I wrote exactly this and abandoned the post assuming someone else must have already made this point. This is the same power that propagandists have over their overpaid entertainers. They know they're not unique and are replaceable, and meanwhile the pay is so damn good they'll spout anything to keep the dollars and fame.
Wokism might fail, but it might also succeed. Already, tens of millions of people report being afraid to speak up against it. Federal and corporate bureaucracies are largely woke.
All sorts of odious ideologies have succeeded throughout history via a rabid minority seizing control of institutions. It was never necessary for them to have anything close to a majority of public opinion.
I bet I will still have to explain how my STEM reseach is going to aid underrepresented minorities in my NSF grant proposals. (Correct answer: not one bit. But I if say that, the proposal will not even get a review.)
Look at history. I keep saying that the last time this happened Bill Clinton had to kill it off by executing a retarded black guy. That doesn't mean that the movement vanished completely. It just retreated back into its cave (college campuses) to hibernate before emerging again in a few decades.
Right-winger here: Republicans, conservatives, nationalists etc. all fervently believe the same thing to be true of their side. They believe that we are insufficiently ruthless and that the Democrats play for keeps and march in lockstep. Of course that's not true. What I will say is that when the Left says it of the Right, it's *less* untrue, but still untrue.
Much as I say to my fellow Trump supporters who look at the institutions of this country, from the DoD to the NFL, and see nothing but cultural Marxism and racial animus everywhere they look... if you think what we have now is "running roughshod" you ain't seen nothing yet.
To put it another way: real right-wing authoritarianism has never been tried, man.
If I was an omnipotent Karl Rove kind of person who was able to bend the Democrats to my will, I'd have the national profile ones doing pretty much what they are now.
There are plenty of sane Democrats out there focused on real economic issues, and the likes of Jen Psaki actually say a lot of relatively common-sense things. But it gets drowned out in the popular imagination by the kind of destructive thinking Freddie has written about.
And Freddie could help by writing about what elected Democrats actually want to do (eg Build Back Better Act), instead of fueling the fire by dissing woke pundits as if they were the elected representatives of the party, which they are most definitely not.
Freddie wrote a state of the blog address a few days ago and one of his key points was that what people say they want, and what people actually read, are two different things. Similarly, people *say* they want sober policy analysis but people are really animated more by things like culture, rhetoric, fear, conflict. It's human nature.
To hold up Freddie as a cause of this, rather than a symptom, is backward in the extreme. If the Democrats have become in the imagination of any given group - I'd say "dissatisfied Leftists" are the main one who read and post here - the party of woke scolds and race conflict, and not the party of economic action, then that presumably didn't come from nowhere.
We underwent, a year ago, a deadly summer of burning cities, lawlessness, looting, even the burning of federal buildings, in the name of "racial justice", in a process that was catalyzed and cheered by more Democrats than either of us could name. Meanwhile BBB has stalled in the Senate. You can forgive people for thinking one of them matters more to the elite Democrats calling the shots than does the other.
In the absence of economic action from the elected representatives, is it not just relevant but in fact vital to look at where the elites are spending their political capital?
I don't hold Freddie up as a cause, but I do hold him up as someone who's not helping. As far as I can tell, Freddie just wants to wait for the glorious marxist revolution, and thinks no other progress is good enough to be worth forging alliances or accpeting compromises.
Lifelong Democrat here (Now G or I) but when the Nation started sponsoring cruises I unsubbed and then D. pundits as bad as any pundits, now no pundits on my radar. Articles like this remind me why.
Assange is a sadly fascinating figure in the last ten years. He's always been a deeply unpleasant person, but has led to the publications of some of the most consequential information of this new century.
Liberals never liked him because he aired the Obama Administration's dirty laundry. Then when Wikileaks released the DNC emails, they went from quietly wanting him dead to loudly demanding that he be assassinated.
That he was briefly loved by conservatives is even stranger. They used to demand for his assassination live on TV! Then, after the DNC emails, they treated him like a beloved ally.
Of course, since liberals and conservatives have wanted him to just die for a long time, no one is going to stand up and defend him. The threats to press freedom also aren't such a big deal to DNC and GOP donors, and too few journalists on the left are willing to defend Assange, because he's done unpalatable things.
I mean, I find it just insanely depressing. The Justice Department is going to sentence him as a traitor to a country he's not a citizen of for publishing news. And too many journalists and news publications are too cowardly to defend him on principle, even though his imprisonment opens a path to arrest and try any journalist or publisher of news.
I agree. It is the #1 issue for me. If we don't defend people thattell the truth even if we don't personally like them, we may as well give it all up. GG was my first Substack subscription and I have made gift subs. GG's bravery in willing to talk on any venue that will have him impresses me deeply. Truthtellers are not believed by the dishonest.
I've been a fan of Greenwald for a long time, but I find him kind of tedious these days. I've never been a big fan of his media and cultural analysis, and that seems to be most of what he does now.
I think, to some extent, twitter broke his brain a bit and now he just can't stop arguing with everyone about dumb shit.
Even so, no one can take away or even downplay how consequential his journalism has been to this new century. The world was changed by the Snowden reveals. Brazil and possibly much of South America and North America will be changed by what he uncovered about the Bolsonaro Administration.
Do sociology departments really teach crap like that (ie the Dartmouth comment)? I never took a sociology course, but I took plenty of philosophy ones. American philosophy departments are almost always analytic: an intense focus on logic, clarity, and the structure of arguments rather than "perspectives" or whatever. Surprised that other humanities don't work that way.
I mean the joke is based on the fact that the academy generally, elite schools especially, and the humanities and social sciences particularly are filled with bizarre and extreme beliefs about race and gender issues
That territory has been well covered but not usually so much from your POV. But one thing that's ironic about conservative complaints is that they long ago ceded that ground by basically forbidding their offspring to take anything seriously in college other than business or engineering classes. Kind of a sweeping charge - and I haven't been an undergrad since the early 80s - but I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.
A spin onthat old Voltaire quote, "If Trump did not exist, it would be necessary for liberals to invent him.". They cling to Trump so tightly because it's the only way their politics make any sense. He upholds their internal narrative, and confirms everything they want to be true about their enemies. Namely that anyone not on their team is hopelessly bigoted and not worth listening to. Same goes for COVID really, they've used COVID as a cudgel to beat conservative America since day one of the pandemic and everyone knows it. If COVID goes away they lose that weapon...same as Trump.
The important thing to remember about US politics is that it's almost exclusively a circus sideshow where no actual power ever changes hands. They just want you to think it does. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
They'll milk it for everything they can too. As a thought experiment, imagine America's liberals trying to justify the actions of the Democratic party if the GOP didn't exist. Not a pretty picture.
I can't tell if people like Hayes are playing a role for clicks/views or if they actually believe the "Trump is a threat to the republic" narrative. Probably some of both. Or maybe he's convinced himself.
“politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer”.
A while ago a meme was going around saying essentially, share the privilege! Giving someone else some doesn’t mean you get none! This isn’t pie! This isn’t kindergarten!
Then an activist I followed starting tentatively saying “but what if it DID require you [white people] to give something up?”
And just yesterday I saw a screen-grab of a tweet by some academic saying (paraphrasing, but pretty close): what I wish folks understood [because everyone is now “folks” as though that word cancels out all the incomprehensible jargon around it] that equity is not an action, it is a way of being.
That part is literally what she said: equity is something you are, not something you do. Making the test of who is your political ally even narrower because nothing one “does”—support a policy, say—says anything about what one is, inside, in their heart.
There was no worse move, philosophically, than for discussions around racism and gender to shift the narrative from "some people are disadvantaged" to "some people are privileged."
If some people are disadvantaged, and disadvantage is bad, the natural answer is to help remove the disadvantage. The non-disadvantaged people feel bad for the disadvantaged people and want to help them, so the feelings are in alignment with the goal.
If some people are privileged, and privilege is bad, the natural answer is to...what? Remove the privilege? In this case, the privileged people feel bad not for the disadvantage of others, but for their own lucky circumstances. If the goal is eliminating privilege (the "bad" thing in this perspective), that leaves the door pretty open to solutions that improve the lot of the non-privileged as well as solutions that knock down the privileged. And it generates a hell of a lot of negative emotions the whole time, causing some to feel awfully guilty about themselves, and causing others to angrily reject that emotional manipulation.
It also poisons the discussions about how things ought to be. Equal pay for equal work shouldn't be a "privilege". Nor should equal access to healthcare or housing, or to fair policing, or to decent schooling, or to safe infrastructure. These are not "privileges", they are the minimum obligations the government has to its citizenry.
Thanks, I definitely should have included that: the word "privilege" literally does not describe the situation. It puts the thinker at odds with reality.
That same activist who posed the question what IF whites people had to give things up later has said there’s nothing wrong with privilege it’s just how you use it.
Reminds me of the scene in The Office where Ryan tells Pam that he could run a Fortune 500 company but she’s good at running the copier. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. And Pam says “it sure sounds like one of those is better.”
Yep. Not to mention, it is so stupid to position things like not getting beat up by the police as "privileges" instead of basic human rights. As if child labor was ended by browbeating nonworking children into checking their "not-in-a-coal-mine privilege."
I heartily agree with your analysis of Democrats and what has replaced any possibility for humility and introspection.
Regarding Hayes specifically, I don't watch his show, but it seems to me that a 5-nights-a-week show leaves less time for deep thought and consideration, time to stand back and evaluate from a broader perspective. Instead, one must create X number of segments per week, and the more mechanistically produced those segments can be, the easier it is to fulfill the time requirements of the show. Issues like the constant war with Fox and its ilk over the minutia of January 6 or Donald Trump guarantees both regular, production-line content that has a built-in audience. His show, like each one on cable news, operates as a content assembly line, mass-producing "news" to sell to its audience. This assembly line approach to content production corrodes capacity for perspective and insight of necessity.
Hayes is a lot better on his podcast than it sounds like he is on his show. He had John McWhorter on a little while ago and IIRC agreed with him about a bunch of things.
It's kind of shocking how well McWhorter has done repeating highly banal and uncontroversial views. Really shows the demand for sanity on identity issues.
Sigh. Right below your excellent piece in my inbox is the latest Anne Helen Petersen post, an interview with someone who wrote a book titled The Trouble with White Women. As you can imagine, according to the author, we are just the worst. We are exclusionary, hag-like agglomerations of Amy Cooper, Karens, and Sheryl Sandberg. And yet the only contemporary example the author offers of these oppressive white women is Sandberg, who is in fact the target not of most women’s admiration but rather of our censure for her “let them eat cake” attitude toward woman’s problems in the workplace. Otherwise, the only specific examples of oppressive white women are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan (who committed the sin of giving Paulie Murray a job as her assistant when no one else would). Has the author actually talked with any of the rest of us? It’s pure straw-womanning.
We on the left can’t afford to exclude our allies. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I write this from Minnesota, where yesterday set a new heat record (55F), and today we’re under a tornado watch. In December. Climate change and economic pressures on regular people are more important than identity politics—I’m sorry, but they just are. If we can get help from people whose souls are flawed, yes, even from middle-aged white ladies like me, then we should take it. And we should stop letting Trump live in our heads. There is work too be done.
yeahhhhhhh I also can't think of a single conservative I've ever met (most of them very nice Catholic homeschoolers) who are keening for blood and soil, but I guess Freddie doesn't do nuance when it comes to the outgroup
It's racist. The rhetoric around white women and men is racist, hateful, born of lies, and counter-productive to the aims of a mixed society. These screeds should be viewed the same way screeds about Jews running the world are viewed: as the conspiracy theories of the delusional and the bigoted. They are not worth our time; that they've become so ensconced in some areas is ridiculous.
An update: it’s been a couple of hours, and suffice it to say it’s not going well. The general tenor of the replies (with one exception) is that there was no need for my comment, and that I should stay quiet and listen. Ah well. I tried
Hello, would you please provide a link to this piece? More interested in the comments than the article/essay itself obviously due to your description of the goings on.
Oh definitely. I tend to ruminate on things like this that would just wash over other people. I was foolish to think anyone would want to hear my opinion and should have let it go.
I saw your comment and thought it was terrific—both thoughtful and convincing, if only the other people on the thread were willing to think about your points!
Oh, definitely. I just don't think it's worth our time to try to battle these things "on their terms", so to speak. The framework is broken and needs to be rejected wholesale, not debated as if it's got merits.
Liked for the vicarious pleasure I took in learning that someone, somewhere enjoyed 55F weather yesterday. It was 85 here in Houston and yeah, that's pretty hot even here for this time of year.
It seems pretty clear to me that 2008 and 2012 were driven more by Obama’s charisma than by actual policy. This explains the wild swings between midterms and general elections better than the vague theory that the emerging majority was too lazy to turn out more than once every four years, and the centrality of the candidate’s personality also explains 2016 and 2020: anti-Clinton feeling was strong enough to enable the equally hated Trump, and anti-Trump feeling was strong enough to enable the non-compelling Biden.
Part of the reason we can’t let Trump go is no Democratic politician with a national profile is anywhere close to as compelling as Obama (or Trump), so all we’ve got is the anti-Trump argument from 2020. The general woke thesis is also a lot easier to advance when you can personify the forces of bigotry in an actual political figure, so that dynamic becomes self reinforcing as well.
This is so lucid. The ruling Dems are like Skeksis. There have been no new voices that have been allowed to be heard. Sure Mayor Pete is all over Netflix, but he ran to be DNC chair...in 2017 so he's no new voice.
MSNBC is a sister subsidiary of CNBC, a well-known media property providing PR services for various Wall St firms. Can we really expect a network in that orbit to focus on the abuses of the rentier class (FIRE by one name) that has its foot on the throat of the American economy? No, let's all engage in a fake dialectic instead - we'll fight about Trump some more, and nothing substantive will get done.
NO popular corporate media outlet is calling out the Dems for not even addressing Biden's pledge to institute a public health insurance option. It's disappeared as an issue, despite being in the gravest public health crisis of our time. If you're the suspicious sort, it's almost like The System in its entirety doesn't want us fighting over the right things.
This was so good and really sums up the Democratic party’s problems.
Back when I had a commute, I listened to Chris Hayes’ podcast in the car. It’s much better than his MSNBC show. He’s had some interesting guests, and he asks thoughtful questions and thinks about counter-arguments. But he takes a very woke perspective.
For example, the interview with Jonathan Metzl (the “Dying of Whiteness” author) stuck with me as an example of where we’re going wrong in how we think about Trump voters. I dug up some quotes:
Hayes: “There's this idea that the material concerns are the real ones. Or why don't people like, and actually it's the other way around. Who you are, the concerns about identity, who you are, what community are you a part of, where do you stand in the story of the nation, how central are you, what are you inherit, what can you lay claim to? That's the stuff.”
(Hayes later) “Because if the whole point is, people have non material concerns, what can I offer you, I can offer you here, I'll give you $1,000 a month and I'll give you healthcare and I'll give you all these things, but you're going to have to give up your centeredness in the national story as a white man….”
The point of their conversation is that white people would rather die than give up “white privilege” and being centered in the national story, whatever that means.
As for the cable show, Hayes (and his network’s) obsession with Trump and January 6th is totally baffling to me because the ratings are terrible. They seem to have concluded that it’s because Trump is gone, so give the remaining viewers what they want (more Trump). But I bet the real reason is that MSNBC has been covering the same shit for 11 months straight. You can watch three hours of primetime and not know who is president, but they report every tiny, procedural detail of the January 6th investigation: A new subpoena. A request for records. It’s so boring, and I don’t understand why they think it appeals even to people who hate Trump.
Here’s what I think. I think that people are looking at their grocery bills, their rent, masking toddlers, shutting down schools, crime in their neighborhoods, chaos on the border, and they’re wondering why everyone they used to trust is still screeching about January 6th like it was Pearl Harbor and Trump like he’s still in charge, and then they finish up by reminding their readers that they’re horribly privileged racists.
It's the evolutionary next step from protesters occupying various state or federal capitols to protest this or that bill, especially when protesters make a habit of tracking down elected officials to make their case in person (or over voicemail). I'd be all for it out of a sense of Jacksonian small-d democracy, except that the way the house and senate run these days your average member has almost no power at all; everything is controlled and decided by the tippy-top of the leadership. Thus protesting in anyone except Pelosi/Schumer/McConnel/McCarthy's offices, except in very rare circumstances where one or two members are holding up very tightly-contested legislation, is basically pointless unless it's for a specific constituent-services issue.
If you'd have told me in 2015 that some guy was gonna run roughshod around the capital building, clad in animal pelts and a bloody horned helmet, my reaction would have been, "holy shit, that guy sounds awesome".
I get what you're saying, and I know you don't mean it this way, but some part of me can't let this pass without saying: I want them to be afraid of their *votes* not of their guns or nooses.
What he means is, States are at heart a creature that consists of laws and violence welded together- or, more clinically, agreements and enforcement mechanisms.
If you vote for a law, or for a candidate who promises to enact or enforce a law, you are also implicitly declaring what problems you’re willing to send in SWAT over. For instance, a vote for Nixon was a de facto a vote for the drug war, which was a de facto a vote to hit people with batons and throw them into a concrete box for years for objecting to a cop stopping their vehicle for smelling weed.
Voting outsources the violence to public servants instead of letting private actors pursue vendettas. It avoids violence in strictest sense that the “whoever has the biggest private army gets to be mayor/governor/senator/president” trap has been sidestepped, but voting very much is a violent act, albeit one strained through severe layers of middlemen.
At the very least it gave them a taste of what people all over the country were experiencing during the summer riots. Too often the rich and privileged escape the chaos and disorder that plague the hoi polloi.
They fear their constituents plenty. Unfortunately for us and the 1/6 mob of rioters, their constituency is the oligarchy, Wall Street and corporate America.
The Cathedral's response to Trump, and further it's response to COVID, and the response to the J6 protests, and the interaction and overlap between the responses, is what you get when the Cathedral is not merely in business-as-usual policy disagreement with something, but pants-wettingly scared to death of something. You can see it with the Assange and Epstein situations as well.
That was absolutely everyone's reaction until we found out that actual Congresscritters had to be evacuated into bunkers and crap in the course of trying to perform a stupid, meaningless, overly-formal technicality of a parliamentary function.
Yes, I’ll second this. I don’t think it’s exactly what it’s being portrayed as by the media, and I think the focus is too much on the dumb activists who made asses of themselves at the capitol and not enough on the machinations of Trump and his team, but I find it genuinely scary and I’m not at all embarrassed that admit it. Is that these tactics are employed it will be nearly impossible to dial them back and I do think we are in real trouble as a democracy.
Because it’s snowballing in the wrong direction? Because the Supreme Court is the key to fixing money in politics and gerrymandering but the republicans are insuring eternal dominance by moneyed interests on the court? Because once we let them have the last piece of the puzzle, controlling the votes themselves, it’s over?
Say what you will about democrats, it’s the Republican judges that fucked us.
Cool! I’m genuinely glad you’re doing those things. But I think you are giving up on democracy too soon. We’ve pulled ourselves out of some pretty deep holes in the past using it.
Besides Stephens, the only people who voted against it were Democrat appointees. So I’d say the odds are zero with Republican nominees and higher than zero with democrat nominees.
Indeed. Sorry to inform some of the staunch always-anti-Democrats in the crowd, but it's almost if not completely the Republican nominated judges and justices who have upheld things like civil asset forfeiture, "qualified immunity", government surveillance, executive branch unaccountability/primacy, and any number of other threats to so-called democracy. In the other direction, literally every dissenting minority opinion on those same issues have come from Democrat nominated judges/justices.
Look up Ray Epps. Hard to argue he was anything but a protected government-directed agent provocateur on the balance of the evidence. That said, I'd wager everything I own that the majority of violence, looting, arson, killing of police officers during the 2020 summer of unrest was also sparked by agents provocateur, both government-directed and right-wing/anarchist (or just plain poor, bored white guys).
I think you bring up a good point about schools and masks on toddlers. I think the democrats are oblivious to how unpopular some of their covid management is. This is not an argument about whether or not it’s effective, just that it’s unpopular and acting like it’s only unpopular with a fringe number of Trumpers is delusional.
Schools are a huge deal. I live outside of Portland, OR and the teachers' union is trying to make all Fridays a "self-guided" learning day. One of our local middle schools just closed for 3 weeks to come up with a new discipline plan and to "deep clean." We're highly vaccinated with less than 20 cases per 100,000 people and our kids are still wearing masks and sitting six feet apart, even outside. Quarantine rules had loads of kids missing most of the first part of the school year. My sisters' kids went to school for 8 days total through October. She quit her job. To underestimate how pissed parents are is seriously stupid.
My vaccinated and masked high schoolers have to spray down their desks before and after every class with some high octane cleaner that is likely more dangerous to be breathing in than their risk of contracting Covid from a desk.
So far I've seen no evidence that its more infective nature is due to spread via fomites rather than aerosols. So the scrubbing and scouring of the schools beyond just simply wiping commonly touched surfaces with alcohol before or after touching them is really just the same as hygiene theater. If in fact it does come out that for whatever strange reason, Omicron, unlike all other variants is spread by fomites, then of course yeah, it'd depend on how long the virus lives on each respective surface.
Yeah. I’m in California, my kids didn’t go to school for a year. It really did open up a new hostile feeling door in my soul toward schools that never was there before. However, they seem to have calmed down a bit and the teachers I encounter are mostly great. My kids still have to make indoors which I’m fine with, but we’ve had regular sports no masks, Christmas concerts and field trips with no talk of remote fridays so I’m pretty happy. I would not be happy if they were tossing around remote Friday ideas.
Parents are exhausted and some don't get paid when they have to skip work. Many have given up on trying to work outside the home--mostly women. Child care tax credit has made this an option for many, but I don't know many women who are glad they had to choose.
".... they finish up by reminding their readers that they’re horribly privileged racists"
Much like the CRT scare this rings hollow to me. I don't get that messaging from any of the liberal sites or rags to which I subscribe (I also read and frequent far-left and right leaning outlets just to stay on top of things). FdB has alluded to this kind of messaging, but I've yet to see any good concrete examples, much less a plethora of them sufficient to justify the outcry.
Murder rates are up, we read a lot about the smash and grab stuff on the coasts, the homeless, and the border. But overall crime rates are trending down. Of all the murders every year, I genuinely wonder how many are committed with a gun; and virtually every single gun was once in the hand of a "good guy."
RE: 1/6, I don't see the mainstream media being any more sensationalistic than they were in the runup to the Iraq invasion, Russiagate or Whitewater/Lewinski. The texts and phone calls coming out are pretty damning and I'm confident that if it was a mob of BLM or antifa rioters breaking and entering into the Capitol the death toll would have been far higher.
Great description of our political parties: "the gleeful conspiracist bloodletting of the right against the sneering disdain and incomprehensible jargon of the left." Increasingly, I conclude that neither gives a sh*t about America or Americans; all they want is the power to inflict their particular cramped views on everyone else. Oh, and the POWER! plain and simple.
I wrote exactly this and abandoned the post assuming someone else must have already made this point. This is the same power that propagandists have over their overpaid entertainers. They know they're not unique and are replaceable, and meanwhile the pay is so damn good they'll spout anything to keep the dollars and fame.
Wokism might fail, but it might also succeed. Already, tens of millions of people report being afraid to speak up against it. Federal and corporate bureaucracies are largely woke.
All sorts of odious ideologies have succeeded throughout history via a rabid minority seizing control of institutions. It was never necessary for them to have anything close to a majority of public opinion.
it's a tiny fraction of the overall public. And the recent elections in VA and NJ make a Sista Souljah/Ricky Ray Rector moment inevitable I think.
I bet I will still have to explain how my STEM reseach is going to aid underrepresented minorities in my NSF grant proposals. (Correct answer: not one bit. But I if say that, the proposal will not even get a review.)
Look at history. I keep saying that the last time this happened Bill Clinton had to kill it off by executing a retarded black guy. That doesn't mean that the movement vanished completely. It just retreated back into its cave (college campuses) to hibernate before emerging again in a few decades.
Ouch!
Ok, but then the question is: how do we keep institutions from going off-mission when their administrative staff start Getting Ideas?
Right-winger here: Republicans, conservatives, nationalists etc. all fervently believe the same thing to be true of their side. They believe that we are insufficiently ruthless and that the Democrats play for keeps and march in lockstep. Of course that's not true. What I will say is that when the Left says it of the Right, it's *less* untrue, but still untrue.
Much as I say to my fellow Trump supporters who look at the institutions of this country, from the DoD to the NFL, and see nothing but cultural Marxism and racial animus everywhere they look... if you think what we have now is "running roughshod" you ain't seen nothing yet.
To put it another way: real right-wing authoritarianism has never been tried, man.
If I was an omnipotent Karl Rove kind of person who was able to bend the Democrats to my will, I'd have the national profile ones doing pretty much what they are now.
There are plenty of sane Democrats out there focused on real economic issues, and the likes of Jen Psaki actually say a lot of relatively common-sense things. But it gets drowned out in the popular imagination by the kind of destructive thinking Freddie has written about.
And Freddie could help by writing about what elected Democrats actually want to do (eg Build Back Better Act), instead of fueling the fire by dissing woke pundits as if they were the elected representatives of the party, which they are most definitely not.
Freddie wrote a state of the blog address a few days ago and one of his key points was that what people say they want, and what people actually read, are two different things. Similarly, people *say* they want sober policy analysis but people are really animated more by things like culture, rhetoric, fear, conflict. It's human nature.
To hold up Freddie as a cause of this, rather than a symptom, is backward in the extreme. If the Democrats have become in the imagination of any given group - I'd say "dissatisfied Leftists" are the main one who read and post here - the party of woke scolds and race conflict, and not the party of economic action, then that presumably didn't come from nowhere.
We underwent, a year ago, a deadly summer of burning cities, lawlessness, looting, even the burning of federal buildings, in the name of "racial justice", in a process that was catalyzed and cheered by more Democrats than either of us could name. Meanwhile BBB has stalled in the Senate. You can forgive people for thinking one of them matters more to the elite Democrats calling the shots than does the other.
In the absence of economic action from the elected representatives, is it not just relevant but in fact vital to look at where the elites are spending their political capital?
I don't hold Freddie up as a cause, but I do hold him up as someone who's not helping. As far as I can tell, Freddie just wants to wait for the glorious marxist revolution, and thinks no other progress is good enough to be worth forging alliances or accpeting compromises.
Lifelong Democrat here (Now G or I) but when the Nation started sponsoring cruises I unsubbed and then D. pundits as bad as any pundits, now no pundits on my radar. Articles like this remind me why.
I worked on the Clinton campaign until the Comey report then voted for Howie Hawkins. I have not thought about DJT one bit since 2020.
To me, right now, the Nation and MSNBC are as far away as the moon.
My number one concern is that Julian Assange is not extradited. If it is illegal to demonstrate that our governments act illegally we lose it all.
Assange is a sadly fascinating figure in the last ten years. He's always been a deeply unpleasant person, but has led to the publications of some of the most consequential information of this new century.
Liberals never liked him because he aired the Obama Administration's dirty laundry. Then when Wikileaks released the DNC emails, they went from quietly wanting him dead to loudly demanding that he be assassinated.
That he was briefly loved by conservatives is even stranger. They used to demand for his assassination live on TV! Then, after the DNC emails, they treated him like a beloved ally.
Of course, since liberals and conservatives have wanted him to just die for a long time, no one is going to stand up and defend him. The threats to press freedom also aren't such a big deal to DNC and GOP donors, and too few journalists on the left are willing to defend Assange, because he's done unpalatable things.
I mean, I find it just insanely depressing. The Justice Department is going to sentence him as a traitor to a country he's not a citizen of for publishing news. And too many journalists and news publications are too cowardly to defend him on principle, even though his imprisonment opens a path to arrest and try any journalist or publisher of news.
I agree. It is the #1 issue for me. If we don't defend people thattell the truth even if we don't personally like them, we may as well give it all up. GG was my first Substack subscription and I have made gift subs. GG's bravery in willing to talk on any venue that will have him impresses me deeply. Truthtellers are not believed by the dishonest.
I've been a fan of Greenwald for a long time, but I find him kind of tedious these days. I've never been a big fan of his media and cultural analysis, and that seems to be most of what he does now.
I think, to some extent, twitter broke his brain a bit and now he just can't stop arguing with everyone about dumb shit.
Even so, no one can take away or even downplay how consequential his journalism has been to this new century. The world was changed by the Snowden reveals. Brazil and possibly much of South America and North America will be changed by what he uncovered about the Bolsonaro Administration.
Look what happened to Tom Paine! https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/legitimizing-the-suppression-of-radicalism
I like Assange. I read his book. Have you?
Do sociology departments really teach crap like that (ie the Dartmouth comment)? I never took a sociology course, but I took plenty of philosophy ones. American philosophy departments are almost always analytic: an intense focus on logic, clarity, and the structure of arguments rather than "perspectives" or whatever. Surprised that other humanities don't work that way.
I mean, it's a joke
Sure but I imagine the joke comes from some experience. My background is in economics, where sociology is just considered crappy economics research.
I mean the joke is based on the fact that the academy generally, elite schools especially, and the humanities and social sciences particularly are filled with bizarre and extreme beliefs about race and gender issues
That territory has been well covered but not usually so much from your POV. But one thing that's ironic about conservative complaints is that they long ago ceded that ground by basically forbidding their offspring to take anything seriously in college other than business or engineering classes. Kind of a sweeping charge - and I haven't been an undergrad since the early 80s - but I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.
A spin onthat old Voltaire quote, "If Trump did not exist, it would be necessary for liberals to invent him.". They cling to Trump so tightly because it's the only way their politics make any sense. He upholds their internal narrative, and confirms everything they want to be true about their enemies. Namely that anyone not on their team is hopelessly bigoted and not worth listening to. Same goes for COVID really, they've used COVID as a cudgel to beat conservative America since day one of the pandemic and everyone knows it. If COVID goes away they lose that weapon...same as Trump.
The important thing to remember about US politics is that it's almost exclusively a circus sideshow where no actual power ever changes hands. They just want you to think it does. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
January 6th is fresh again because there is fresh news about it, with Meadows's book and texts being released.
They'll milk it for everything they can too. As a thought experiment, imagine America's liberals trying to justify the actions of the Democratic party if the GOP didn't exist. Not a pretty picture.
I can't tell if people like Hayes are playing a role for clicks/views or if they actually believe the "Trump is a threat to the republic" narrative. Probably some of both. Or maybe he's convinced himself.
“politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer”.
A while ago a meme was going around saying essentially, share the privilege! Giving someone else some doesn’t mean you get none! This isn’t pie! This isn’t kindergarten!
Then an activist I followed starting tentatively saying “but what if it DID require you [white people] to give something up?”
And just yesterday I saw a screen-grab of a tweet by some academic saying (paraphrasing, but pretty close): what I wish folks understood [because everyone is now “folks” as though that word cancels out all the incomprehensible jargon around it] that equity is not an action, it is a way of being.
That part is literally what she said: equity is something you are, not something you do. Making the test of who is your political ally even narrower because nothing one “does”—support a policy, say—says anything about what one is, inside, in their heart.
Oh my actual god.
There was no worse move, philosophically, than for discussions around racism and gender to shift the narrative from "some people are disadvantaged" to "some people are privileged."
If some people are disadvantaged, and disadvantage is bad, the natural answer is to help remove the disadvantage. The non-disadvantaged people feel bad for the disadvantaged people and want to help them, so the feelings are in alignment with the goal.
If some people are privileged, and privilege is bad, the natural answer is to...what? Remove the privilege? In this case, the privileged people feel bad not for the disadvantage of others, but for their own lucky circumstances. If the goal is eliminating privilege (the "bad" thing in this perspective), that leaves the door pretty open to solutions that improve the lot of the non-privileged as well as solutions that knock down the privileged. And it generates a hell of a lot of negative emotions the whole time, causing some to feel awfully guilty about themselves, and causing others to angrily reject that emotional manipulation.
My husband lived in Russia from 1986-87, and he likes to share this joke his Russian friends would tell:
It’s 1917, and a very old lady hears a commotion in the street. “What is happening?” she asks her maid.
“Oh, it’s so exciting! They are protesting in the street!”
“What do they want?” the old lady asks.
“They want for there to be no more rich people!” says the maid excitedly.
The old lady sighs. “In my day they protested too, but back then they wanted for there to be no more poor people.”
It also poisons the discussions about how things ought to be. Equal pay for equal work shouldn't be a "privilege". Nor should equal access to healthcare or housing, or to fair policing, or to decent schooling, or to safe infrastructure. These are not "privileges", they are the minimum obligations the government has to its citizenry.
Thanks, I definitely should have included that: the word "privilege" literally does not describe the situation. It puts the thinker at odds with reality.
That same activist who posed the question what IF whites people had to give things up later has said there’s nothing wrong with privilege it’s just how you use it.
Reminds me of the scene in The Office where Ryan tells Pam that he could run a Fortune 500 company but she’s good at running the copier. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. And Pam says “it sure sounds like one of those is better.”
This is a ridiculously keen point I hadn't really thought about. Thanks for posting this, its a good framework to think this thru.
Yep. Not to mention, it is so stupid to position things like not getting beat up by the police as "privileges" instead of basic human rights. As if child labor was ended by browbeating nonworking children into checking their "not-in-a-coal-mine privilege."
Making politics into vibes is such a powerfully hilarious and depressing idea.
Or maybe it's better to describe it as a Luther's "Faith alone" argument for salvation.
I heartily agree with your analysis of Democrats and what has replaced any possibility for humility and introspection.
Regarding Hayes specifically, I don't watch his show, but it seems to me that a 5-nights-a-week show leaves less time for deep thought and consideration, time to stand back and evaluate from a broader perspective. Instead, one must create X number of segments per week, and the more mechanistically produced those segments can be, the easier it is to fulfill the time requirements of the show. Issues like the constant war with Fox and its ilk over the minutia of January 6 or Donald Trump guarantees both regular, production-line content that has a built-in audience. His show, like each one on cable news, operates as a content assembly line, mass-producing "news" to sell to its audience. This assembly line approach to content production corrodes capacity for perspective and insight of necessity.
In the 70s or 80s there were these two books: 4 arguments against the existence of television and amusing ourselves to death. They were both right
Hayes is a lot better on his podcast than it sounds like he is on his show. He had John McWhorter on a little while ago and IIRC agreed with him about a bunch of things.
It's kind of shocking how well McWhorter has done repeating highly banal and uncontroversial views. Really shows the demand for sanity on identity issues.
Sigh. Right below your excellent piece in my inbox is the latest Anne Helen Petersen post, an interview with someone who wrote a book titled The Trouble with White Women. As you can imagine, according to the author, we are just the worst. We are exclusionary, hag-like agglomerations of Amy Cooper, Karens, and Sheryl Sandberg. And yet the only contemporary example the author offers of these oppressive white women is Sandberg, who is in fact the target not of most women’s admiration but rather of our censure for her “let them eat cake” attitude toward woman’s problems in the workplace. Otherwise, the only specific examples of oppressive white women are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan (who committed the sin of giving Paulie Murray a job as her assistant when no one else would). Has the author actually talked with any of the rest of us? It’s pure straw-womanning.
We on the left can’t afford to exclude our allies. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I write this from Minnesota, where yesterday set a new heat record (55F), and today we’re under a tornado watch. In December. Climate change and economic pressures on regular people are more important than identity politics—I’m sorry, but they just are. If we can get help from people whose souls are flawed, yes, even from middle-aged white ladies like me, then we should take it. And we should stop letting Trump live in our heads. There is work too be done.
Apparently so does voting Republican.
Small government libertarianism is just a call for the absolute dominance of propertyholders in society with absolutely no check on their power.
Same. Would like to know. Is there a phone number I can call or something?
yeahhhhhhh I also can't think of a single conservative I've ever met (most of them very nice Catholic homeschoolers) who are keening for blood and soil, but I guess Freddie doesn't do nuance when it comes to the outgroup
Normally, he's much more balanced here...
Have you considered that you may be misreading an obviously hyperbolic descriptor as something sincerely meant?
Go back to your car dealership, revanchist! /s
It's racist. The rhetoric around white women and men is racist, hateful, born of lies, and counter-productive to the aims of a mixed society. These screeds should be viewed the same way screeds about Jews running the world are viewed: as the conspiracy theories of the delusional and the bigoted. They are not worth our time; that they've become so ensconced in some areas is ridiculous.
Thanks for this. I posted a version of my comment here to Petersen's post. I'm bracing myself, but I felt like I had to speak up.
An update: it’s been a couple of hours, and suffice it to say it’s not going well. The general tenor of the replies (with one exception) is that there was no need for my comment, and that I should stay quiet and listen. Ah well. I tried
Hello, would you please provide a link to this piece? More interested in the comments than the article/essay itself obviously due to your description of the goings on.
BTW, I was able to find the link and conversation using Google. Seems a bit like much ado about nothing, but whatever, that's just MO.
Oh definitely. I tend to ruminate on things like this that would just wash over other people. I was foolish to think anyone would want to hear my opinion and should have let it go.
Thanks for trying, it takes guts these days to refuse the "stay in your lane unless you want to say something we agree with" command.
I was so annoyed by the responses, I paid $5 to comment. Gah.
I saw your comment and thought it was terrific—both thoughtful and convincing, if only the other people on the thread were willing to think about your points!
"They are not worth our time; that they've become so ensconced in some areas is ridiculous."
Maybe it's worth our time to figure out how they got there and fix it?
Oh, definitely. I just don't think it's worth our time to try to battle these things "on their terms", so to speak. The framework is broken and needs to be rejected wholesale, not debated as if it's got merits.
"We on the left can’t afford to exclude our allies. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Turning away allies is pretty much the only thing the left is any good at.
Freddie's post today (demonizing the people attempting to spend trillions of dollars on improving poorer people's lives) is an excellent example.
Liked for the vicarious pleasure I took in learning that someone, somewhere enjoyed 55F weather yesterday. It was 85 here in Houston and yeah, that's pretty hot even here for this time of year.
In terms of Betty Friedan, I read "Feminine Mystique" about 30 years ago......I was about 25 years old and a gay male.
Loved Friedan's insights. She was such a radical with a great, incisive mind. I miss people like her. Miss that kind of a woman.
It seems pretty clear to me that 2008 and 2012 were driven more by Obama’s charisma than by actual policy. This explains the wild swings between midterms and general elections better than the vague theory that the emerging majority was too lazy to turn out more than once every four years, and the centrality of the candidate’s personality also explains 2016 and 2020: anti-Clinton feeling was strong enough to enable the equally hated Trump, and anti-Trump feeling was strong enough to enable the non-compelling Biden.
Part of the reason we can’t let Trump go is no Democratic politician with a national profile is anywhere close to as compelling as Obama (or Trump), so all we’ve got is the anti-Trump argument from 2020. The general woke thesis is also a lot easier to advance when you can personify the forces of bigotry in an actual political figure, so that dynamic becomes self reinforcing as well.
This is so lucid. The ruling Dems are like Skeksis. There have been no new voices that have been allowed to be heard. Sure Mayor Pete is all over Netflix, but he ran to be DNC chair...in 2017 so he's no new voice.
How much does Chris Hayes earn per year? My guess is $1 million. Opinions please.
MSNBC is a sister subsidiary of CNBC, a well-known media property providing PR services for various Wall St firms. Can we really expect a network in that orbit to focus on the abuses of the rentier class (FIRE by one name) that has its foot on the throat of the American economy? No, let's all engage in a fake dialectic instead - we'll fight about Trump some more, and nothing substantive will get done.
NO popular corporate media outlet is calling out the Dems for not even addressing Biden's pledge to institute a public health insurance option. It's disappeared as an issue, despite being in the gravest public health crisis of our time. If you're the suspicious sort, it's almost like The System in its entirety doesn't want us fighting over the right things.
This was so good and really sums up the Democratic party’s problems.
Back when I had a commute, I listened to Chris Hayes’ podcast in the car. It’s much better than his MSNBC show. He’s had some interesting guests, and he asks thoughtful questions and thinks about counter-arguments. But he takes a very woke perspective.
For example, the interview with Jonathan Metzl (the “Dying of Whiteness” author) stuck with me as an example of where we’re going wrong in how we think about Trump voters. I dug up some quotes:
Hayes: “There's this idea that the material concerns are the real ones. Or why don't people like, and actually it's the other way around. Who you are, the concerns about identity, who you are, what community are you a part of, where do you stand in the story of the nation, how central are you, what are you inherit, what can you lay claim to? That's the stuff.”
(Hayes later) “Because if the whole point is, people have non material concerns, what can I offer you, I can offer you here, I'll give you $1,000 a month and I'll give you healthcare and I'll give you all these things, but you're going to have to give up your centeredness in the national story as a white man….”
The point of their conversation is that white people would rather die than give up “white privilege” and being centered in the national story, whatever that means.
As for the cable show, Hayes (and his network’s) obsession with Trump and January 6th is totally baffling to me because the ratings are terrible. They seem to have concluded that it’s because Trump is gone, so give the remaining viewers what they want (more Trump). But I bet the real reason is that MSNBC has been covering the same shit for 11 months straight. You can watch three hours of primetime and not know who is president, but they report every tiny, procedural detail of the January 6th investigation: A new subpoena. A request for records. It’s so boring, and I don’t understand why they think it appeals even to people who hate Trump.
Source for podcast transcript: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/dying-whiteness-jonathan-metzl-podcast-transcript-ncna987671
Here’s what I think. I think that people are looking at their grocery bills, their rent, masking toddlers, shutting down schools, crime in their neighborhoods, chaos on the border, and they’re wondering why everyone they used to trust is still screeching about January 6th like it was Pearl Harbor and Trump like he’s still in charge, and then they finish up by reminding their readers that they’re horribly privileged racists.
It's the evolutionary next step from protesters occupying various state or federal capitols to protest this or that bill, especially when protesters make a habit of tracking down elected officials to make their case in person (or over voicemail). I'd be all for it out of a sense of Jacksonian small-d democracy, except that the way the house and senate run these days your average member has almost no power at all; everything is controlled and decided by the tippy-top of the leadership. Thus protesting in anyone except Pelosi/Schumer/McConnel/McCarthy's offices, except in very rare circumstances where one or two members are holding up very tightly-contested legislation, is basically pointless unless it's for a specific constituent-services issue.
Protesting in their offices is apparently treasonous insurrection.
I hated everything it stood for, but seeing people run riot through the Capitol was pretty thrilling on a basic libidinal level.
If you'd have told me in 2015 that some guy was gonna run roughshod around the capital building, clad in animal pelts and a bloody horned helmet, my reaction would have been, "holy shit, that guy sounds awesome".
I get what you're saying, and I know you don't mean it this way, but some part of me can't let this pass without saying: I want them to be afraid of their *votes* not of their guns or nooses.
Oh, agreed. It seems like the thing they fear above all else (typically) is not raising enough money.
I mean, at root a vote is just symbolic violence in replacement of the actual thing.
This is like saying steering away from a wall is a symbolic car crash. The peaceful transfer of power exists to *negate* violence, not to replace it.
What he means is, States are at heart a creature that consists of laws and violence welded together- or, more clinically, agreements and enforcement mechanisms.
If you vote for a law, or for a candidate who promises to enact or enforce a law, you are also implicitly declaring what problems you’re willing to send in SWAT over. For instance, a vote for Nixon was a de facto a vote for the drug war, which was a de facto a vote to hit people with batons and throw them into a concrete box for years for objecting to a cop stopping their vehicle for smelling weed.
Voting outsources the violence to public servants instead of letting private actors pursue vendettas. It avoids violence in strictest sense that the “whoever has the biggest private army gets to be mayor/governor/senator/president” trap has been sidestepped, but voting very much is a violent act, albeit one strained through severe layers of middlemen.
At the very least it gave them a taste of what people all over the country were experiencing during the summer riots. Too often the rich and privileged escape the chaos and disorder that plague the hoi polloi.
They fear their constituents plenty. Unfortunately for us and the 1/6 mob of rioters, their constituency is the oligarchy, Wall Street and corporate America.
The Cathedral's response to Trump, and further it's response to COVID, and the response to the J6 protests, and the interaction and overlap between the responses, is what you get when the Cathedral is not merely in business-as-usual policy disagreement with something, but pants-wettingly scared to death of something. You can see it with the Assange and Epstein situations as well.
That was absolutely everyone's reaction until we found out that actual Congresscritters had to be evacuated into bunkers and crap in the course of trying to perform a stupid, meaningless, overly-formal technicality of a parliamentary function.
Yes, I’ll second this. I don’t think it’s exactly what it’s being portrayed as by the media, and I think the focus is too much on the dumb activists who made asses of themselves at the capitol and not enough on the machinations of Trump and his team, but I find it genuinely scary and I’m not at all embarrassed that admit it. Is that these tactics are employed it will be nearly impossible to dial them back and I do think we are in real trouble as a democracy.
Because it’s snowballing in the wrong direction? Because the Supreme Court is the key to fixing money in politics and gerrymandering but the republicans are insuring eternal dominance by moneyed interests on the court? Because once we let them have the last piece of the puzzle, controlling the votes themselves, it’s over?
Say what you will about democrats, it’s the Republican judges that fucked us.
Cool! I’m genuinely glad you’re doing those things. But I think you are giving up on democracy too soon. We’ve pulled ourselves out of some pretty deep holes in the past using it.
Besides Stephens, the only people who voted against it were Democrat appointees. So I’d say the odds are zero with Republican nominees and higher than zero with democrat nominees.
Indeed. Sorry to inform some of the staunch always-anti-Democrats in the crowd, but it's almost if not completely the Republican nominated judges and justices who have upheld things like civil asset forfeiture, "qualified immunity", government surveillance, executive branch unaccountability/primacy, and any number of other threats to so-called democracy. In the other direction, literally every dissenting minority opinion on those same issues have come from Democrat nominated judges/justices.
I really want to know who everyone was...were there agents provocateurs? That is important to discern.
Look up Ray Epps. Hard to argue he was anything but a protected government-directed agent provocateur on the balance of the evidence. That said, I'd wager everything I own that the majority of violence, looting, arson, killing of police officers during the 2020 summer of unrest was also sparked by agents provocateur, both government-directed and right-wing/anarchist (or just plain poor, bored white guys).
Too many times this has happened in our past to believe it is otherwise.
Doesn't the "agent" part of agent provocateur imply that they're directed by someone? Who might that be? (Semi-rhetorical)
I think you bring up a good point about schools and masks on toddlers. I think the democrats are oblivious to how unpopular some of their covid management is. This is not an argument about whether or not it’s effective, just that it’s unpopular and acting like it’s only unpopular with a fringe number of Trumpers is delusional.
Schools are a huge deal. I live outside of Portland, OR and the teachers' union is trying to make all Fridays a "self-guided" learning day. One of our local middle schools just closed for 3 weeks to come up with a new discipline plan and to "deep clean." We're highly vaccinated with less than 20 cases per 100,000 people and our kids are still wearing masks and sitting six feet apart, even outside. Quarantine rules had loads of kids missing most of the first part of the school year. My sisters' kids went to school for 8 days total through October. She quit her job. To underestimate how pissed parents are is seriously stupid.
Deep cleaning??? I thought we figured out that was pointless like in June 2020?
The point is, depending on your point of view, either an abundance of caution or an ongoing humiliation and self-flagellating ritual.
My vaccinated and masked high schoolers have to spray down their desks before and after every class with some high octane cleaner that is likely more dangerous to be breathing in than their risk of contracting Covid from a desk.
Yup. Just more hygiene theater.
I think the increased infectivity of Omicron deflates that point.
So far I've seen no evidence that its more infective nature is due to spread via fomites rather than aerosols. So the scrubbing and scouring of the schools beyond just simply wiping commonly touched surfaces with alcohol before or after touching them is really just the same as hygiene theater. If in fact it does come out that for whatever strange reason, Omicron, unlike all other variants is spread by fomites, then of course yeah, it'd depend on how long the virus lives on each respective surface.
Omicron may well deserve a better response, which means time wasted on "deep cleaning" is a disservice to that.
Yeah. I’m in California, my kids didn’t go to school for a year. It really did open up a new hostile feeling door in my soul toward schools that never was there before. However, they seem to have calmed down a bit and the teachers I encounter are mostly great. My kids still have to make indoors which I’m fine with, but we’ve had regular sports no masks, Christmas concerts and field trips with no talk of remote fridays so I’m pretty happy. I would not be happy if they were tossing around remote Friday ideas.
Parents are exhausted and some don't get paid when they have to skip work. Many have given up on trying to work outside the home--mostly women. Child care tax credit has made this an option for many, but I don't know many women who are glad they had to choose.
I was, as the token conservative, literally cornered at a family gathering last week and asked to denounce Trump and January 6th. It's December!
".... they finish up by reminding their readers that they’re horribly privileged racists"
Much like the CRT scare this rings hollow to me. I don't get that messaging from any of the liberal sites or rags to which I subscribe (I also read and frequent far-left and right leaning outlets just to stay on top of things). FdB has alluded to this kind of messaging, but I've yet to see any good concrete examples, much less a plethora of them sufficient to justify the outcry.
Murder rates are up, we read a lot about the smash and grab stuff on the coasts, the homeless, and the border. But overall crime rates are trending down. Of all the murders every year, I genuinely wonder how many are committed with a gun; and virtually every single gun was once in the hand of a "good guy."
RE: 1/6, I don't see the mainstream media being any more sensationalistic than they were in the runup to the Iraq invasion, Russiagate or Whitewater/Lewinski. The texts and phone calls coming out are pretty damning and I'm confident that if it was a mob of BLM or antifa rioters breaking and entering into the Capitol the death toll would have been far higher.
I had to come back and comment on my own comment. Kamala Harris did in fact compare 1/6 to Pearl Harbor in her speech this morning.
Great description of our political parties: "the gleeful conspiracist bloodletting of the right against the sneering disdain and incomprehensible jargon of the left." Increasingly, I conclude that neither gives a sh*t about America or Americans; all they want is the power to inflict their particular cramped views on everyone else. Oh, and the POWER! plain and simple.