come after you for it either through the government directly coming after you or through people suing you.

So what happened? What happened starting in the 1960s is you see the growth of this human resources industry. You can just look at the chart of the number of human resource workers in the US going through the roof. Now if you had just said quotas, hire this many blacks, this many women, that would have been simple. You wouldn’t need a full-time bureaucracy to do that. The fact that it was vague and there were potentially substantial penalties sort of put business on edge. You needed a full-time bureaucratic class to interpret the laws and what was going on.

So the DEI industry is derived off of the rise of human resources. So you know, the way people see woke institutions today, “well they’re just deciding to be woke, there’s just a class of people deciding to take the leftwing issue on anything related to race and gender,” and some of that is obviously right. But you’re ignoring that basically legally you’re only allowed to be on one side of the culture wars. You’re not really allowed to say… if you’re a government contractor you can’t say “I don’t want to count my employees by race or gender. I don’t want to collect that data. I don’t want to take affirmative action to help black people or women out, I believe in a colorblind policy.” Mainstream conservative views, conservatives believe this stuff, it’s not legal. Conservatism is illegal for a lot of institutions. Not everything is covered but huge portions: the federal government, government contractors, subcontractors, it covers a huge portion of the private and public sectors.

And then it filters down, you have these big corporations and other people sort of follow them. And then you have these norms that apply to everyone. Courts will look at best practices, saying “Oh, discrimination is wrong, what are the best practices in the industry? What are people doing to fight discrimination?” And if that’s Robin DiAngelo at one point in time, you start to worry if you don’t have Robin DiAngelo coming to give speeches you might get in trouble. Not specifically Robin DiAngelo, but you get the idea. You have these intellectual fads that come and go and everyone’s jumping on the same train because it’s necessary.

…

But anyway, let’s get back to the feminization issue. I think this is a discussion that can easily devolve into two cranks kind of sounding conspiratorial and bitter. The one place outside this conversation that’s been steadily beating the drum of this thing has been Tyler Cowen on his blog Marginal Revolution. I think we can generally be quite normatively neutral around this trend, it’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, but if you go to Marginal Revolution and search “feminization,” you notice that it does pop up quite periodically.

For example, one thing that Tyler Cowen recently said, and I’ll quote: “one thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminized culture will be rather strongly enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles.” I think last year or the year before Tyler Cowen said “the feminization of our culture is for me, trend #1,” noting that basically all the top ten selling books had female protagonists and seven were authored by women. And I think you can go through different professions, education and other institutions, over the past 50 years, and I guess it’s not surprising since the kind of increased participation of women in the workforce and democratic process, you’d kind of expect our cultural and institutions to change. But I guess this is what I wanted to spend today talking about, when you kind of took the piss out of DiAngelo and just said “this is just estrogen and mental illness.” Let’s talk about what has happened in our culture, what does feminization mean?

Richard: Well, I think it means a lot. It’s a broad topic. I think what Cowen is referring to is, you have men and women, and men and women deal with conflict and challenges in different ways. We as a society are leaning more towards doing things in the feminized way rather than a more masculine way. Robin DiAngelo is just a great example of this. I mentioned the human resources industry. I also have a chart in my Substack that shows the changing demographics over time, shows something like 60-70% female. So this idea that you have problems with people and then you talk to them about it and you talk to them not for say, an instrumental purpose, “we’re going to work something out,” but talking is a reward in and of itself. You need something, you need to re-establish the relationship, you need to feel heard, feel validated. This is a very feminine thing.

So you have these protestors at universities, and it’s funny because you look at identity politics in the past, anti-colonization or something. It’s just “we want to get the occupiers out of our country, we want to fight them, we want to have our own society” it’s a kind of masculine idea. And you now have these sort of identity politics where it’s like “hire more diversity counselors and have them talk to the people who are mean to us forever.” It’s a very strange thing compared to what identity politics was 30, 40, 50 years ago. It’s a sort of nationalism, a tribalism, an us vs. them that’s there in every society. But it’s morphed into something different.

So DiAngelo, the rise of human resources, even things like how we understand cost-benefit analysis. I think Safetysim is a more female way of looking at things. Bryan Caplan in his book The Myth of the Rational Voters has a few predictors of thinking more like an economist, and one of them is being male rather than female.

…

Richard: Well, if you go to the places where it’s most purely about consumer preferences, just walk though the girls section in the toy store… now they announce there’s no girls section or boys section, but they’ll have one isle that’s all cars and one isle that's all dolls. I was at Target not long ago just looking at the dolls and the Barbies, now they’re in different colors, black, brown, and they have careers, doctor Barbie, astronaut Barbie. I didn’t see a fat Barbie, I didn’t see a trans Barbie, I didn’t see a bald-headed Barbie, I didn’t see a tattooed Barbie…

Misha: Not now, but every joke becomes a reality.

…

Richard: I think things like anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, these things are higher in women. Neuroticism, I think these things are clearly… everyone sort of understands that. Especially the way we talk about things like mental health. Simone Biles… the idea that she quit right before a match, a meeting? A game? Whatever they call it?

Misha: An Olympics thing? A sports thing? We’re the wrong guys here. And she says she doesn’t want to do it anymore?

Richard: Anyway, there’s some kind of competition which she quit. And it’s not about her specifically, it’s about the media reaction which is that this is more heroic than if she would have won.

Misha: The quote in The New Yorker, I think it is, “her radical courage.” It’s deranged! To your point, even the best have blowups and absolutely no judgment, whatever. It’s the cultural reaction to it that is totally hilarious and idiotic.

Richard: Even stuff like therapy, the rise of mental health discourse. If you watch some normal TV shows, it’s amazing how everyone has a therapist. It’s seen as everyone has these problems they gotta work through, and the idea of it is that everyone is walking around damaged. I’m not going to say that’s normal for males or females. But we are tilting towards… it’s closer to the female norm than the male norm. There’s a minority of women who are very anxious and go through life feeling a lot of pain, and even for all our so-called gender equality, there’s still an idea that it’s much more socially acceptable for women to complain about things; for women to cry about things is much more socially acceptable than men.

So women tend to have these negative emotions at higher rates and it’s more acceptable for them to express negative emotions, so what happens is female concerns are overrepresented in the things we talk about. Not even all female concerns, I mean it’s very specific. Elizabeth Bruenig, this is a Washington Post writer for those who don’t pay attention, I think she just wrote some article that said “I became a mom at a young age and this made me happy,” that was the whole article. And every person on Twitter lost their mind and said it’s white supremacy or something. So it’s not the women like Elizabeth Bruenig, though she is a columnist and has a voice, she’s not representative of her class. It tends to be single, urbanized, less connected to family or marriage or a committed relationship. Those people talk the most and they tend to go into journalism and academia. They tend to have a disproportionate influence. This isn’t just women who have influence, but is true of human beings in general and who ends up mattering and having influence. The prominence we give to mental health and the way we talk about it are both signs of feminization.

…

Richard: To go back to what you said about whether it’s an American thing, I don't have much experience traveling overseas. I did a semester abroad in Russia when I was an undergrad, that was about 10 years ago, around 2008-2009.

Misha: That’s awesome, where did you go in Russia?

Richard: St. Petersburg.

Misha: Cool! How’s your Russian?

Richard: Not very good. I have a minor in it but it’s been 12 years so I barely know anything.

So I was there, and I saw Tyler Cowen say this: the gender dimorphism is very high there. I didn’t see any women with short hair. I didn't see any women with sweatpants or anything like that. I traveled a bit in Europe and I think it’s the same way. ‘Letting yourself go’ as a woman is more of an American thing. I don’t know if it’s an Anglo thing, you can tell me about Australia, but it’s sort of like… some women have gotten in their heads the idea that to appeal to a man is somehow sexist or wrong. But it’s human nature, men want to appeal to women and women want to appeal to men.

Misha: Yeah, but you can have an argument that’s regressive and that’s reflective of traditionalist values, that’s basically behind rather than an alternative. I know they look at the anglosphere and see everyone as totally deranged. I can’t even say it on here but the things they say about this whole dynamic is pretty funny. How do you think about that? Maybe it’s just a function of liberation, that you don’t need to be on parade all the time.

Richard: Why is that liberation? You could say someone being obese is liberation, why do they feel like they have to watch their weight? Not caring about how you look, this is a form of liberation.

Misha: You joke, but the US is way heavier than it was 50 years ago. You are seeing all these big is beautiful schtick kind of everywhere, you know what I mean? I kind of get the everyday person rolls their eye at this, but it seems to be a meaningful…

Richard: Do an experiment. Find a woke woman, tell her “you’ve put on a few pounds recently.” Say it in the nicest way possible, and see if she takes it as an insult. The things we say, “big is beautiful,” but try it sometime. Tell someone “I’m a liberal, I don’t have any judgement on these things.” It doesn’t work. There’s what we’re supposed to say and the reality.

…

Richard: Yeah, that’s some of it, and to go back to civil rights law, some of these things have been forcibly integrated. Some big golf course, something related to the PGA… they had men’s only golf and some big lawsuit. I think that’s right… Harvard within the last few years got rid of single gender fraternities and sororities, I don’t know if they went after the sororities too but they at least went after the fraternities. You think about why you’d need a male only space, or an all female space, and the justification would be “men and women are different, I can speak and talk in a way with other men that I can’t in a room with all women,” and that idea of fundamental differences is verboten, it’s something you’re not allowed to say or think.

You do get some all female spaces. It’s sort of like you could have an all black club but not all white club; because that’s the preference of the protected group, people will justify it somehow. They’ll say “blacks or women face unique challenges” not because they’re biologically different but because they’re facing unique challenges due to sexism or whatever. Sometimes they won’t deny the biological, but basically you don’t have to think too much about it, because they’re the “good people,” women and minorities.

And if you’re a man, now you’re talking about differences. And you’re implying those differences in some way favor the men. It’s funny, Daily Caller is a conservative website and they went to some member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a Democrat, and asked him “why do you think that men are arrested for crimes more than women?” Now the joke is that the Congressional Black Caucus says that it’s racism if blacks are arrested more for crimes than white people. And the Congressional Black Caucus, one of the guys was like “oh of course, because men are more violent.” It was nothing. So they sort of got him. There’s not a consistency. Sometimes you can believe in differences, sometimes you can’t. It’s not about if you believe in differences or not, it’s about if you’re flattering the group that needs to be flattered or insulting the group that needs to be insulted.

…

Misha: Just leave the crusty old dudes alone! There’s like 50 female gyms down the road from that same club and no one cares. But this is literally front-page news. No one can get enough of these crusty old dudes getting together for lunch.

Richard: The thing is men don’t want to do identity politics against women. You do have these guys online, men’s rights activists…

Misha: They’re losers! Who wants to be those guys?

Richard: Right. So there’s got to be a way to pushback, while not falling into the “we’re just like women, we’re going to have a fight on equal terms.” I mean if you do do that, you end up with the Taliban. Men will win, if you fight on equal terms with women… Trust me, it’s not going to be much of a fight. You don’t want to go in that direction.

…

Misha: I meant more, does being an immigrant allow you to speak truth to power? People can’t accuse you of being some rich, boat-shoe wearing fancy-boy who is speaking from a place of power in the US. Do you know what I mean?

Richard: Maybe. Let’s say there was a blond-haired blue eye guy who was just like me.

Misha: And you’re light haired and light eyed by the way!

Richard: I’m light eyed and dark haired. But yeah, I think it would be more difficult. I do think that’s certainly the case. There’s a guy named Madison Cawthorn, a young Republican, he looks like an SS officer. But he’s in a wheelchair, he had an accident, so it’s sort of strange that way. But he’s a typical dumb Republican who says dumb things. The media freaks out at him, it’s the way he looks. The wheelchair thing makes it a little strange. From what I can tell he’s not different from any Republican in Congress, just different in the way he looks.

Misha: So this is one of my favorite things about you. And whoever’s outraged at this point would have switched off or stopped listening already, but you’ll kind of point to the demographics or insane institutions in the US and you have this whole wokeness piece, you’re a pretty loud critic of that. But then you look at the Republicans and go “these idiots are totally worse. These idiots couldn’t organize a root in a brothel.” What’s going on there? To go in a different direction, what is with the state of conservatism in the US?

Richard: This is something I actually want to write about. There’s a narrow problem which is that they have never done the things I recommend they do, which is look at civil rights law and honestly face what’s happening. But then there’s a broader question as to why they think about this stuff and why they never intend to do anything about it. So that’s sort of a broader question.

The liberals are ideologically motivated. You look at which sources of news and information liberals trust more, and it’s usually the written word. The New York Times, Washington Post, it’s these other publications. The base driving the Democratic party and the left in the US is journalism and academia. For the right it’s talk radio and TV. Talk radio and TV is not ideological, it has a short attention span. It likes to fight, it likes the reality TV side of things. Sometimes it can win, it can win over the majority of the public because it’s good at showmanship and fighting.

And you have these groups that are issue focused, the gun people and anti-abortion people. These people do well, they’re organized and get the bills passed that they want. But in general, I think conservatism is more of a reaction to an ideological movement and liberalism is the ideological movement.

[caspia-writes]

Summer of Whump #14 — Hand Gagging

Summary: A boy accidentally reports his parents to the police over a piece of chocolate.

A/N: I could definitely be happier with this piece, but after several attempts to figure out how to fix it, I've decided that I've probably just been looking at it too long. Maybe I'm just not used to this much dialogue?

Content warnings: None

It was always interesting to see how the children at the park responded to Theodor’s presence. The ones he knew personally, the ones who called him Onkel Theodormore than anything else, ran over immediately, all clamoring for a piece of chocolate. Naturally the other young ones, old enough to understand the chants of Bitte ein bisschen Schokolade?, were never far behind. After all, why should they let the others have all the treats? Even the older ones would eventually come over, forming a somewhat more orderly mob as they held their hands out and asked if they might have a piece too—before fleeing back to some other corner of the park to eat it and watch him unblinkingly.

But today there was an exception in the form of a young boy who was still shying away, even as the other children were almost climbing over each other to try and get some chocolate. When he didn’t think Theodor was watching, he stared; when he realized he’d been caught, he looked down at the ground in front of him. Almost guilty, except what could a boy of six or seven have possibly done to break the law?

Probably nothing. But Theodor intended to be sure of it.

It didn’t take long for the boy to notice what was happening, but he didn’t run. His face went pale and Theodor could see him almost beginning to hyperventilate, but he stayed right where he was, watching as Theodor got closer. Even at the point when almost anyone with the slightest fear of him would’ve dashed away, the boy simply stood there, stupefied, gazing at Theodor with eyes so wide they barely seemed to fit in their sockets.

Slowly, taking care not to do anything that might startle the child further, Theodor pulled a square of chocolate and held it out to the boy. Instead of taking it, the boy yelped and cowered. Curious. He’d never seen a child afraid of candy before. And in fact, he didn’t think that was the problem—so he took the boy’s arm, pried his fist open, and pressed the chocolate square into his palm anyway.

After a few seconds, the boy opened his eyes and began examining his present. The boy frowned at the chocolate, trying to look at it from every angle and even sniffing at it. Not having accomplished whatever he had set out to do, he shot a half-second glance up and whispered, “Is it poison?”

So that was what he was trying to figure out. The answer was simple enough. “No.”

And now, having found an excuse to eat a piece himself, Theodor reached back into his pocket and began pulling the foil off another square. That seemed proof enough to the boy, who immediately tore the wrapping away and began devouring his chocolate. Which, hopefully, meant that Theodor had built enough rapport to be able to talk to him.

“What’s your name, boy?”

The boy hesitated, making a point of eating the rest of his chocolate before answering. “Florian Quenstedt.”

“Well, there’s a good, proper Sächsischer name.” It seemed Florian took well to the comment. Or perhaps he was just happy to have had chocolate. Either way, he met Theodor’s eyes again and smiled. “So why, Herrlein Quenstedt, were you afraid of me?”

Florian looked away again and began sucking the melted chocolate off his fingers. “My Vati says he hates you because you’re evil and want to kill him.”

Now that captured Theodor’s attention. Many people didn’t particularly like the Staatspolizei—but hate? And openly admit as much to their children? That was unusual.

“Really? And why do you suppose that is?”

Florian frowned. “He said it’s because he’s—um, that he’s a demo... dema...”

“Perhaps he’s a democrat?”

“Yeah, that!” Florian beamed up at Theodor. “My Vati is a democrat! And he says you really hate democrats, and that’s why you’re evil and want to kill him. But I don’t think you’re evil.”

This time his voice must have carried across the park. All of ten seconds later, a woman—his mother?— dashed over, her face pale and sheening with sweat as she almost fell to the ground trying to grab her son by the collar.

“Florian!” she yelped before meeting Theodor’s eyes. “Good evening and—and please don’t listen to him, Herr Reichsminister. I don’t know where he learned that awful word. Or this awful habit of telling lies!”

“But Mutti, I wasn’t telling—!”

The mother slapped her hand over Florian’s mouth before he could finish. As if there was any more evidence Theodor needed to investigate the entire family. Besides, refusing to let the child talk now, after he’d told all, only confirmed that Florian had been accurate, or close enough to it. Not that Theodor intended to let on.

“Well, this is simply how some children are.” Honest, loyal, and entirely willing to sacrifice their family for the good of the nation. Even if most of them didn’t consciously realize the last part. “You never know what they’re going to say or to whom. But surely this is all a misunderstanding of some sort?”

To that, the mother nodded frantically. Of course she did. Criminals always loved any story that made them sound innocent. And what could be more innocent than a child not understanding a word they were using? With her enthusiasm, she may as well have begun to confess right then.

Nonetheless, if Theodor wanted more information, just to be sure, he would need to find a way to drag this out a little longer.

“Now—Florian, wasn’t it?” The boy glanced back at his mother, then nodded at her lack of objection. “Would you like another piece of chocolate?”

“Yes please!” This time he didn’t bother seeing what his mother thought of it. If he had, he would’ve seen her trying to force a grimace into a smile. Frankly, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

“All right, you can have one more piece.” Florian’s eyes lit up, then dimmed as Theodor held up a finger. “But only if you can tell me what the National Syndicalist Party slogan is first.”

“Alles zum Wohle der Nation!” Florian immediately yelled, even managing a halfway decent salute.

But der Nation? That was an odd error to make. Every child his age should’ve known it was actually der Großsachsen. And this error in particular sounded suspiciously like the sort of bastardization that a child raised around democratic criminals would make, what with all the talk of ‘self-determination’ and ‘freedom of the individual peoples.’ But all the better for Theodor’s case against the family.

As for the boy and his candy, he’d been close, and it wasn’t his fault his parents were traitors. He had the necessary enthusiasm and national spirit to become a good citizen, that had been clear enough. And his salute had been quite good for a boy his age. Once he was liberated from his parents and learned that it was der Großsachseninstead, he’d be well on his way to becoming a model citizen.

“Well...” Theodor still drew the word out, cupping his hand on his chin. Florian’s entire body deflated and he turned his eyes to the ground before Theodor gave his shoulder a pat and presented him with another wrapped square of chocolate. “I suppose it’s close enough for now. But it’s der Großsachsen, not der Nation. Remember that next time, all right?”

“Don’t worry, Herr Reichsminister, I’m sure he will.” The mother forced her grimace into an even wider smile. It was almost becoming grotesque, how desperate she was to appear pleased with this interaction. “Alles zum Wohle der Großsachsen!”

Theodor smothered a laugh as the woman grabbed Florian’s arm and vanished into the crowd. She wasn’t fooling anybody with that. Or at least not Theodor, and he didn’t need anyone else convinced when it came to these matters. Certainly not after the thorough damning her son had provided.

On that note, Theodor thought he rather liked that Florian boy. For all his parents’ efforts to the contrary, he was still well on his way to becoming a good, loyal, Großsächsisch citizen. Just as he should have been.

Children really were little wonders.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 27, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

This morning, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol began its hearings with testimony from two Capitol Police officers and two Metropolitan Police officers.

After Representatives Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) opened the hearing, Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and and Officer Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police, and Officer Michael Fanone and Officer Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police, recounted hand-to-hand combat against rioters who were looking to stop the election of Democrat Joe Biden and kill elected officials whom they thought were standing in the way of Trump’s reelection. They gouged eyes, sprayed chemicals, shouted the n-word, and told the officers they were going to die. They said: “Trump sent us.”

Lawmakers questioning the officers had them walk the members through horrific video footage taken from the officers’ body cameras. The officers said that one of the hardest parts of the insurrection for them was hearing the very people whose lives they had defended deny the horror of that day. They called the rioters terrorists who were engaged in a coup attempt, and called the indifference of lawmakers to those who had protected them “disgraceful.” “I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room,” Fanone said. “But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell wasn’t actually that bad.”

The officers indicated they thought that Trump was responsible for the riot. When asked if Trump was correct that it was “a loving crowd,” Gonell responded: “To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt…. And what he was doing, instead of sending the military, instead of sending the support or telling his people, his supporters, to stop this nonsense, he begged them to continue fighting.” The officers asked the committee to make sure it did a thorough investigation. “There was an attack carried out on January 6, and a hit man sent them,” Dunn testified. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.”  

The Republicans on the committee, Representatives Adam Kinzinger (IL) and Liz Cheney (WY) pushed back on Republican claims that the committee is partisan.

“Like most Americans, I’m frustrated that six months after a deadly insurrection breached the United States Capitol for several hours on live television, we still don’t know exactly what happened,” Kinzinger said. “Why? Because many in my party have treated this as just another partisan fight. It’s toxic and it’s a disservice to the officers and their families, to the staff and the employees in the Capitol complex, to the American people who deserve the truth, and to those generations before us who went to war to defend self-governance.”

Kinzinger rejected the Republican argument that the committee should investigate the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, saying that he had been concerned about those protests but they were entirely different from the events of January 6: they did not threaten democracy. “There is a difference between breaking the law and rejecting the rule of law,” Kinzinger observed. (Research shows that more than 96% of the BLM protests had no violence or property damage.)

The officers and lawmakers both spoke eloquently of their determination to defend democracy. Sergeant Gonell, a U.S. Army veteran of the Iraq War who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, said: "As an immigrant to the United States, I am especially proud to have defended the U.S. Constitution and our democracy on January 6.” Adam Schiff (D-CA) added: “If we’re no longer committed to a peaceful transfer of power after elections if our side doesn’t win, then God help us. If we deem elections illegitimate merely because they didn’t go our way rather than trying to do better the next time, then God help us.”

Cheney said: “Until January 6th, we were proof positive for the world that a nation conceived in liberty could long endure. But now, January 6th threatens our most sacred legacy. The question for every one of us who serves in Congress, for every elected official across this great nation, indeed, for every American is this: Will we adhere to the rule of law? Will we respect the rulings of our courts? Will we preserve the peaceful transition of power? Or will we be so blinded by partisanship that we throw away the miracle of America? Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country and revere our Constitution?”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) both said they had been too busy to watch the hearing. But the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, called the officers heroes and said: “We should listen to what they have to say.”

Republicans are somewhat desperately trying to change the subject in such a way that it will hurt Democrats. Shortly before the hearing started, McCarthy House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who was elected to that position after the conference tossed Liz Cheney for her refusal to support Trump after the insurrection; and Jim Banks (R-IN), whom McCarthy tried to put on the committee and who promised to undermine it, held a press conference. They tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for the attack on the Capitol, a right-wing talking point, although she, in fact, has no control over the Capitol Police.

Shortly after the hearing ended, some of the House’s key Trump supporters—Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Bob Good (R-VA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—tried to hold a press conference in front of the Department of Justice, where they promised to complain about those arrested for their role in the January 6 insurrection, calling them “political prisoners.” The conference fell apart when protesters called Gaetz a pedophile (he is under investigation for sex trafficking a girl), and blew a whistle to drown the Republican lawmakers out.  

This story is not going away, not only because the events of January 6 were a deadly attack on our democracy that almost succeeded and we want to know how and why that came to pass, but also because those testifying before the committee are under oath.

Since the 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) pioneered constructing a false narrative to attract voters, the Movement Conservative faction of the Republican Party focused not on fact-based arguments but on emotionally powerful fiction. There are no punishments for lying in front of television cameras in America, and from Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen to Rush Limbaugh’s “Feminazis” to the Fox News Channel personalities’ warnings about dangerous Democrats to Rudy Giuliani’s “witnesses” to “voter fraud” in the 2020 election, Republicans advanced fictions and howled about the “liberal media” when they were fact-checked. By the time of the impeachment hearings for former president Trump, Republican lawmakers like Jim Jordan (R-OH) didn’t even pretend to care about facts but instead yelled and badgered to get clips that could be arranged into a fictional narrative on right-wing media.

Now, though, the Movement Conservative narrative that “socialist” Democrats stole the 2020 election, a narrative embraced by leading Republican lawmakers, a story that sits at the heart of dozens of voter suppression laws and that led to one attempted coup and feeds another, a narrative that would, if it succeeds, create a one-party government, is coming up against public testimony under oath.

“The American people deserve the full and open testimony of every person with knowledge of the planning and preparation for January 6th,” Cheney said today. “We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House—every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.” She added: “We must issue and enforce subpoenas promptly.”

—-

Notes:

Manu Raju @mkrajuRep. Liz Cheney told me the Jan. 6 investigators should move rapidly to enforce subpoenas. She didn't specify who should be subpoenaed. "I think it is very important that we issue and enforce subpoenas, as the chairman has said, and we do that quickly," Cheney said1,091 Retweets5,401 Likes

July 27th 2021

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a37144429/capitol-police-officer-slam-table-michael-fanone/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoints/five-takeaways-from-the-first-jan-6-committee-hearing

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-capitol-security/police-recount-calamity-of-u-s-capitol-attack-at-panel-hearing-idUSKBN2EX12Z

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/27/one-republicans-jan-6-committee-went-out-his-way-rebut-his-partys-whataboutism/

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/27/1021161550/this-is-how-im-going-to-die-police-sergeant-recalls-the-terror-of-jan-6

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/us/jan-6-inquiry.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/27/jan-6-commission-hearing-live-updates/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/27/liz-cheney-statement-jan-6-committee-probing-capitol-insurrection/5375885001/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.

A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.

Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.

Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.

Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.

The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

It’s no secret that Republicans are anti-intellectual, but it makes you wonder what their end goal is?  Why do they keep electing dumber and dumber presidents?  Is it just to own the libs?  Do they just not care?  They’ll get what they want regardless of how smart their presidents are, so why always pick the low hanging fruit?

The only smart Republican of the last 60 years was Bush Sr, and he was a one-term wonder who rode Reagan’s coattails into office.

Nixon was notoriously incompetent as VP, almost beat Kennedy in 1960, threw what should have been a career ending shit fit in 1962 after losing the California governor’s race, but not only came back in 68 and win because Goldwater was so unpopular in 64, but won 72 in the greatest landslide in history up to that point.  Corrupt to the bone, he resigned before he could be impeached for hiring burglars to steal dirt on a political opponent, covering it up, and lying about it.

Ford was appointed VP to replace scandal stricken Spiro Agnew, specifically chosen because he was known as an honest politician.  His reputation evaporated the second he became president because his first act was to pardon the guiltiest man in the country; he lost handily in 76.

Reagan was an actor who wanted to play politician so he could hurt the people he didn’t like; blacks people, poor people, gay people, women.  It was a power trip for him, and because he was good at reading cue cards and delivering jokes written by other people, everyone let him get away with murder.  He committed treason by selling weapons to Iran; this isn’t hyperbole, the actual definition of treason includes giving aid to out enemies, and after the oil and hostage crises of the 70s, Iran was an enemy first and foremost.  Oliver North took the blame and had his secretary shred the evidence, the President Bush pardoned everyone involved.  Reagan won in an even bigger landslide than 72 in 84, and Bush won in a major upset against Dukakis in 88.

Bush lost in 92 in no small part because of Ross Perot splitting the ticket; no third party candidate has ever done better nationwide than Perot in 92, with 19% of the vote (though he didn’t win a single state, which some minor candidates have done).  Clinton won with 43% of the popular vote.  Forty-three percent!  57% of people voted against him, and he won.  92 was a farce, as was 96 with less than 50% voter turnout, the lowest in modern history.  Perot ran again and got 8.4% of the vote, Republican Bob Dole only got 40.7%, and Clinton got 49.2%.  This means that less than a quarter of eligible voters voted for Bill Clinton, and he still won.  FARCE!

Al Gore rightfully won in 2000, but the conservative majority Supreme Court stole it from him.  Florida was too close to call; whichever candidate won it would become president.  George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, and he ordered the federally mandated recount be stopped, breaking the law.  The Supreme Court decided not to restart the recount for no discernible reason besides they wanted Bush to win.  He was notoriously dumb, stereotypically dumb, so dumb a lot of people thought it was an act and voted for him because they thought he was a secret genius who was just pretending to be a cowboy running for president off his daddy’s legacy.  He was the stupidest president we had ever had up to that point, and hired a lot of smart people to do horrible things so he could claim plausible deniability.  That Obama didn’t send Dick Cheney to the Hague was a deafening silence.  Bush only won re-election in 2004 because he started a war in Iraq in 2003 and the country didn’t want to change horses midstream; same exact tactic his daddy used, only this war lasted longer than the Gulf and “worked” as planned.

2008 was a ceremonial race; McCain didn’t stand a chance.  He was not incompetent, but his running mate was.  Sarah Palin was even dumber than Bush, and like Gingrich in the 90s was responsible for a conservative revolution we’re still feeling today.  Barack Obama wasn’t an amazing president, but he was an AMAZING candidate.  Everybody loved Obama in 2008, he won more votes than any candidate in history until 2020.  McCain was a career moderate, and after the last 8 years of failure both parties were running on a platform of “I am not George W. Bush.”  Turns out a young charismatic smart black man is less like Bush than another old white guy.

Obama lost a ton of momentum going into 2012 because he didn’t really DO anything his first term.  His only major accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act, which was an act of the Democratic congress than anything else, and it still wasn’t nearly as progressive as it needed to be (the US is still the only developed nation without universal healthcare).  Romney, a Republican governor from the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, could have beaten him were he not a classist piece of shit.  Romney hated poor people more than Reagan, and once wore brown face to a campaign event to make himself look more like Obama (they didn’t paint his hands or neck, just his face).  Obama made a lot of promises he didn’t keep, in no small part because of the Tea Party and the devastating losses in 2014 (we suffer under Mitch McConnell because of that).

2016 was a dumpster fire that shouldn’t have happened, and if either party had run a different candidate, it wouldn’t have.  Sanders would have beaten Trump, Clinton would have beaten Cruz.  It was a perfect storm of a very unpopular and insincere grandma running against a cartoon supervillain.  You couldn’t repeat that with what we know now.  Your vote in 2016 came to represent who you were as a person; people took it to the extremes, and the sunk cost fallacy made the entire Republican party shift so far rightward that we have actual concentration camps now and NOBODY GIVES A SHIT!  Trump was a game show host, a used car salesman famous for being tacky and dumb and offensive.  He was KNOWN for running his companies into the ground, that was his MO, he made a career out of bankruptcy, and Republicans still can’t believe that he drove us into the worst economic depression since the last Republican (history repeat itself, whoop-dee-doo).  Biden won in 2020 because of record turnout, though 2020 was closer to the intentional walk of 2012 than the home run of 2008 in terms of enthusiasm for the candidates.

If we’ve learned anything its that Republicans just keep getting worse and worse, so it’s getting hard for me to imagine what 2024 has in store.  Will Trump risk losing the popular vote 3 times in a row for a second term?  i think he’ll pretend to so he can scam millions of dollars out of his base, but he’ll either lost the primaries and tank the Republicans by running third-party, or he’ll drop out and endorse one of his spawn.  If Biden decides not to run in 2024, the nomination will almost certainly go to Kamala Harris, at which point I expect the Republicans to run a woman as well, so that we’re guaranteed the first woman president; she’ll be young, and white, and blonde.  My money’s on Ivanka.  Kamala vs. Ivanka will be a repeat of the 2016 dumpster fire, only worse because then everyone would be acting like both candidates are feminist icons, #GirlPower #SheRunsTheWorld #WarCrimesAreBetterWithTwoXChromosomes  If Biden DOES run again, then I suspect the Republican pool will be wide early on (Prick Scott, Ron DeathSantis, Uncle Tom Cotton, Nikkki Haley, you name it), only to shrink before the primaries as they all coordinate to get behind someone strong enough to defeat an incumbent.

Republicans are very good at coordinating; they are the party of “Follow the Leader.”  Whoever is in charge has 100% authority, no ifs, ands, or buts, no questions asked, just follow orders.  It would be easy to call them lemmings, but it’s more insidious than this.  They run dumb candidates for president, but have very smart people working behind the scenes to do horrible things.  They’re willing to follow orders blindly to ensure that the party prospers, whereas Democrats are chicken running around with their heads cut off.  There are no Democratic leaders.  Pelosi?  Schumer?  Nobody likes those dinosaurs!  The only really popular Democrats are progressives, and they will never have power as long as the moderates have a majority of the caucus.  AOC could be a senator someday; she could replace Schumer whenever he retires, but that would hinge on her not having any moderate primary challengers.  Moderates are still very popular because they are seen as “electable,” even though they never DO anything once elected.  Progressives have big ideas and the concrete plans to get them done, but the moderate establishment is afraid of losing power, and would rather placate the other side doing nothing, changing nothing, making no waves.  The party needs to shift leftward, or the country is doomed.

I would suggest the progressives splitting off to form a third party, but that would almost certainly destroy left-wing politics in this country as every safe seat would become split.  In an ideal world, it would be a nominal change; they would be the Progressive Democratic Party, they would continue to run in blue districts and caucus with Democrats on votes, but would advertise themselves as anti-establishment.  They would be like the New Democrats in Canada, which now that I think about it is a very bad idea because the New Democrats have no power and end up giving more votes to the Liberals and Conservatives instead.  The Progressive solution is intended to show the caucus that the moderates don’t have total control, but it would end up with the moderate Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, running against Progressives in every seat, handing them to the Republicans.  Every election cycle people act like a loss would spell “the end of the _____ party,” but this would actually be it for the Democrats.  It would be a turning point, like the 1960s, with millions of people changing parties out of principle, a major shift.  A Red Scare

I just want to crawl in a hole and die.  I hate politics.

[canchewread]

Editor's note: this journal is original content (written by myself, of course) and has not appeared elsewhere online before today. I should also note that because this is both an opinion piece and an informal journal, my level of commitment to providing citations for the disingenuous wasn't particularly high; if you're looking for formally documented evidence that we're currently in the middle of a fascist takeover, I encourage you to check out my academic writing about the subject on ninaillingworth.com instead.

Journal 09/09/2020: Looking the Beast in the Eye

When I originally sat down to pen this journal, my intention was to call it something along the lines of “advice to a young leftist” which is probably in no small part, the reason why it's taken me three days to write this piece. This is because unfortunately I do not have very much good advice for a young leftist today in two-thousand and twenty, or at least much advice that isn't going to sound rather a lot like “quit before what you believe destroys your entire life.”

As I've written (extensively) elsewhere, we're in the middle of a fascist takeover that is more or less succeeding across the entire Pig Empire, and what passes for the liberal (read: capitalist) establishment in our respective nations seem quite content to try and appease the beast by feeding them the entire left and any marginalized group “uppity” enough to demand justice, equality or representation. There is not a lot of upside to being an open leftist right now and understanding what I know about both the history of fascism and the history of reactionary crackdowns in America, it's awful hard for me in good conscience to advise any young person to willingly subject themselves to the tender mercies of an uncaring state and its fascist cutout vigilante groups.

Let's talk a little bit about what that history, including very recent history, can tell us and why what it tells us isn't very good for the American left. Here in particular, we as both a class in American society and a people that believe in a more equal, compassionate and humane way of life, stand at the intersection of state power, class oppression and the homicidal revenge fantasies of a fascist political order that has seized power throughout much of the United States. The fact that this is not understood by our milquetoast Dem Soc allies and the bougie “progressive left” is completely irrelevant; as any Ferguson activist (who is still breathing) can tell you COINTELPRO never ended, performative liberal anti-racism stops well short of opposing police repression, and genteel society will respond to violent reprisals against activists by the reactionary right with either dead silence or some mild clucks of disapproval at best.

Are the liberals aware that when the increasingly fascist American right says “the left” they mean liberals and suburbanite Democrats too? On some level I'm sure they are, but clearly the threat of increased taxation and social programs for the poor terrifies them far more than the possibility fascism will progress to the point that they're next in front of the firing squad – I've been told the liberals of Weimar Germany felt much the same way during Hitler's rise; which merely demonstrates that the liberal capacity for coddling fascism if it's profitable knows few limits. Furthermore the nauseating truth is that many of your misguided and misinformed liberal allies in the working class simply don't understand that the fascist right always seeks to eliminate the militant left first simply because those are the people who're going to fight back when you start loading Muslims, Latinos and lanyard Democrats onto cattle cars.

This historical process of fascism of course intertwines with the American establishment's history of ruthlessly repressing, criminalizing and even murdering the left. As I detailed extensively in a prior essay called “The Inversion Perversion” the state's war against Americans who want a more equal society (in any number of ways) predates the rise of Nazi Germany, the American Civil War and as those who've studied colonial America might argue, even the foundation of the country. Between the mass deportations of anarchists, suppression of left wing literature through the mail, two Red Scares, anticommunism, Hoover's COINTELPRO war against the civil rights movement, the black power movement and the American student left, or all the way up to the Obama Department of Justice's ruthless oppression of the Occupy, Ferguson and North Dakota Pipeline protests, I could easily spend this entire essay demonstrating that when it comes to persecuting, destroying and yes even murdering the left, there is a long and storied history of bipartisan consensus in America – I see no reason or evidence to suggest that has changed much in our modern times.

In other words history, even recent American history, says that this story ends in a jail cell or a shallow grave for some of the folks reading this journal right now and I don't know how to sugarcoat that for anyone, let alone a young person with their whole life (such as it is) ahead of them. The plain, god-awful truth is that the American right wants you dead, and the center-right American liberal establishment simply doesn't care, just as it has never cared, because they also want the left destroyed and fear sharing their ill-gotten wealth more than they fear fascism. Furthermore, this same elite “liberal” establishment is actively engaged in splitting the component parts of the current American uprising up into acceptable and non-acceptable targets; that's why Joe Biden keeps yammering about police funding, anarchists and “looters.” Democrats in particular are doing this even as fascist militia vigilantes are starting to execute antifascists and protesters in the street, might I add.

Did I mention that it's a really bad time to be an open leftist, or even just someone who passionately feels cracker murderpigs shouldn't get away with murder because some fascist gave them a badge? And yet of course therein also lies the rub; just as there is danger in resisting the imposition of a fascist order there is also danger in refusing to resist.

Turning once again to history, we know that the fascist creep isn't going to stop itself until well after it has killed millions of people and destroyed everything about our lives that contains any meaning whatsoever. The reactionary backlash will not stop with silencing, arresting and/or killing teenage anarchists, African Americans protesting against racialized police violence or Portland soccer moms who've had enough fascism for a lifetime. The fascist mindset and method of societal control dictates that there must always been more enemies both within and outside of the state who represent both an abomination that should be destroyed and a threat to everything good and pure in the national character. Right now, the waking dragon of American fascism has cast a laser-like focus on those brave few Americans who are willing to physically resist the transformation of the country from a corrupt Oligarchy to an overt fascist police-state with rigged elections. Once that enemy is crushed and defeated, the beast will turn its eye to others – unions, teachers, and yes even Democratic Party politicians who've always been friendly to the fascist capitalist billionaires running much of the reactionary American right today.

Whether you choose to fight, hide or run, it has become crystal-clear clear to me that we are all headed towards dark days in the very near future and the only variable left to be determined is which segments of the audience reading this will be thrown onto the pyre first. What we know today as “Western Society” is blindly crashing through the kinds of barriers people who desire peace, comfort and security simply don't breech without expecting violence, bloodshed and a whole lot of rain.

Perhaps in light of all this my advice to the young leftist should be to harden oneself for the torrential downpour of violence, repression and yes death that lies ahead, regardless of whether or not you choose to resist the fascist creep. Perhaps the best thing I can offer a young person staring directly into the eye of this beast is the assurance that it is not their fault, that nobody in history has ever asked to be born into the war against fascism and that ultimately the fascists cannot win because fascism is a death cult that will eventually eat itself and has done so every single time before this one. Perhaps all I really have to share with you is the hope that in the darkness and despair that lies ahead of us you will remember my words and know that no matter how much they repress, terrorize and torture us, fantasy cannot be reality, slavery cannot be freedom and life cannot be death.

And that I think is the handle and the comfort I can offer those of you reading this who’re young enough to have a future beyond the fascist order; I have no optimism to sell you but I can make one promise that may help carry you through the bowels of the hell we are all descending into after all. It might not amount to much yet, but I promise you there will always only be four lights; no matter how many of us they murder to try and “prove” otherwise. Do not give these maggots the satisfaction of seeing your fear; know that at least some of you reading this will eventually dance on their graves and take whatever comfort you are able to, in that inevitability.

Never forget - one way, or another, the future is left.

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

[peachyteabuck]

treason against kingly youth, pt i of ii

summary: somehow, you survived the 2020 election. now, all you have to do is get a know-nothing white man into the senate. should be easy enough. 

pairing: chris evans x reader

words: 3223

trigger warnings: rpf, white dudes doin White Dude Things

ask box / masterlist / commission info / ko-fi

For a moment, just a moment, you allow yourself to breathe, really breathe. One, big breath in that clears the stress from your muscles, drops your shoulders, lets your whole body sag against the decade-old chair that you’re surprised hasn’t crumbled under the weight of your ever-tense body and its corresponding sins.

It’s a mere six feet away that everyone else you’ve worked with for the past three years with – the people you went through sleepless nights, long road trips, greasy food from mom and pop diners with the middle of assfuck nowhere, registering voters and writing up another plan for every fucking thing wrong with America (low teacher pay? Check. Electoral college ruining democracy? Check. Criminalization of homosexuality? Check. Private school sucking the life out of public schools? The monopoly artificially inflating prices on glasses up to 400%? The disparity between the number of men’s and women’s bathrooms in federal buildings? Check, check, check) – each and every person celebrates with wine and whiskey and any other alcoholic beverages they can get their underpaid hands on. It’s not even the cheap stuff, no, this is top shelf liquor. This is D-Day, “we’ve got an hour before the nuclear missile hits” liquor.

There are two times people go this all-out on their spirits – the end of the world, and the end of an election (though, to some, they’re the same thing).

But not you. Never pitiful little you. Pitiful little campaign manager you doesn’t rest, doesn’t get to stop pulling rabbits out of hats and money from single moms and votes out of college students.

There’s three TVs in front of your desk, each playing a different news station and each anchor drowning the others out. It’s a cacophony of white noise, and not because

The only voice, the only singular voice that has cemented itself into this far, previously blissfully unattended corner of your brain. You can hear her, feel her own on your shoulder – you can see her leaning against her old desk nestled in her home back in Massachusetts.

“I want you to be my chief of staff. You ran my campaign better than I could have asked for, and I would be incredibly lucky and blessed to have you run my White House.”

Your own voice rings next, always shakier than the time previous.

“I can’t do that,” your sigh gets deeper each time, too. “You know I can’t.”

Somehow, her voice always gets more confident. It’s one of those things about her, about the way she carries herself. If she’s faking that confidence you’d never know. “I know, but I’ll always tell you that there’s a place for you at the White House as long as I have something to say about it.”

In the sea of blue and red and white confetti and streamers and all the other shit people use to celebrate when their party wins an election, the thick, bleached white of your laptop screen stares back at you more menacingly than any Republican – winning or losing - you’ve ever met.

You’d like to think you are the kind professional that is never caught off guard, the kind of woman who can expect anything. But as the email that’s derailed your plan for the next four years stares back at you, the all-caps subject line feels more like the headlights of an 18-wheeler to a deer in the middle of a highway than an excellent career opportunity.

Still, with malt liquor in hand, you allow yourself a moment to breathe. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll make all of this just a little bit easier.

A little less than five hundred miles away, Christopher Robert Evans is the drunkest he’s ever been, surrounded by the same men he’s known since his freshman year of high school, yelling nonsensically as one of his current senators becomes the president-elect of the most power country on Earth.

The only coherent thing to leave the man’s mouth the entire night is oh so wonderfully caught on a friend’s iPhone and will – quite likely – be posted to some social media site by the next morning.

The video (which you will eventually be seeing at your first meeting with the Boston native) shows him in a Harvard sweatshirt (a university he did not attend), deep blue skinny jeans, and a Patriots hat balanced just enough to show his (possibly) thinning hairline. There, between his two best friends, he screams in his played-up Boston accent at the top of his lungs:

“I’M GOING TO BE A SENATOR, BITCHES!”

But you, back in D.C., are blissfully unaware of the long road ahead of you. So, you enjoy your malt liquor, and your small bit of quiet on election night – a sign of the muted calm before the political shitstorm ahead of you.

You end up not replying to said email the next morning (see: seven hours later after falling asleep in your chair for about five hours and then browsing angry GOP Twitter accounts while cackling into a cup of the blackest coffee you’ve ever tasted for the other two), confirming you’d be willing to work for Christopher Robert Evans’ campaign to run for the current president-elect’s soon-to-be open senate seat.

Or, at least confirming you’d speak to the Evans family to talk about running the campaign of the whitest man under the age of forty you’ve ever seen. Whether or not you ended up attempting to control what is likely another dumpster-fire campaign in a series of dumpster-fire campaigns. Harris is the one that comes to mind, but drawing any parallels between that woman and this man feels borderline offensive.

Plus, her senate run was successful. And she held elected office before that.

Why did you agree to do this again?

Right, you need money. So much money. All of the money. At least enough money that you can be bought from straight under the White House, which just so happens to be the amount the Evans estate offered you in exchange for your services.

Maybe that’s why you’ve found yourself in a conference room in an expensive office building, looking up at Chris Evans as his face turns red and your heart rate picks up.

“I’m Massachusetts’s best choice!” he screams, slamming his hands onto the table – a rich brown you sort of wish you could afford to have in your own home back at the capital. Your estate sale table, even with the coat of white paint you gave it after buying it, still can’t hold a candle to the beautiful grooves and smooth top.

But this isn’t time to yearn for better interior design prospects. Now is the time to put this moderate democrat man-child in his upper-middle-class place.

“Chris, you’re the best choice for an internship for the fucking EPA,” you nearly hiss. “You’re in the intern in Vice who watched Dick Cheney make deals with those fucking oil businessmen. You’re the shiny faced bastard who watched the world burn while listening to a Walkman. Do you understand me?”

His teeth are barred like he’s about to bite at your face; luckily that man comes with an electric collar and you’ve got the controller.

“Your biggest qualification is you got a five on the AP Gov exam. You have a single living family member who has held elected office in the last five years, and he was in the House of Representatives. The House! He wasn’t even in the chamber you’re gunning to be a part of. You were an econ major with a minor in, what? Poli sci? At a mid-tier university because your family doesn’t have Kushner money to bribe your acceptance letter out of a better one. Your main job after college was working as an accountant for old fraternity because they get audited so often the IRS had to release a public statement saying they were changing their processes for such matter on college campuses. You’re so moderate you’re in the aisle playing legislative mad-libs while everyone fawns over your B+ facial hair and C- chest tattoo. You’re a cute puppy at a for-profit rescue, you’re eye candy on a political television show.

“You’re the type of person who didn’t think that Gillibrand was done for before the second debate. That’s the problem with you. I mean there are lots of problems with you, but that’s the one I’m most annoyed with right now. It’s not that you can’t understand patterns or see what’s going on around you. It’s that you were never forced to. When you walk outside in the dark, I bet you don’t look behind you, you don’t clutch your keys like claws to protect yourself. You know how much pepper spray costs? Do you know what a noisemaker does? No, you’ve never had to. You’ve never had to shield yourself from danger because the rest of the world did that for you.”

It’s then that you realize you’re both standing, your finger jabbed into the Windsor knot of his tie. Still, you don’t stop.

“You are the shell of an actual politician; you represent a safe option for right-adjacent Democrats and moderate Republicans who hate the president’s coalition and women. Especially women of color. You’re the perfect option because you stand for nothing of substance, you do nothing on your own. You’re a cover for old racist white men and moderate white women who need something to attatch their lack of political knowledge to during dinner conversations. Either you shape up, or I’m leaving this campaign and watching your inevitable fall from my office in the White House. I will drink a martini in the West Wing the day you lose, I will release a glowing endorsement of the first liberal who so much as whispers about taking your ass down. Do you understand me?”

The longest few seconds of your life pass with bated breath as you two stand there, chests rising and falling in a synced rhythm with your jaws set. It’s a stand off, neither of you willing to look away from the other’s eyes.

“Do you understand me, Evans?” you bite, getting angrier at each passing Chris says nothing. It’s not the self-reflective kind of silence, it’s the generic peanut butter when you’re too broke to afford the real stuff. It’s pasta before a marathon. It’s ads the radio station plays when they’re out of loops of the latest rape-adjacent pop hit.

It’s a filler. And it’s a bad one.

“¿Te comprende?” You’re almost yelling now, screaming in his face louder than you’ve ever screamed before. “¿Me necesitas para decirlo de nuevo?”

Another heavy pause. Chris’ voice is rough as he speaks, like ten grit sandpaper. “Yeah, I get it. I fucking get it.”

And with that, he grabs his side bag and stomps out of the conference room, grumbling something about high school Spanish and Despacito. You ignore his tantrum – unlike his father, who moves to run after him. You shoot daggers into the silver-haired ca, and he sits back down.

You push the too-sweet aftertaste of canned fruit to the back of your mouth. The thick resume paper slides out of your laptop-case-slash-important papers-folder with ease, the heavy five-hundred word essay on why you hate your job detailed in 12-font Times New Roman, pristine black letters nearly shining in the low light.

“That’s my letter of resignation,” you say, looking your boss dead in the eyes. With his jaw set the way it is, you expect to hear his teeth cracking before you could leave the boardroom.

“You know we can’t accept this,” his father says with a tone that’s much too close to a laugh. A nervous laugh, but one that makes you feel like he’s treating you as if you were a joke nonetheless. “You’re our only hope for this race.”

The second sheet of paper - or, rather, the small stack with a staple in the top right corner perfectly perpendicular to the nearest corner - hits the table next. “Then, these are my demands. Let me know by midnight tonight if you can meet them or not so I know whether or not to accept a job somewhere else.”

With that, you pick up your coat and leave.

The driver, a single mom in her mid-forties who is helping put her only son through college, laughs when you enter the backseat of her vehicle. It’s not condescending, not something you feel offended by. Rather, shame paints your face.

“Did Mr. Evans-Junior snap?” She asks as she pulls away. Her tone is knowing, too knowing. How long has she worked for the Evans anyway?

You sigh, then scream into your hands. The woman in front of you doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move a muscle as she waits for your reply. “He’s an idiot.”

The woman laughs. “That’s not what I asked, and I know you know that.”

You’re tempted to scream again, only a little louder. You don’t. “He snapped. I snapped,” you sigh again as you watch out the window. It’s late, too late for traffic to be like this. Fuck Boston. “Now I want to go home and take off my bra and wash off my make up and ger super drunk and shave all my hair off and quit my job and become a sheep herder in Iceland.”

The woman doesn’t disagree, doesn’t negate. She gives you the wonderful gift of silence until she drops you off, waving you goodbye.

“You have a good night,” she calls.

“I’ll do my best,” you shout back.

You’re alone in your apartment, dressed in the most comfortable (and expensive) pair of pajamas you own with red wine and some playlist titled an artsy version of “my life is very sad and my world is falling apart so I bought a $200 bottle of alcohol and hope I cry off my name-brand make up before I have to reemerge into the eyes of polite society,” when you get the text you’ve been dreading. It’s Chris, with his perfect capitalization and punctation and lack of emoji use. You’ve seen the way he texts the rest of the team, his family, his friends. He only pulls that shit with you.

Fuck, you think as you open the message. That kid’s really gotta loosen up. Isn’t weed legal in Massachusetts? He’s a Democrat, there’s no excuse.

He’s asking if he can come over, because of course he is. You’re just lucky the message is something closer to “I feel bad and wish to speak about it with you in person” instead of the crass “u up” you expected. Still, when the three dots at the bottom of the screen appear once again, you assume it’s going to be a picture of his junk that loads.

“Please,” is all the text says.

You acquiesce, sending him something akin to a “Fine but if you step out of line again your ass is going to be explaining why you fucked up to the cold-as-fuck pavement outside.”

You hear the knock at your door thirty minutes later (you often forget how shitty Boston traffic is), opening it to reveal the saddest white boy you’ve ever seen in your short life.

His chestnut hair is disheveled enough to indicate he’d had half of a sleepless night. This is the most casual you’ve seen him – basketball shorts with another Godforsaken Harvard hoodie with Nike sneakers – bags under his eyes completing the “sad frat boy who probably just flunked a chem exam” kind of look.

“Can I come inside?” he asks.

You sigh, trying to figure out how your life came to this. A jerk of your chin allows him entry into your small apartment, every surface littered with physical copies of presentations and a map of Massachusetts covered in stickers and sticky notes and scribbles of poll numbers from past campaigns. To Chris’ untrained eye it all looks like the homestead of a serial killer, but to anyone else on his campaign it’s his ticket to the senate. Politics is a game, a game with very public winners and losers and those who fall between; anyone who doesn’t study all of those outcomes is destined to find themselves either a) in a vacation home in the hills of Vermont drunk as hell, or b) running for president.

(You’ve considered how likely both of those possibilities are, and part of you fears he’ll do both).

There’s a heavy, awkward silence that falls over the room as you both sit down, facing each other.

“So,” you ask awkwardly. “Do you want, uh, a beer…or something?”

Chris shakes his head. “No, I’m, uh, I’m alright. Thanks.”

You sigh a little, relieved. “Good, because all I have is very expensive red wine and judging by our past interactions it is not worth having it spilled all over my white carpet.”

For a moment it’s obvious he doesn’t realize that you’re kidding, but after a few seconds of a facial expression that’s a perfect blend of concerned, rejected, and confused – he lets a little smile get past his façade.

“Yeah, uh,” he laughs. “That sounds like a bitch to clean up.”

What follows is a few minutes of incredibly awkward silence as he looks around your house once more and you take the opportunity to look at him.

It’s weird to see him in this state – it’s weird to see him as something human.

Still, you want to snap at him when he breaks the quiet.

“I want to do better,” he says, voice small. He avoids meeting your eyes, wrings his hands while he looks at the floor. “I thought about what you said and I,” he sighs. “I’m sorry. I want to do better…for you.”

You sigh, placing your red wine on the side table next to you before clasping your hands together. “Look, if you’re winning this election for me-“

“I’m not,” Chris says way too defensively. You let it slide for your own sanity.

“If you’re doing this for me, you’re going to be disappointed. Mostly because what your father wants and what I want are two very different things,” Chris opens his mouth to speak again but you hold you hand up to silence him. “Listen, I have a few rules with my clients. The first one is don’t lie to me. We can talk around this all day outside the boundaries of this home, but if you can look me in the eye on my couch while I drink my wine and tell me you’re doing this for a love of the people or whatever, I’m going to need you to leave.”

Chris gives you a single silent nod.

“But, if you want to win this shitshow…” you drink the rest of the glass in a single gulp. “Then, yeah. Let’s fucking do this.”

Chris lights up.

“But, I have some rules.”

He nods silently, allowing you to continue.

You count off on your fingers. “Don’t lie to me. When I ask a question, answer it. If I don’t ask a question, answer it anyway. I want to know everything, got it?”

Chris nods.

“The only time I don’t want you to speak is when I tell you to shut the fuck up. You got that, too?”

Chris nods again.

“Good, then I have a sneaking suspicion this will work out just fine.”

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.