MEMBERS ONLY: Jordan Peterson’s Bastardization Of Biology

I’ve largely written about Jordan Peterson in the Banter Members section and not on the main site to avoid the onslaught of pestering I would no doubt receive from his devoted fans. I do not fear intellectual criticism from his army of hardcore acolytes, but I do value my time and do not wish to spend it arguing with true believers who hang on his every word.

For all Peterson’s noise about avoiding dogma and ideology, his supporters are a remarkably narrow minded bunch who seem to spend most of their time on Youtube watching videos of him “owning” feminists.  I’m sure there are many interesting, open minded Peterson fans out there, but the vast majority I have come across display a religious zealotry matched only by the most hardened of Bernie Sanders supporters. They are mostly male, mostly white, and utterly convinced that they are the only rationally minded people on earth. With Peterson’s blueprint for “restoring order” to a chaotic, feminized world, they preach paternalism, discipline, and a vitriolic disdain for gender and identity politics. While this may be good for young men on a personal level (just as fundamentalist religion is good for others), their contribution to the political dialogue is not only tiring, but intellectually shallow.

Underpinning much of Peterson’s overarching philosophy of human societies is an bastardization of evolutionary biology — specifically his belief that “nature is red in tooth and claw” and should dictate how we organize ourselves as a species. Peterson’s views are not only wrong, but several decades out of date, as anyone in the field of evolutionary biology would gladly tell him. 

Peterson is a big believer in hierarchies, famously using lobsters in his book “12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos”. He argues that, like humans, lobsters live in hierarchies and have a nervous system that runs on serotonin (like ours) that his highly attuned to status (like ours). The higher up the status hierarchy a lobster is, the more serotonin it produces. More serotonin = more happiness, more breeding, and longer life, while less serotonin = more stress, less breeding, and early death. According to Peterson, our hierarchies work the same way and we ignore this at our peril. 

“Let’s start with the notion that hierarchies are not the secondary consequence of the West, or the patriarchy, or capitalism,” Peterson said recently in an interview with Brian Rose. “That’s wrong.”

“How do we know it’s wrong? Well, animals organize themselves into hierarchies, so it’s obviously not a mere consequence of human construction, much less a human construction of Western society over the past 500 years — it’s in animals,” he went on. 

“Well, how long has it been around? Well how about 350 million years! How’s that for ‘not a consequence of capitalism’? Yeah, that’s pretty damn solid.”

Well, it isn’t “pretty damn solid” actually, no matter how forcefully Peterson says it. A master of vague absolutes, Peterson is masking a very shaky understanding of evolutionary biology, taking the bits that corroborate his world view while ignoring the inconvenient ones that don’t. 

I have spent countless hours researching forest ecology and plant biology in over the years due to my interest in the natural world, and I knew that Peterson’s take on evolutionary biology was sorely lacking. The latest research on evolutionary biology, particularly as it pertains to the functioning of complex eco-systems, fundamentally challenges the notion that evolution is driven solely by competition. In fact, it appears that the avoidance of competition plays a key factor in drivings ecological diversity and evolution, meaning cooperation is the biggest factor in how life sustains itself on planet earth. New research on plant communication  also corroborates this notion, with the discovery that Mycelial networks (fungi) provide the basis for extensive communication and cooperation between plant and fungi species. The new paradigm emerging in evolutionary biology is radically upending the 19th century notion that life is simply a race to the finish between competing individuals, and those who ignore it cannot claim to be an authority on the subject. 

Peterson’s amateurish understanding of evolutionary biology was on full display in his book when he made sweeping comparisons between two species that evolved separately over hundreds of millions of years. As actual biologists will tell you, this isn’t particularly helpful when trying to understand their behavior. Writes marine biologist Bailey Steinworth in the Washington Post:

To understand the similarities between any two organisms, biologists look back through evolutionary time to their most recent common ancestor. In the case of humans and lobsters, our most recent common ancestor was defined by the remarkable evolutionary innovation of a complete gut — meaning that the mouth and anus are two separate openings (the importance of this morphological novelty is clear when you contemplatethe alternative). The living animal that probably most closely resembles this ancestor is the acoel, a mostly harmless marine worm no bigger than a grain of rice. Acoels’ social interactions are limited to mating — they’re typically hermaphroditic, so each individual acts as both “male” and “female” — or sometimes to cannibalism, if a hungry acoel encounters another small enough to fit in its mouth. I suppose cannibalism is a sort of dominance hierarchy, but acoels don’t engage in the complex displays of aggression seen in lobsters or form social hierarchies like primates. If the common ancestor of humans and lobsters lacked dominance hierarchies (which seems likely, based on what we know about living animals), then our two species’ social behavior evolved independently, and the one can’t inform us about the other.

Steinworth goes on to cite other oceanic species that have been used in serotonin studies, including sea hares that are “hermaphrodites that mate in groups, alternating between the “male” and “female” roles.” In fact, hermaphroditism is so common in nature that Steinworth argues “it’s possible the ancestor of all animals was a hermaphrodite,”

This flatly contradicts Peterson’s binary interpretation of biology and strict definitions of gender in human societies. He is entitled to his belief that there should be a neat separation between men and women and that humans require ordered hierarchies, but he is not entitled to state his belief as biological fact. 

Part of Peterson’s schtick is to make sweeping generalizations about a broad array of topics that help create a narrative beneficial to himself and others like him. It is natural of course that he, a 6ft tall, wealthy white male, should be at the top of the food chain. To him, capitalism is merely nature replicating itself in human trading systems, so must be accepted as a fact of life. Those who succeed in it are virtuous, while those who don’t are by default, of no evolutionary benefit to the species.

This type of right-wing drivel is nothing new, but Peterson packages it superbly and presents himself as a revolutionary thinker with ideas so big most people are intellectually incapable of coming to terms with them.  According to Peterson, if you don’t agree with him, you don’t understand him — a line used by many a bullshit artist throughout history.

Peterson is a psychologist by trade, and has many useful things to say about the human mind and its foibles. He offers some excellent practical advice for those struggling to find order in their own lives, and he is doing some good in reaching out to psychologically disturbed right wing extremists. But Peterson is not a biologist, or a political philosopher, or even a particularly good writer (I’m half way through ’12 Rules For Life’ and am struggling with his brutalist prose). Normally, I wouldn’t have a problem with entertaining some of his ideas, but he presents them as an unimpeachable template for the survival humanity. His assertions must be taken as gospel, because, well, he is a rich, educated, white man with a commanding voice.

Peterson’s unflappable assuredness might be appealing to young men in search of a father figure, but to those interested in truly furthering their understanding of the world around them, he is becoming a rather tiresome impediment.

MEMBERS ONLY: Yes, Kavanaugh’s Extremism Makes Him More Likely To Be A Sexual Predator

After growing up in a world of extreme privilege and entering the corridors of far right politics best known for placing the power of wealthy white men before the wellbeing of the entire human race, the only people shocked, shocked, I tell you!, by the idea that Brett Kavanaugh could possibly be a sexual predator shielded by his money and power are the ones being well paid to play stupid.

Michael Gerson, for example, of the Washington Post is simply aghast at how personal and vicious Sen. Mazi Hirono (D-Hawaii) got when asked about Kavanaugh denying the allegation of sexual assault leveled against him:

But Hirono appears to be contending that Kavanaugh is more prone to lie about sexual assault because his approach to judicial interpretation is extreme and deceptive, and because he is probably opposed to Roe v. Wade. These beliefs, she seems to be saying, are indications of bad character.

Does Hirono actually believe that being pro-life (something Kavanaugh, by the way, has not acknowledged) and a judicial conservative makes someone more prone to lie about attempted rape?

The short answer to this is: Yes. The long answer is: Are you fucking insane? Yes, goddamit!

Kavanaugh has spent decades ensconced in the conservative movement being groomed for this. Whether Gerson chooses to acknowledge this or not, the machine built by billionaires to churn out loyal drones tolerates no independent thought and rewards obedience richly. This club is intensely racist, misogynistic, and anti-(small d) democratic. It also has no moral or ethical center. Power to rule over the rubes is the bottom line. Power by any means necessary. 

So when Gerson asks his question, he is leaving out a bit of context. It’s not just that Kavanaugh is a conservative and pro-life, it’s that he’s a conservative and pro-life within a movement that openly and actively talks about women as if they are chattel. Not for nothing, CNN just had a panel of Republican operatives, all female, who went on the air to explain that attempted rape is just something boys do and we shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. Last year, it became a widespread talking point on the right that a grown man dating/sexually assaulting an underage girl is OK because it’s in the Bible.

This is a movement in which white men with money and power are revered as gods. Unaccountable. Untouchable. Able to do whatever they want to whoever they want without consequence because that’s how it’s always been. They elected Trump in part because he was the personification of this. So, yes, Kavanaugh’s politics do make it more likely that he would not only engage in attempted rape (because women are just objects, you see) but then lie about it because consequences are for the little people, not the ruling class.

But Gerson wasn’t done.

It is feasible that some people are genuinely disturbed by a medical procedure that begins with two genetically distinct human beings and ends with one? Is it reasonable to credit the good intentions of millions of men and women who want the circle of inclusion and protection to include every human life, at every stage of development?

I love having this argument with pro-“life” people. I can suss out their “good intentions” in just a few minutes. It’s really simple and you can play along!

Ask the following:

• Do you believe that women should have access to contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies?
• Do you believe teens should be taught comprehensive sexual education in school to prevent unwanted pregnancies?
• Do you believe pregnant women should have free prenatal care?
• Do you believe children should have free medical, food, clothes, housing, and education?

If they say “Yes” to all or even most of these, then that person is, in fact, arguing against abortion with good intentions. But, spoilers!, most of the “millions of men and women” Gerson refers to will respond with a sneering “No!” and then lecture you about how they shouldn’t have to pay for some slut who couldn’t keep her legs closed. That’s because the pro-“life” movement has nothing to do with life and everything to do with punishing women. This is why the instant Roe v. Wade is overturned, the right will go after Griswold v. Connecticut, the case that allows women access to birth control.

Personally, I would love to have Michael Gerson answer these questions. I would also love to have him ask all of his pro-“life” friends the same and see how many of them reject the notion of actually reducing abortions or protecting children in favor of making those dirty whores suffer for having sex. 

But Gerson still wasn’t done. This entire column was about blaming “both sides” for the toxic partisan atmosphere in Washington so that requires massive amounts of false equivalency:

There is, of course, a mirror-image problem of pro-life activists who regard pro-choice people as murderers. But that is precisely the point. There is a strong current of dehumanization running in our politics. The rival crew, it turns out, is not only wrong but evil. And how can mortal enemies embrace the give and take of a shared political project? Only the raw exercise of power can decide between them. The goal is no longer to win arguments but to crush opposition.

To summarize, the side that calls people murderers, actually murders people, firebombs abortion clinics, and denies women their reproductive rights for the purpose of punishing them is the mirror-image of the side that finds the first group to be morally repugnant for doing those things. Remember, Republicans pass laws to close down abortion clinics but then also ban contraceptives and sex education and cut Medicaid for pregnant women and food stamps for newborn children. They do all of this to the rapturous applause of their base.

To continue to say they are concerned with the lives of the unborn requires a suspension of disbelief bordering on mental illness. And when Gerson says that both sides are a mirror image of the other? One is forced to wonder if he has actually seen a mirror outside of a circus funhouse. 

And then Gerson takes the full “both sides” plunge into the absurd:

This is the moral risk of extreme political polarization: dehumanization. In our circumstance, it has emerged in the bipartisan dehumanization of political opponents and in the nativist dehumanization of certain groups: migrants, refugees and Muslims. This is not politics as usual; it is political pyromania. Our democracy is designed for disagreement. It is broken by mutual contempt.

In World War II, the United States went to Europe and proceeded to kill hundreds of thousands of Nazis. We did not feel guilty about this because they were monsters who planned to exterminate entire populations of people. Their “nativist dehumanization of certain groups” led to genocide as it inevitably must when given the power to do so. 

Yet, somehow, Gerson is blaming both sides for the state of American politics. He can’t even bring himself to acknowledge that only one side is engaged in “nativist dehumanization”, a nice way of saying “white nationalism. Why? Because it’s too hard to justify why those opposed to such evil shouldn’t be wholly committed to stamping it out. Far easier to pretend we should be practicing politics as usual as if the white nationalism and fascism of the GOP were normal and healthy and not a cancer to be burned out.

Michael Gerson is the perfect example of right’s lifeboat building. If everyone is to blame, then no one is to blame when the Republican Party implodes over the coming two election cycles. Good luck with that, Mikey. Only one side is goosestepping and throwing Nazi salutes and everyone knows it.

But aside from Gerson’s insipid lying, Sen. Hirono is right: Kavanaugh’s despicable politics make him exactly the kind of person that would do the things he’s accused of and lie about it. And Republicans will tell any lie to cover for him, including Gerson. That’s who they are and that’s why they have to be destroyed; not because of Gerson’s imaginary “both sides” dehumanization but because Republicans have openly embraced fascism and white nationalism as a means to power and can no longer coexist with our system of democracy.

MEMBERS ONLY: The 2018 Midterms Have Become a Referendum on Brett Kavanaugh

 

The 2018 midterms are potentially America’s last chance to hold Donald Trump and his corrupt administration to account. But now, they have also become a referendum on Brett Kavanaugh and the sham hearings Republicans have foisted upon us.

There were many red flags against Kavanaugh’s character from the onset, like credit card debts and gambling addiction. But with the newest revelations of his sexual misdeeds and the Republicans’ complicity in covering them up, he is now a liability that threatens the existence of their party.

Explosive new allegations

In a bombshell report published last night by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, Yale classmate Debra Ramirez recalled that as a freshman, an inebriated Brett Kavanaugh took his pants off and waved his genitals in her face during a rowdy college party. She pushed him away, touching his junk in the process, and recalled another student yelling down the hallway, “Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face.” Other classmates corroborated the story’s veracity, with one admitting that, in the words of Farrow and Mayer, “[it] seemed outside the bounds of typically acceptable behavior, even during…parties on campus.” Like Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Ramirez has said her accusations merit an investigation by the F.B.I.

At the same time, Michael Avenatti announced via Twitter that he now represents a woman with “credible information” regarding both Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, his accomplice in the Christine Blasey Ford assault. In an email to Senate counsel Mark Davis (who controls the nominations before the Judiciary Committee), he called on the Committee to question Kavanaugh and Judge that they and other men in the D.C. metro area during the 1980s participated in house parties where they drugged or intoxicated women and then formed a “train” to take advantage of them. Avenatti included in his email a list of six questions targeted towards Kavanaugh, all of them regarding his conduct during these orgies, and if he answers “yes” to any of them under oath, they would be enough to disqualify him from a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, his D.C. judgeship (and his precious middle school girls’ basketball team).

The GOP’s complicity

However, these allegations are not aimed merely at Kavanaugh, or Judge, but at the entire rotting heart of the Republican Party. They have acted despicably throughout these hearings, hiding key documents from the American public and changing the terms under which Dr. Ford would be allowed to testify. But it wasn’t until Farrow and Mayer’s report that we got the most revealing glimpse so far into their utter soullessness:

“Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote.”

Let this sink in for a moment: Republicans knew of Debra Ramirez’s allegation and instead of calling for further investigation, decided it was best to accelerate the vote – in other words, get Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court as fast as possible before other women could speak out against him.

Now we know why Chuck Grassley has been so adamant about holding a vote. Now we know why Orrin Hatch’s staff was so quick to believe the cockamamie conspiracy theory Ed Whelan made up to save Kavanaugh’s nomination last week. Now we know why Lindsey Graham has been playing Kavanaugh’s attorney on TV, telling Fox News yesterday that he wasn’t going to “ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation.”

They also denigrate the legacy of Anthony Kennedy, whom Kavanaugh would replace if confirmed. Kennedy may not have been a friend to liberals all the time – in fact, during the last year of his tenure, he sided with the conservatives more often than not – but he was still a smart jurist who, in the tradition of his predecessors, reviewed all the facts and made his judgments in a fair-minded manner.

A Referendum on Basic Decency

There is still the chance that none of this will be enough for Republicans to yank Kavanaugh’s nomination, not just because Trump’s history of sexual assault and possibly even rape has lowered the bar for an endorsement in their eyes. It’s possible that their desire to get Kavanaugh on the bench is only because if Trump was charged either with collusion or obstruction of justice, Kavanaugh could cast the deciding vote in his protection. He holds extreme views on executive power, even going so far as to say that the Supreme Court should not have forced Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes – an event which led to his resignation less than three weeks later.

Republicans know that they are on their way to being a minority party as the country grows more diverse and Americans wake up to the ways they have oppressed women and minorities for centuries. Now that they control all three branches of government for the first time since George W. Bush, they are engaging in scorched-earth tactics to poison the judiciary and make it harder for Democrats to repair the damage they have wrought once they are out of power. Fortunately, the American people are paying attention to this – and have a chance to show them that they will neither forget nor forgive their shamelessness.

A Chance to Fight Back

Thanks to social media campaigns like #WhyIDidntReport, as well as a diverse slate of Democratic candidates, Americans are speaking out against the madness they voted against by a margin of three million votes in 2016. On November 6th, they will walk into the voting booth and use their ballot to tell Republicans that enough is enough. This will not just send a message to Trump and his cronies, but to every Republican Senator who could have stopped the Kavanaugh hearings from getting out of control, and chose to protect their power instead of their constituents.

“Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of’ Judgement,” says the Book of Matthew. If the Republicans and their religious base really believe in this credo, they should be held accountable for their words in November. There are only 43 days left until the 2018 midterms. Ticktock.

MEMBERS ONLY: The Hilarious, Depressing Republican Survey Confirming The Idiocy Of Their Voters

If you’ve watched your paycheck diminish, education costs go up, and your health care costs spiral out of control, most rational people would probably think about not voting for Republicans. Why? Because Americans have been subjected to right wing economics for almost four decades now, and with very, very little to show for it. 

Unfortunately, most self identified Republicans do not seem to be able to grasp this, believing instead that the federal government and immigrants are responsible for all their woes. They are painfully unaware of some very basic economic facts that have had a huge impact on their lives, as witnessed by a new, remarkable RNC commissioned survey. 

The recently commissioned survey should disturb party leaders, and well, everyone else, for a number of reasons. The first is that their so called “winning issue” going into the midterms isn’t actually a winning issue at all. The giant tax cuts rammed through last year that were deeply unpopular at the time, are not only still despised, but specifically not something they can run on in November. 

Furthermore, the majority of Republicans believe that the tax cuts do in fact benefit the middle class — a potentially more frightening revelation about the cognitive abilities of the average GOP voter. Via Axios:

63% of independent voters think the tax law mostly benefits wealthy Americans and large corporations, compared to just 27% who think it benefits middle-class families.

* That’s nearly flipped among Republican voters (63% think it benefits middle-class Americans).
* 44% of voters approve of the tax law overall, though, compared to 45% who don’t.

Just think about that for a moment: 63% of Republican voters believe the exact opposite of what every reputable study in America explicitly demonstrated — that the GOP tax cuts would not only benefit the ultra wealthy, but actively harm the middle classes.

Magical Mathematics

While this should be uncontroversial, it stands to reason that if you pay less money into the government, the government will have less money to spend on things like health care, education, roads, clean water, the military etc, etc. 

If you pass tax cuts that disproportionately benefit billionaires and millionaires, it stands to reason that there will be even less money to spend given the ultra wealthy generate far more revenue for the government that everyone else.  

According to your average Republican voter however, passing giant tax cuts for the very wealthy does in fact benefit the middle classes. Why? Because despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, party leaders and Fox News says it is so. This is somewhat like believing that taking money out your bank account means you will have more money in it at the end of the month. 

Magical mathematics aside, the Trump tax cuts were also explicit about screwing over the middle classes. Reported Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post:

Republican leaders keep claiming the bill focuses on helping the middle class. But voters are already catching on to the fact that the biggest tax cuts go to the wealthiest.

Lately the public has learned that the Senate bill will actually raise taxes for households making less than $75,000 by 2027, relative to current law. Yes you read that right. And it’s true even if you don’t count the bill’s changes to Obamacare.

It appears Republican voters are so adverse to facts that they will even suffer financially to support their fictional version of reality.  

The RNC report this week accurately concludes that the GOP has lost the messaging war when it comes to the alleged benefits of their giant heist. “Voters are evenly divided on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the report stated. “But, we’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue.”

Breathless Cynicism

If you look at the behavior of the Republican Party over time, it becomes abundantly apparent that they have never been particularly interested in whether the tax cuts were popular or not. 

Last year, the party clearly calculated that they had a window of opportunity to transfer truly extraordinary amounts of cash to their donors and the ultra wealthy from the poor and middle classes. It was an extraordinary heist — a smash and grab tactic from a party devoid of all morality and belief in the political system to do good. They knew full well what was going to happen in the midterms the following year given the trajectory of Trump’s presidency, and simply figured it was better to destroy the lives of working people sooner rather than later. Polling at the time told them their tax cuts were extremely unpopular, but they went ahead and did it anyway. 

The GOP also calculated that their voters were, sadly, mostly too stupid to understand why the tax cuts were so bad for them. The party has long banked on their rank and file not knowing enough about economics or having enough common sense to work out that they have been screwed over relentlessly by their destructive economic agenda. It is a clever ruse that enables them to keep the average Republican voter uneducated and clueless in perpetuity. 

A Cycle of Ignorance

The more destructive the economic policy, the worse educated the population becomes. The worse educated the population becomes, the less likely they will be able to work out what is happening to them. The GOP then, in collusion with other far right corporate interests (Fox News), promote a completely different narrative about why their economic situation is so bad. 

The easiest, cheapest way to do this is to blame immigrants, black people, and the poor. It provides a vulnerable scapegoat that has little ability to fight back, and makes the voter feel more powerful. It isn’t the rich and powerful driving up the cost of living for you and your family, it is black welfare queens and foreign sounding people taking your jobs. 

Not so fast

Unfortunately for the GOP however, is that this trick only seems to work for self identified Republican voters — not Democrats or independents. The RNC survey is clear on this: non-Republicans see right through the GOP’s propaganda, and accurately believe the tax cuts for the ultra wealthy do exactly what they are supposed to do, which is benefit the ultra wealthy. While they have profited from their bold economic agenda in the short term, in the long term, the strategy is a disaster. Republicans have little to run on in the midterms, and even less to run on in 2020. They have put all their eggs in one basket, and are now about to drop them off a cliff. Trump is hugely unpopular, their social agenda is hugely unpopular, and now the only thing they could potentially wield as proof of their competency is gone. 

Without having perceived authority on all matters economic, the GOP is essentially finished, and voters are about to remind them of this painfully in November. 

MEMBERS ONLY: The Collapsing Hope Of White America

As a white man, I don’t take any particular pleasure in writing about how much white people, especially white men, in America suck. We’re racist. We’re greedy. We’re unbelievably self-centered. We’re violent. And above all, despite our insistence that we are the greatest thing to ever exist, we are as fragile as spun glass.

This doesn’t apply to all of us, of course. People exist on a spectrum. I’m a liberal writer so I’m more self-centered than racist. Others are more greedy and less violent. Some, like Donald Trump and much of the alt-right, are the total package, filled to the brim with the worst this country has to offer. But white fragility can be found just about everywhere you find white skin.

Responding to criticism and adversity

Recently, I’ve been listening to anti-racism activist Tim Wise’s podcast and he had an episode during which he discussed white fragility. While he didn’t exactly separate it himself, there are two distinct, but somewhat related versions. One of them is a fair take on how poorly white people respond to criticism. But the other one I found to be a less convincing take on how white communities responded to the economic collapse and lack of recovery after the financial crisis.

We’ll start with the economic collapse that decimated white communities. The collapse also hit black communities hard but, as annoying as it is to say, they’re used to being economically devastated. If there’s one thing white America is good at, it’s ignoring (or, worse. deliberately exacerbating) the economic plight of black America.

What was different about the last recession was that the jobs didn’t come back afterward and those that did didn’t pay nearly as much. Republicans blamed Obama for 8 years and demanded massive tax cuts for the rich to increase wages but the truth is that corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars in profits. They just don’t have any incentive to share that wealth with the rest of us. 

After 40 years of being promised that the rich would share their money with the nation, or at least white people, middle class and working poor white Americans finally tumbled to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Their golden future of prosperity was gone and they took it…poorly:

Mortality rates have been going down forever. There’s been a huge increase in life expectancy and reduction in mortality over 100 years or more, and then for all of this to suddenly go into reverse [for whites ages 45 to 54], we thought it must be wrong. We spent weeks checking out numbers because we just couldn’t believe that this could have happened, or that if it had, someone else must have already noticed. It seems like we were right and that no one else had picked it up.

We knew the proximate causes — we know what they were dying from. We knew suicides were going up rapidly, and that overdoses mostly from prescription drugs were going up, and that alcoholic liver disease was going up. The deeper questions were why those were happening — there’s obviously some underlying malaise, reasons for which we [didn’t] know.

This didn’t actually start after the Great Recession. It actually dates back to 1999 when the Baby Boomers saw that their retirement wasn’t going to happen the way they thought it was. It simply got worse after the economic collapse of 2008-2009. The opioid epidemic accelerated the trend and the press started to report on it so now it’s national news but the crumbling of white communities has been in progress for some time now. 

White fragility? 

During the podcast, Tim Wise chalked up this increase in mortality to white fragility; the inability of white people to handle long-term economic failure. And this is probably true — but only up to a point. The idea is that white people, again, particularly white men, have been sold the myth that if you work hard, you can have the American Dream. A family, a nice house with a white picket fence, a car, a yearly vacation to Disney, etc. And at the end of this bucolic life, you can retire and spend your golden years playing with your grandchildren and watching Late Night TV. 

But that didn’t happen for millions of white people and their communities sank into poverty and long-term unemployment. As a result, suicide, alcoholism and drug use skyrocketed. So did drug-related crime.

Yes, some of that is going to be white fragility; the frustration of hopes predicated on lies. But looking at how black communities respond to economic devastation, we see more or less the same thing: Drugs, alcoholism, crime, increased mortality (compared to less economically stressed communities).

The loss of hope 

I would submit that what we’re seeing is not so much white fragility, but a community finally coming to terms with the fact that their future in America is bleak. When hope is limited, despair fills the void and things get ugly. I would submit that we’re seeing destitute white communities “catch up” to destitute black communities. If this persists for a generation or two, we wouldn’t see much difference in terms of how both communities cope with economic destruction.

On the other hand, when it comes to legitimate racial criticism, white fragility is a wonder to behold. You can’t say anything about whiteness without sending white people into a frenzy of rage and denial. Simply pointing out that most school shooters are white, or that most white collar criminals are white, or #OscarsSoWhite will set heads exploding from sea to shining sea.

This is a direct result of white supremacy in America. Race is something other people have because it allows us to Other them with ease. But doing so requires whiteness to be invisible; our own race has to not exist. Therefore, anything that calls attention to whiteness is a problem and anything that criticizes whiteness, no matter how true or mild, is a red-hot assault on us.

This is true for both the left and the right. While you’d naturally expect the right to lose its mind over what it falsely perceives to be whiteness under siege, the far left also is extremely intolerant of having its whiteness questioned.

Progressives cluelessness 

After the murders at the Madden tournament a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about white male rage. I got a lot of pushback from white progressives who really didn’t want to talk about it. They found the entire idea of talking about white male rage to be entirely offensive. My depiction of white men as overly entitled in a country that has told them for generations that they are the pinnacle of creation infuriated them. I was told, flat out, that what I was doing was no better than Donald Trump’s attacks on blacks and Latinos.

These would be the same people that flatly refuse to acknowledge the existence of white privilege; claiming that they never got any help so how could they have privilege? It doesn’t matter how many different ways I explained that privilege can also simply be the lack of obstacles systemically thrown in the way of minorities, they didn’t want to hear it. Their whiteness was sacrosanct and was not to be spoken of in a negative way and preferably not at all.

I was surprised at first as the reaction from (admittedly all male) progressives but it occurred to me that it actually makes sense. As a group, the far left is more ideologically driven than moderates. They are heavily invested in their identity in much the same way the right is invested in theirs. Thus, anything that challenges that identity is rejected on the spot with extreme prejudice. White moderates, at least on the left, are much more flexible and nuanced in their thinking, making them less invested in their identity. Without that investment, they’re not nearly as threatened by criticism of whiteness.

That’s not to say that political moderates are immune to white fragility. Far from it. If an angry black woman starts yelling “Check your privilege!” at most of us, our first response, even if it’s just internal, is not going to be one we’re proud of. But when someone, even a black person!, explains to us how and why we’re not being a good ally or lays out the realities of white privilege, the point of Black Lives Matter or other issues we may be ignorant of, we won’t archly declare, as far too many progressives do, that income inequality and economic justice are far more important than this “identity politics” stuff and blow it off.

If you want to see left-wing white fragility on full display, challenge a progressive on their dismissal of identity politics as a function of their whiteness. After all, being white means you never have to worry about racial injustice which is why it tends to be unimportant to many progressives. It’s not their problem. The anger such a challenge generally invokes bears little difference from the anger you see from the right because they come from the same place. Whiteness is not be to discussed unless it’s as the victim (and, so far, that’s almost exclusive to the right).

The unvarnished truth

Someday, people will stop talking about us being so fragile because we’ll have finally matured enough to stop throwing temper tantrums over the tiniest of criticisms. But in order for that to happen, society would have to stop being almost entirely geared to favor white skin while simultaneously pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s hard to grow up when you’re coddled all the time. 

As horrible as it is, maybe the economic devastation of white communities will finally start breaking us of the lie that we’re special and intrinsically better than Those People. We never were. We just created a rigged system and told ourselves we naturally prospered because of how awesome we were. Now that the system is finally breaking down, the stark reality of how not special we are is staring us in the face and we can either drown our sorrows in drugs and alcohol and white nationalism or we can focus our rage on the greedy billionaires that have systematically destroyed our future.

We can continue to be fragile or we can remember that we were part of the diverse coalition of people from all across the world that built the most powerful nation in human history. I know which I’d prefer.

MEMBERS ONLY: Trump Is Mentally Disintegrating By The Day

It was just over a week ago when we received further confirmation of Donald Trump’s total lack of mental fitness for the presidency. We didn’t necessarily require confirmation since we’ve all witnessed it firsthand, but there it was anyway in horrifyingly reliable detail. 

First, we heard from Bob Woodward’s new book an entire series of harrowing stories detailing how Trump’s White House is “Crazytown,” including one particular story illustrating his inability to accept information from his own hand-picked advisers. Ironically, he once blurted that Jeff Sessions is “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner.” Advisers told Woodward the president has the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader.”

Then, as if the Woodward book wasn’t damning enough, an anonymous administration official published an op/ed in The New York Times emphasizing Trump’s complete lack of leadership skills and his general stupidity. The author of the piece described Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” We learned that a secret cabal inside the White House is working to flummox Trump’s worst instincts, and, more importantly, this same group of officials actually considered invoking the 25th Amendment due to the president’s obvious lack of stability.

Since then, Trump has done absolutely nothing to disprove the allegations other than saying they’re simply untrue. An at least partially coherent leader would make an effort to undermine these stories by finding ways to prove himself to be more engaged and centered. But not Biff. In fact, it’s almost as if he’s going out of his way to vindicate exactly what Woodward and the anonymous author wrote about him.

During preparations for Hurricane Florence, Trump staged several photo-ops in which was pretended to be engaged. Needless to say, Trump has at his disposal — as with everything — an entire roster of advisers and government experts to offer insights into natural disasters such as hurricanes. They could literally feed him lines to repeat, and the upshot would be a chief executive who at least sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, especially after his deadly lack of initiative during the hurricanes that decimated Puerto Rico, leaving 3,000 dead Americans in the aftermath.

In a video shot in the Oval Office, Trump was flanked by easels holding maps of the hurricane “cones” when he described the incoming weather to be “tremendously big and tremendously wet.” This is what you say about something when you have nothing to say about it. He’s like a third grader who answers a question by repeating the question. 

TEACHER: How large is the hurricane, Donnie, and how much rainfall will it bring? 
DONNIE TRUMP: Um, it’s… uh… tremendously big and tremendously wet? 

So, instead of telegraphing a tone of dignity and presidential insight, Trump simply achieved a set-up for a continuous series of diaper and pee-pee-tape jokes on Twitter.

As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, Trump shot another video, this time in the Rose Garden where he described the hurricane as “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.” And they actually allowed this video to be edited, rendered, uploaded and displayed publicly on Trump’s Twitter feed — with the “wettest” line still in there. 

Not only is it a dumb fucking thing to say for obvious reasons, but Florence isn’t even in the top 10 “wettest” hurricanes to hit the U.S. unless we exclude Hawaii, then it’s eighth on the list. But it doesn’t matter. Trump needs shit to brag about, even if it means bragging about the alleged “wettest” hurricane. He’s clearly framing the hurricane as the wettest because it’ll mean the Great And Powerful Trump successfully got through such a catastrophic ordeal without endlessly pissing his pants.

Wetness aside, Trump gave an on-the-record and tape-recorded interview to The Hill in which he complained about Jeff Sessions. “I don’t have an attorney general,” he said, once again telling us that he knows nothing. The AG isn’t his. The AG isn’t Trump’s personal law enforcement officer or his personal attorney. He’s not there to protect the president from legal issues like, say, collusion with a foreign power or obstruction of justice. It’s been nearly two years since that horrible, horrible Election Day and our president still doesn’t understand the role of the attorney general. Sleep tight, America, because he’s about to fire Sessions and hire a new AG even though, again, he doesn’t know what the AG is supposed to do.

Speaking of law enforcement, Trump also returned to a former official who continues to reside near the top of the president’s enemies list. During his chat with The Hill, Biff said this about James Comey: “I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries…I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy.”

Either Biff has access to a time-traveling DeLorean, as my “Biff” nickname for him suggests, or he doesn’t realize that it would’ve been impossible to fire Comey before his inauguration because he wasn’t president yet. He’s on tape. He really said this.

Mentally unfit.

Do we really need to know that he also once proposed building a wall across the 3,500 mile wide Sahara Desert in order to solve Europe’s immigration issue? Well, he did. He also told a hurricane victim in North Carolina on Wednesday to “have a good time.”

Beyond America surviving this president’s nincompoopery, there’s another very serious reason why he can’t be allowed to continue serving and must be legally removed from office. If he endures through the end of his term, and especially if he’s somehow re-elected (there’s a chance, yes), it will emphasize to the world how any doofus can be president, sidestepped all of the constitutional strictures that are supposed to protect us from similar fuckery. 

And if anyone can do the job without being removed, Trump will have reduced the presidency to a shell of its former stature. It used to be that people would aspire to be president, understanding that it’s a monumental job to achieve and then to successfully occupy. Not after Trump’s done with it. He’s reduced the nearly unachievable challenge of attaining the office to that of a Summer gig at Six Flags. 

Worse, it appears as if our other national leaders don’t care enough to protect the people from the myriad downsides accompanying such a foolish man — they don’t seem to care that a full third of the federal government is being run (poorly) by a mentally declining faker whose best observation about a major storm is that it’s wet. 

Members Only: The Horrifying Panel Of “Normal” Trump Supporters

In what seemed like an effort to present some Trump supporters as normal, concerned Americans interested in the welfare of their country, CNN hosted a Q and A with six women who voted for the president in the last election. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota spoke to them in order to find out how they will be voting in the midterms and asked them how they rated his performance thus far.

The discussion was perhaps more horrifying than I could have imagined — but not for the normal reasons associated with your average Trump supporters. 

The women were not overtly ignorant, mean or particularly passionate about their support for the president. They were of varying ages and backgrounds, and seemed for the most part like nice, normal people. Some of the women planned on voting for the Democrats in the midterms, and one of the younger panelists, Ally Bass, seemed to genuinely understand why Trump was so dangerous to women in America. 

“It starts with talking about women’s facelifts,” Bass told Camerota when asked why Trump was so unpopular with women. “It’s disrespectful. I think the majority of women, they don’t see him as a respectful, pro women, kind of man, especially people my age. In my age demographic it’s a huge deal that he’s not supportive of easily accessible women’s health care, in terms of planned parenthood. They feel like they are losing the right to birth control, pap smears, abortions.”

Camerota asked Bass whether it would be fair to say she regretted voting for Trump in the first place. Bass agreed, saying she only voted for Trump because she thought he would make America safer. 

“Part of the reason that I voted for him was that I thought he was going to be the one of the two candidates to make our national security a high priority and make us safer on our own grounds and our own territory,” she said. “But when you are making fun of foreign leaders and becoming buddy buddy with Vladimir Putin, it shakes me up a little bit.”

It took me a moment to digest these comments and process just how terrifying they are when understood in context. Here was a young, informed woman, who believes strongly in protecting women’s rights, respecting women, and having a strong leader who fights for democratic values around the world. And yet she voted for a man who was recorded bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, took three different stances on abortion during the 2016 election (and ultimately came out for banning it), and had known links to Russia given they were busy hacking into Democrat affiliated organizations, and had praised Vladimir Putin effusively.

 “I’ve always had a good instinct about Putin,” Trump told Iowa radio host Simon Conway in December of 2015. “I just feel that that’s a guy—and I can analyze people and you’re not always right, and it could be that I won’t like him. But I’ve always had a good feeling about him from the standpoint.”

“Putin said good things about me,” Trump said at a rally three months later.  “He said, ‘he’s a leader and there’s no question about it, he’s a genius.’ So they all said, the media, they said — you saw it on the debate — they said, ‘you admire President Putin.’ I said, I don’t admire him. I said he was a strong leader, which he is. I mean, he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader.”

These statements, and hundreds of others, were well documented by the media. And yet Bass, and ostensibly others like her, didn’t seem to think it mattered and voted for him anyway. Given Trump’s opponent was an eminently qualified candidate, particularly when it came to national security as she served as Secretary of State under Obama, it is inconceivable that anyone would gamble with the country’s security with a failed casino operator and notorious scam artist with no experience in government whatsoever. 

Bass at least displayed a modicum of self awareness, while the other women gave answers to Camerota’s questions that were so incongruent and clueless you wondered how on earth they felt comfortable going on live television expressing them. 

“I feel at age 44 when I am living paycheck to paycheck, and concerned about my future, but more importantly my daughter’s, I feel like there is a lot riding on the elections coming up,” said Nell Justiliano, who also regrets voting for Trump.  

“I voted for Obama in ’08, and I ended up voting for Trump. It was very difficult for me, but I knew at that moment that I wanted change. And for me, he represented that change.”

“What is your plan for how you plant to vote now for the midterms?” asked Camerota. 

“At this point, I plan to vote Republican,” answered Justiliano. “I am very confident in the economic status of where we are at now, what Trump has done, and hopefully for what he can continue to do in the future, if he has the support behind him. He is a very flawed human being, but aren’t we all.” 

To try to make sense of this requires would require a doctorate in psychology. Justiliano is struggling from paycheck to paycheck, regrets voting for Trump, but thinks he has been good for the economy and will vote for Republicans in the midterms. 

Another panelist, Ruth Birchett, said she will be voting for Republicans in the midterms because “it is Democrat decision making that has widened the divide between the haves and the have nots.”

Given Trump and the GOP have slashed taxes for the wealthy elite creating unprecedented economic inequality in America, it is hard to square Birchett’s comments with reality. In fact, wealth inequality under Trump is now so extreme that the United Nations described the president’s economic agenda for America as a “bid to become the most unequal society in the world”.

It isn’t difficult to figure out where Birchett is getting her information from, but it is hard to figure out where she gets her extreme confidence from. The assuredness with which the women on the panel spoke with about Trump and the issues facing the country was perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the discussion. Here were six adult voters who appeared to be politically aware, but could not put forward a coherent argument as to why they voted for Trump or what they believed in.

This, sadly, is a snap shot of the electorate Democrats have to navigate this year and in 2020 — the much desired “swing voter” who can flip an election at the final hour. How do you reach someone who is struggling financially but believes Trump is good for the economy? How do you speak to a voter who believes Trump is bad for women, but voted for him after hearing him talk about sexually assaulting women and calling them “pigs”, “dogs” and “slobs”? 

While each of these women should take responsibility for the horrors president Trump has wrought on the country over the past 19 months, I still do not hold any personal animosity towards them, or think they are bad people. They are the product of a deeply dysfunctional society that has been torn apart by right wing talk radio, Fox News and corporate money in the political system. They have voted for a party that continues to rob working people to pay off their wealthy donors, defund public education, and destroy affordable health care because they buy into the scare tactics used by the pundits on the shows they watch. They have voted for a man who has gone to war on reality, and are so confused by the inconsistencies they have been subjected to that they cannot make coherent decisions any more. 

Sadly, this is the society Donald Trump wants, and it is one he will ultimately benefit from. Because if this panel is anything to go by, the Democrats have a very serious war on their hands in the coming months and years. 

MEMBERS ONLY: Brett Kavanaugh And The Ridiculous ‘Nice Guy’ Test

This weekend, Stanford Professor Christine Blasey Ford revealed that at 15, she was sexually assaulted by a then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who held her down and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. If there was ever a moment to end this farce of a hearing and yank his nomination, this would be it.

However, the Republicans are shameless in their need to control the highest court in the land, having first preventing President  Obama from holding hearings on Merrick Garland, and now trying to force a corrupted nominee through the system.

There are several reasons why the Republicans want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the biggest being that he would be the deciding vote on many conservative issues, including the long-desired overturning of Roe v. Wade. However, they have shown no transparency in this matter, withholding thousands of documents concerning his conduct and refusing to engage in vote postponements (until the emergence of the rape allegations).

Even after the Ford allegations, the GOP have decided that the American people should know one thing about Kavanaugh which qualifies him for the job: he’s nice.

The Nice Guy Debate

From the moment Trump announced his nomination at the White House, Kavanaugh has been presented to the media as a loving family man. He brought his two daughters to witness this moment and even went so far as to bring the whole basketball team to his hearing. The Washington Post even ran an article by his friend Julie O’Brien, who wrote that she may not know Kavanaugh as a judge, but she could say he was “a great carpool Dad.”

Even law professors argued that his niceness should play a role in his consideration for the Supreme Court position. In a Medium article, University of Chicago’s Daniel Hemel, who experience Kavanaugh’s famous ‘niceness’ argued that niceness may not be the only thing that matters when choosing a Justice, but it’s still important since it carries with it a number of character traits that could influence their rulings, like empathy, the use of power, and the ability to be a role model. However, centering the debate around Kavanaugh’s ‘niceness’ ignored a whole host of other issues – how would he vote on abortion? What was he doing when he worked for George W. Bush? What does he think about guns?

Hemel did add that “all the niceness in the world shouldn’t save his confirmation” if anything untoward came out about him — a caveat that is now being put to the test.

A Tale of Two Cities

If Hemel’s test is applied to Kavanaugh, it’s clear that the Judge has failed to live up to its parameters. He appears to be a man with little real empathy – witness the photo of him refusing to shake the hand of Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter died in the Parkland shooting. He uses his power to harm people – as he did Alicia Baker, who had to choose between paying off student loans or getting an IUD after Kavanaugh said companies could refuse to insure contraceptives to female employees. And his status as a role model is now in ruins thanks to the allegations made by Prof. Ford.

The astonishing part of all this has been the contrast between Kavanaugh’s allies and his opponents. Nowhere was this more apparent than during the final day of the hearings, where citizens were allowed to testify either on his behalf or against him. Over and over again, his friends spoke to his good character, calling him a nice, decent man. These testimonies were immediately followed by people like Mrs. Baker, as well as young adults like Parkland survivor Aalayah Eastmond, who worried Kavanaugh might strike down regulations regarding assault weapons; and asthmatic teenager Hunter LaChance who said his rulings on clean air could make his life more difficult. Watching these dueling points of view follow each other back-to-back, it was truly a tale of two cities – Kavanaugh the nice guy vs. Kavanaugh the heartless sociopath.

Kavanaugh’s #MeToo Moment

The Republican effort to make Kavanaugh into Tom Hanks reached its apex of shamelessness last Friday after the assault allegations were revealed, when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released a letter denouncing the charges and signed by 65 women who knew Kavanaugh in high school. And why did they argue that this woman was lying? Because Brett Kavanaugh is “nice”:

“He…[had] a wide circle of friends…Many of us have remained close friends with him and his family over the years. Through the more than 35 years we have known him, Brett has stood out for his friendship, character, and integrity. In particular, he has always treated women with decency and respect. That was true when he was in high school, and it has remained true to this day.”

Throughout his hearings, Kavanaugh has proven himself a coward, a perjurer, a racist, and attempted rapist, but his allies have argued that because he’s “nice,” these things are either not true, or shouldn’t be considered. Hemel may have argued that niceness was a part of the debate, but it should not be the center of it, as the Republicans have done. Through this dishonest debate, they have forgotten that “niceness” is irrelevant without basic goodness — by far the more important character test when it comes to fitness for the Supreme Court.

Take as examples, Justice Felix Frankfurter and Chief Justice Earl Warren. Neither of them was considered a “nice” man – in fact, they didn’t treat each other that well – but they are widely regarded as two of the most effective justices in court’s history. They made up for their lack of personal “niceness” with a basic sense of decency that inspired them to make rulings that changed people’s lives for the better, like Brown v. Board of Education. Republicans have never established Kavanaugh’s goodness. Instead they have used bland, Hallmark card sentiment to sneak his nomination through.

Perhaps the skeletons in his closet kept them from doing that. What we know now is that this mistake has come back to bite them in the behind as they face a potential tsunami in the midterms. They might have avoided all of this had they just heeded to the words of Stephen Sondheim, who wrote in his musical Into the Woods, “Though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good.”

MEMBERS ONLY: Minorities Are Skeptical Of The Hard Left, And For One Very Good Reason

Having been a part of the hard left as a teenager and young adult, I often found it perplexing as to why minority friends of mine were not impressed with my Noam Chomsky inspired views. They understood the inherent racism of Western imperialism, the structural inequalities built into capitalism, and also believed that both parties in America were complicit in the current status quo. Why then, were they not as militant as I was?

After I left college, I rarely came across non-white people who thought there should be a third party in US politics, that the Democrats were “just as bad” as the Republicans, and not voting in protest of the corrupt system was a good or moral idea. Black friends of mine would mostly agree with what I was saying, but calmly point out that America had always been this way, and that there was little that could be done about it. I disagreed vehemently, believing passionately that something could and had to be done, that destroying the system would bring about the change we needed. If only people would listen to the logic and vote for the hard core leftists outside of the political system who really knew what was going on, we could do achieve radical change.

It took a number of years for me to figure out why none of my minority friends saw things the same why I did. Over time, I began to see that because I was so enamored with my own brilliance, I could not see that my own experience of life had colored the way I thought politics in America worked.

As a white, Jewish and middle class male, I was used to things working out for me. I could go to whatever school I wanted to, could complain to figures authority and have them listen to me, walk down the street without getting arrested at night, drive without getting pulled over, and have people take me seriously because I spoke with a British accent. If I made a fuss about something, I could effect change, and goddamnit, if I wanted change in society then if I shouted loudly enough about it, it would change.

It began to occur to me however, that this was not everyone else’s experience of living in America. I was particularly struck by the attitude of my black friends, who were never shocked by the insanity of Fox News and Republican politicians. Blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, were as far as I was concerned, so crazy that they should be kicked off the air. No news show in the UK would have anyone so nakedly partisan and intellectually bankrupt host anything serious, so why on earth were they headline shows in the US?

“That’s just America being America,” one black friend told me. “See, we’re just used to it, so it’s normal for us. There’s nothing you can do to change it.”

The longer I lived in America and the more I interacted with immigrant communities, the more I began to see the country as it really was, not as I believed it should be. This really hit home when I met my wife, a Peruvian American whose parents emigrated to the States in the 1980’s.

My wife’s parents view of what is possible is very, very different to mine. It is far less idealistic and much more pragmatic. My father-in-law has generally voted according to what will be good for his construction business, which means mostly Republican (Donald Trump aside). My mother-in-law doesn’t pay too much attention to politics, preferring instead to focus more on her family, religion and friendship circle. My wife is interested in politics and is well informed, but does not get too worked up about it.

My family on the other hand, always voted on principle, spend hours debating politics, and still fanatically keep up to date with the news.

“White people love to get worked up about that kind of thing,” my wife jokes regularly. “Latin people think it’s pretty silly. They think you should be focused on your family!”

Of course there is a rich history of minority resistance to oppressive policies in America, but, at least in my experience, most minorities in America just want to get on with their lives without too much trouble. They resist the notion that a great (usually white) politician is going to save them and they vote pragmatically, not ideologically. Why? Because they aren’t gullible, don’t believe in saviors, and do not have the same sense of entitlement white progressives like my (former) self usually have. My father in law for example, recognized the threat of Donald Trump posed to people like him, and voted for Hillary Clinton (I also believe he was deeply opposed to him from a moral point of view too).

It is telling that minorities overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries in 2016, eschewing the politics of Bernie Sanders — a huge favorite amongst white college students and hard left liberals. As Politico reported:

Sanders coming from seemingly nowhere to seriously challenge Clinton while drawing historically large and enthusiastic crowds has soaked up much of the attention in the Democratic race, making it feel as though he’s hit a chord that resonates throughout the party. But his brand of idealism has been rejected by the majority of minority voters—Clinton won every contest with at least a 10 percent black population, except Michigan, and each state where Latinos make up at least 10 percent of eligible voters, except Colorado

The Politico piece also noted that the hardcore Sanders supporters “mocked” minorities who voted for Clinton “for supposedly ‘voting against their self-interest’ because they refuse to believe a political revolution is at hand”.

It hadn’t of course occurred to the Bernie militants that minorities didn’t vote for Sanders because he almost certainly wouldn’t have beaten the Republican candidate (although they have dozens of articles on hand from The Intercept and The Nation that apparently prove otherwise). While Hillary Clinton was not as morally pure as Sanders, she was a damn sight better than whatever crackpot the GOP were set to nominate as their candidate. This was obvious to most people outside of hard left, almost exclusively white circles. Minorities in America don’t have the luxury of voting for candidates who pledge to implement single payer health care, get rid of the NSA and ban gas driving cars if they are going to lose. It is as simple as that. I personally preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, but was not particularly bothered when he lost as I thought both candidates were actually pretty good.

Politics is a messy, horrible business, but as you mature in life, you begin to realize that life is a messy, horrible business. But you do your best with what you have, and try not to complain too much. Perhaps it is the case that African Americans and other minorities in America just reach this conclusion a lot faster than people like me.

MEMBERS ONLY: The Case for Open War Against the Republican Party

The Republican Party has got to go. Period. Anyone still interested in little things like freedom or justice or even being allowed the luxury of ignoring politics have to vote Republicans out of office at every level of government. Nothing else matters now except removing them from power and banishing them from the public square.

If you’re wondering just how dangerous the GOP has become, consider the words of Tom Nichols, a Republican trying, in his own words, to fumigate his party:

The GOP as a party, meanwhile, is now a cult of personality, bereft of conservative ideals, except for one: That "conservatism" must be carried forward by unelected judges, which is totally not a conservative ideal. Veteran GOPers see what's coming – and have wisely retired. /6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 8, 2018

Republicans have abandoned all attempts to win the hearts and minds of the electorate. They will no longer appeal to anyone but angry white men and the women in their thrall. They see the judiciary as their only means to hold on to power because their policies are so toxic, they can only sucker white Republican voters as long as the economy Obama built remains strong. As soon as they crash it (again) with their tax cuts for billionaires (again) and deregulation for Wall Street (again), even fulfilling their base’s masturbatory fantasy of putting brown children in cages won’t be enough to keep them in office.

The only option left is to have courts stacked with partisan extremists overturn any effort to stop their legislative agenda and to, hopefully, uphold as much of their voter suppression efforts as possible and they are pursuing this option with fanatical intensity. In other words, the Republican Party has torn out its own eyes so it cannot see anything but the imaginary goal of total control of the United States by judicial fiat. But by blinding themselves to the damage they’re inflicting on the very nation they seek to rule over like kings, Republicans have become an immediate threat to its continued existence. And so they must be eliminated as an electoral and social force.

This is not a call for the “Second Amendment remedies” the right is so fond of. That only comes if the GOP wins and they continue to follow white nationalism to its logical, genocidal conclusion. And considering that their base is now fully engaged with the idea of making America white again and using fascism to make it happen, there’s little reason to suspect they won’t. Republicans have proven themselves manifestly incapable of bucking their base’s worst instincts. But before they start purging America of Those People, we still have the opportunity to use our overwhelming numbers to smash them at the ballot box and ensure that they are removed from power forever. And for that, we have to become fanatically anti-Republican.

This even applies to those on the right who are not thrilled at the chance to be an open white nationalist. Contrary to our (admittedly reasonable) caricatures of the right, not every conservative is champing at the bit to make America white again. Part of the reason Trump has an 80-90% approval rate among Republicans is that a good number of people have left the Republican Party in disgust, leaving only the worst elements behind. This isn’t even really about Trump; he simply accelerated the trend of the GOP turning into a white power party and he made it impossible to pretend it wasn’t happening. That’s why so many people abandoned the party. Those who walked away (for real, unlike the fictional #Walkaway campaign for the Democrats) didn’t magically become liberals; they simply couldn’t stay in a political party that chose to embrace fascism and white nationalism.

To those people and to anyone else who cares about the future of this country: It’s time to vote blue until the Republican Party is dead and something new and honest takes its place. If you can’t see your way fit to do this, it doesn’t matter what your excuse is, you are aiding the fascism and white nationalism of the GOP.

This is especially true for the people who still, even at this late date, pretend that “both sides are the same.” And I’m being very deliberate in my choice of words here because even the most inattentive voter is lying at this point when they claim “both sides.” Yes, the press throws out both sides nonsense at every available opportunity but I don’t care how jaded you are; one side has a growing number of white nationalists running for office and the leader of their party had to be forced to criticize Nazis. End of line. Full stop. There is no “both sides” argument after that. You can mouth the words but you can also say bacon tastes like liver. That doesn’t mean it’s true or that you should be treated as a serious person.

I’m not asking people to become hardcore liberals or even Democrats for life. It’s important to remember that conservatism is not synonymous with racism, bigotry, and sexism. There is a place in our political debate for slowing down the breakneck speed of progress without resorting to hate and greed. And someday, we will have a sane balance between left and right politics again. We will have a party that represents conservative values that does not seek to turn America into a fascist ethnostate.

But this is not that time and the Republican Party is not that party. The GOP is not a conservative party in any sense of the word. They represent the interests of the 1% and are using white nationalism and religious extremism to enact the will of their oligarch masters. For the good of the country and the future of our children (and ourselves, for that matter), the most important thing is to destroy the Republican Party, root and branch.

All of our other goals are still important. Identity politics do not need to go sit in the back of the bus. Income inequality does not need to be ignored. Whatever honest conservatives believe in these days does not need to be lumped in with Republican fascism. But the most important thing has to be annihilating the GOP by voting them out of office and shunning them in public.

Think of it this way: When you have aggressive cancer, you go on with your life. You still work, eat, sleep, shower, watch TV, play with your kids, etc. But the main focus of your life is getting rid of your cancer. It dominates your thoughts. It’s the driving goal of your life because you know that if you don’t, nothing else will matter because you will be dead. If someone asks you where you see yourself 5 years from now, no matter what other answers you might give, the foundational and unspoken response is “Cancer free.”

Unless our foundational and unspoken response to every political question is “End the Republican Party”, nothing else will matter because they will murder this country. They will do it in broad daylight while praising Jesus and the flag at the top of their lungs. And then it will be too late. All the other things we thought were so much more important will mean nothing because those things can only be changed by a system of government that obeys the will of the people. That’s not how fascist ethno-police states roll and all the marches and protests in the world won’t change it back.

Whether you want to believe it or not, we are in a civil war right now against the Republican Party and there is no guarantee of victory unless smashing them becomes our highest priority. Win the war, and everything else can be negotiated later. Lose it, and arch declarations about whose cause is the most important won’t mean a goddamn thing.

Time to pick a side. You are either dedicated to removing a fascist white nationalist threat from the nation or you are helping them end America. Both sides are not the same. Silence is consent. Neutrality is siding with the oppressor. There are no third options.