It’s hard to predict what will hit you, what will have an impact; that’s part of why I haven’t been writing as much — I don’t know what to say to have an impact on my audience (if I even have any audience left), and I can’t predict what will have an impact on me. And the hypernormalization that he talks about is definitely real, and strongly controlling of my day-to-day interactions with the world and the world of current events. I will also say that my role as a teacher is partly to encourage some of that hypernormalization, because my students freak out, often because they enjoy freaking out and more often because they are young people in a terrifying and confusing world; and whether they are freaking out for the sake of their shattered nerves, or for the sake of the meme (or freaking out for the meme as a way to disassociate from their shattered nerves) , the answer is always to remain calm and to try to pour water on the flames they are fanning. So I spend part of pretty much every working day trying to calm the tempestuous waters of teenaged souls. Then I come home, and sometimes my wife is freaking out — in that case it is never for the meme, it is only because of her shattered nerves or because the world really is a dumpster fire and sometimes we are caught in the flames (which is NOT FINE) — and then sometimes, again, my job is to make awful things seem normal and manageable and not a big deal. Sometimes my job is to freak out with her, which, sadly, I am bad at, because my freaking out usually looks like me getting really mad, and that doesn’t always make people around me feel peachy; but I do my level best anyway, Partly because my nerves are shattered, too.
But this is counterproductive for my writing, because I don’t want to write about how things are normal, how they are just fine. I want to write about how they are fucked up. I don’t want to freak out, because nobody wants to read pages and pages of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuyckfukfuyckfuckfuckfukfuckfuckfuck Hey that’s pretty fun when you get the rhythm going!
But it’s hard to write, calmly and rationally, about how things are fucked up when you are yourself freaking out. Which is, of course, what the powers that be want: they want us to draw into our individual isolated shells and hide from the horrors they have put into the world, because that makes us easier to control, and easier to eliminate; and that’s why this very nice therapist made this TikTok, in which he tells us to take a step, even a small step, towards interacting and connecting with others during this particular moment of jarring insanity; because, as he says at the close of that video, even that small step of having a conversation or connecting with a group of potentially like-minded people, is much bigger than sinking back into the hypernormalization without having done anything other than twitch bonelessly for the 1-3 business days of this moment when we can break loose.
So let’s break loose. Rationally. Without freaking out, but also without rationalizing everything into normality. Because this is not normal: a man shot Charlie Kirk in the throat. Charlie Kirk is dead — apparently assassinated, though one thing I will say is that we absolutely must stop speculating about shit we know nothing about, until we actually know what is going on. We don’t know that the murderer was an assassin in the sense that we know for sure that the killing was politically motivated, and that Kirk was murdered because he was a prominent political voice; he was a prominent political voice, so in the case that we see any such death as an assassination, then it was, but I think it is important to distinguish between John Hinckley’s attempted killing of Ronald Reagan and Lee Harvey Oswald’s successful killing of John F. Kennedy: Oswald intended to kill the US President because he disagreed with Kennedy’s political stances and actions, and maybe what Kennedy represented; Hinckley thought Jodie Foster would notice him if he shot the President. That second one is not, to me, an (attempted) assassination. If we assume that this one was an assassination, which is a reasonable assumption but not a certainty because the killer carved fucking memes into his bullet casings — “If you read this you are gay LMAO” is not a political statement — it is also not clear if it was done because Kirk was too right wing, or if he was not right wing enough, which means we may be able to label it as an assassination, but not then go on to say anything meaningful about that fact other than it was a terrible, horrible thing, like every murder, especially unnecessary ones. (Yes, there are necessary murders. Not many, and they are still terrible, but there are. Not this one, so that is not our topic.) We do not know, and I will disagree with the people saying all over the internet and TV, that Kirk was killed for his political views, or his ideological beliefs, or his past statements which the killer may have found too offensive or not offensive enough; when all of that becomes clear, then we can discuss it — though we are unlikely to come to any useful consensus about it. And that’s partly because of Charlie Kirk.
I don’t want it to be because of me, too. I like to think it never could be, because I, of course, am rational and reasonable — and also correct, which, as I like to tell my students (quoting the late great Bill Hicks), gives my argument that extra oomph — but of course we all think that about ourselves. I do certainly write divisive things, both because my arguments are aggressive and confident, sometimes even spoken in words as hard as cannonballs (to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson), and because my language and my personal statements about my opponents and enemies are frequently deeply offensive. If people who disagree with me read these posts, they probably get pretty mad at me, and at them. Though they may deny it, because of course online debaters must never admit that they are upset, that they are emotional and out of control.
I am quite emotional. I am often somewhat out of control, usually, as I said, because I have a temper, and because my nerves are shattered. Anybody who doesn’t feel the same, at least that last part, is either lying or a sociopath.
Because stuff is fucked up. Deeply, multifariously, evilly fucked up. A man was murdered, and we all flipped our shit about it: and on the same day, two children were wounded by a third, who shot them at their school and then killed himself. I don’t even know how many other people have died in the days since Kirk was killed, but if we keep up this year with last year’s average it would have been about 47 per day. The right accused the left of causing Kirk’s murder with our political rhetoric; the left accused the right of causing Kirk’s murder with their violent fascism; people posted about how saddened they were by the death, especially because his wife and children were there and saw it happen; other people posted about how they were glad Kirk had been killed because of the awful things he had said and the positions he had espoused in the past, including racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia.
It’s all fucked up. And even the virtuoso guitar playing of Stevie Ray Vaughan (Who was only five years older than Kirk — 36 to Kirk’s 31 — when SRV died in a helicopter crash) can’t make it better, can’t make me feel calmer and more in control at this moment.
So I had a thought. A step to take, in this window (which may have closed already, because it’s been four days since he died; but I’m going to try to do this anyway because I don’t think I’ve sunk back into the hypernormalization yet) of opportunity. Not to argue for gun control, though I am doing that on social media; not to argue against hyperpartisanship because arguing against people arguing badly is a losing endeavor, no matter how you slice it; not to lament the loss of free speech in this country, because Malcolm X was assassinated sixty years ago — also in front of his wife and children — and the Alien Enemies Act signed into law by President John Adams in 1798 was used by President Donald Trump in 2025 as a legal justification for deporting both citizens and non-citizens without due process, so I would argue that we have never had fully free speech in this country.
I want to try to reverse the polarity of this moment. I want to try to speak positively. Not about Kirk’s murder, which is nothing but horrendous; I just want to use this moment to try to imagine a world in which Kirk would not have been murdered. A world that certainly could have existed, if we had made different choices as a nation and a people, and one that we can certainly bring into existence if we try. Maybe if I try to normalize hope, then we can have some when we sink back into our absurd routines.
Let’s start with a beautiful image. This one came from here, and is advertised as using no AI.
I don’t see why not. Hope is not any harder than despair: hope takes work, but we have to work to keep our despair gurgling inside of us, just as much. We have to spend time looking for more reasons to feel despair, have to keep thinking negatively about what is in our world or in ourselves — or what is not there — have to keep all of that front of mind, or else we might spot a video of a cute puppy and not be sad any more. If you’ve ever felt sorrow or despair, then you know the struggle to keep it that I am talking about. (Depression, now: depression does not require any work to maintain; that’s why it is depression. But I’m not talking about mental health, other than to say that hope and positivity in a non-toxic way might help with depression, as well. Not going to oversimplify the facts of depression, but still. Here’s that puppy.)
This is my favorite ear configuration: one up, one down. And nobody does it better than Corgis.This image is from here.
I’m not trying to slap some pretty pictures up over the horrors: that kind of forced, hollow veneer just makes things feel worse because we know how thin it is. I’m just using the images to counteract the — let’s call it the acidity of the first part of this post, the corrosiveness of horror and violence and conflict. But for the hope, I want to speak genuinely. Because I think the hope is real.
First, what am I hoping for? I’m hoping for a society that recognizes the value of all of its members, and takes all stakeholders seriously when considering what to do collectively. I’m hoping for a world where people are able to find and create joy, consistently, throughout their lives. A country where we try to find our common ground, and respect our common humanity, before we disagree about what our country should look like. A life where people recognize the liars and conmen, the gaslighters and manipulators, and see the corruption for what it is, and don’t tolerate it because it smells just like our own. A world of integrity and trust.
No. It isn’t impossible. I’m certainly speaking in broad generalities, because no, I don’t expect any world to reach a point where problems are eliminated, where there is no conflict, where liars are vanished and corruption is prevented before it taints everything. But I do know that our world, our society, our ethos, used to be different, in at least some ways and to some degree; and that means that change is possible. We talk about the pendulum swinging, and it does, and it will — though I suspect that the pendulum, like most other political machinery in this ever-so-exploitable country, has been manipulated in some way to ensure that the people in power don’t lose that power when the pendulum swings; but the power of the pendulum metaphor is that the swings are inevitable, and reactive: you can hold back the pendulum, you can even push it farther away from plumb; it’s just going to swing harder and faster when it finally goes, and swing farther in the other direction when it does. It can’t be stopped. And it can’t be stopped because people are essentially good, despite what our cynical profiteers would have us all believe — because they want us all hiding in our individual isolated shells, hiding from the horrors, easily controlled and easily exploited. No: people are essentially good. We are just — we’re really, really scared. That’s what we have to overcome.
Here’s a nice picture of individual shells:
These are Cuban snails. Image from the subReddit NatureIsFuckingLit. Hell yeah.
And it begins with trust.
That’s the message I want to share today. Hope is possible, and achieving what we hope for is possible, especially if we all hope for (essentially) the same things. It begins with trust: we need to trust each other, to believe that we all will cooperate, so far as we can, to achieve those things we hope for.
I know this because I am a high school English teacher. And I have watched my classes struggle more, in some ways, every year, as their attentions spans wane, as their interest in reading disintegrates, as they become less and less literate. I have certainly lost hope at times; I have certainly lost trust in my students, have believed that they do not want to learn what I have to teach, that they do not want to read, that they do not want to do anything other than play video games, watch TikToks, and be annoying. I have believed all of those things because there are days when they act like that. Some of my students act that way all the time, and some of those even say that they have no interest in learning to read better, no interest in ever reading as long as they live. It’s hard to keep trusting kids who say that to me, especially the ones who know the impact on me of what they are saying.
But those are only some days. And those kids? They are only kids. They don’t want to read because they don’t have any hope. They are not incapable of reading, and they are not incapable of hope. On my worst days, I don’t believe that; but on my best days, I inspire hope in them. I know it: I’ve seen it, and I’ve been told about it, both in the moment and years afterwards. I was having a rough day this last Friday: and then one of my students — now former student, because they have departed my school for online schooling — came back to thank me for being their teacher. They gave me a lovely hardback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book I taught them. Because they saw it and they thought of me, and they wanted me to have it. They saw a book: and they recognized the value of that book, because I taught them that book had value. And, I mean, I’m a good teacher: but I’m no miracle worker. This was just an ordinary interaction, a regular unmotivated and difficult student, who I happened to connect with enough that they trusted me when I said that TKAM was worth reading: and then I proved it. And for the rest of their life, they will know at least one book that has value, that is something worth giving to another person as a thank-you gift.
That’s hope.
And it starts with trust.
I’m going to keep going with this idea, because I like it, and I think there is value in it. Hopefully I can get some of you (if there are any of you — but I trust that there are) to trust me enough to start hoping, as well. And if we can agree on what we should be hoping for, then we can make it happen. We’ll turn that goddamn pendulum into a wrecking ball — one made of candy.
Okay. Let’s talk. Honestly. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The truth.
I’m trying to get my Freshman English students to do that. To talk honestly. They don’t – ever – but I think it’s mostly because they don’t know how.
See, what we have done in education over the last ten or twenty years is reward lying. Reward cheating. To a certain extent that is not new: I lied constantly when I was a teenager, especially to my teachers and my parents, and I would guess that most teenagers had similar experiences. And for the same reason: schools reward lying and cheating. For as long as schools have been product-focused, rather than process-focused, we have given students an opportunity to achieve all the rewards of school (All the apparent ones, at least) without doing the difficult parts. My grade in my classes was based on the work I turned in: which means that if I can find a way to cheat on those assignments, then I get the exact same grade I would if I did the work myself, the hard way. And sure, we also try to stop students from choosing to cheat, through threats of dire consequences if they get caught; but that “if” in what I just wrote is a humming, glowing, throbbing beacon of glorious light. Because teenagers are dumb: we think that we can get away with anything, even while we are actively not getting away with it. The very first time I caught students cheating – and they were cheating on a small, simple, easy assignment, a set of study questions that came after a reading, which they did with the reading in hand, in class – I realized while I was reading their responses that three young women, all friends, had given identical, word-for-word answers. They had copied. And the giveaway was they had used the word “oasis” completely out of context – something like “and the oasis of the story was the courage the characters had.” One of them – the one who had done the work and given it to the other two, the source student – had written “basis,” in cursive, and the other two had misread it. So I gave them all zeroes for copying, two for doing it and one for letting them, and when I handed the work back, I told them they had gotten zeroes. But instead of confessing, they argued with me. Vociferously. Angrily. Denying that they had ever done such a thing. I hadn’t handed back their papers, choosing to keep them as evidence, and just informed them of their grades; when they demanded I show them the evidence, I realized I had left the papers in my other classroom (Like many first-year teachers, I got the crappiest job assignment, so I floated between three different classrooms and taught two different remedial classes), and they insisted on coming with me to see the evidence; they yelled at me the whole way across campus, about how dare I accuse them, and they would never do that, and it was not fair, and so on. We got to my other classroom, I showed them their papers, pointed at where they wrote “oasis” and said, “Explain that.”
And they actually tried. They tried to come up with some bullshit on the spot about how “oasis” was meant to represent the safe space that had been created in the story by the characters… the girl who was talking trailed off in the middle of the sentence. I just shook my head and said, “No.” And they left. Grumbling. Still denying that they had done what they couldn’t actually prove that they hadn’t done – because they had done it.
But what happened? The student who had done the work had her mother complain to the administration, and I had a meeting with one of the vice principals and this mother. Who told us that her daughter was under a lot of stress, and after all, she had done the work, and then had made the poor choice to let her friends copy because they all just wanted so badly to do well. That’s not really bad, is it?? So, as per the decision my administrator made, that girl got the grade. The other two had a chance to make up the work and get a grade. They got a warning.
A few days later, one of the boys in the class told me that he had actually let the first girl, the source girl – the one who got the grade – copy his work.
So. This is the structure we have built for students. Cheating is overlooked; copying is standard; getting “help” with the answers is encouraged. Because the product is what matters, not the process by which you create that product. (It’s the perfect conceptual framework for a life cut short by working yourself to death in order to get the company more profit. But surely that’s just a coincidence…) And onto that structure we have added the internet, with all of its access to perfect information and perfect writing; and now AI, the same perfect information and perfect writing, but now both customizable – and untraceable. And we still grade students on product, not process. We still assign homework, so they can complete the assignments in privacy, without supervision, with full access to resources like AI and Google. We use the same assignments year after year, so students can pass on work they did to the next year’s class. And we tell them that what really matters in school is getting good grades, so you can get into good college, so you can have a good job and make money. Oh, we tell them they need to learn, they need to master the skills; but that’s just talking. Every single reward in school is derived directly from product. (With the exceptions of PE, the arts [which sometimes reward product, but not always – my wife’s Life Drawing class is graded only on process, her AP Art class graded largely on process… though in that last case that’s because if she graded their art work as she would grade a college student’s work, they’d all fail. She has high standards. And we don’t work at an art school.] and a few classes like foreign language, where students are graded on their conversation and pronunciation and so on: performance metrics.) And almost every product can be completed with some kind of corrupting assistance, whether it is copying from a friend, getting help from a family member, or using the online resources they have available. Even just using the excuse of “Oh no, my paper didn’t upload!” to get extra time to complete it and turn it in, with permission, a second time. Because after all, I can’t blame a student if the WiFi went down, right?
Right.
So I’m trying to get my freshmen to think about lying, and whether it is good or bad. They all, without exception, think it is good in the right circumstances, which are always two: to spare someone’s feelings – the classic “Do I look good in this outfit?” conundrum – and to save yourself from getting in trouble. They do usually offer a third circumstance: when someone threatens to kill you if you don’t tell them something, like where you hid the money, then it is acceptable to lie to save your life. Thank you for including that hypothetical, children; surely an important one. But it’s that middle one, the lying-to-get-out-of-trouble, that I want them to think about. Actually, the first one, too, because I gave them the counterargument: if you tell someone they look great when they look terrible, then you’re telling that person to walk around proudly, while they look terrible, and don’t know it. They didn’t have an answer to that. They’re not ready to admit what I think is the answer, that honesty really is the best policy, and the key to getting along is knowing how to speak truth without being harsh and insulting – you don’t have to say “Damn, you look terrible!” when someone looks terrible in an outfit, but you should not lie and say they look perfect when they look terrible – and the key to not getting in trouble is… not doing things you shouldn’t do. I don’t think they’ll all come over to my side, but I want them to think about it, because they lie to me constantly, and I’m sick of it.
But then, last night, I watched our President stand up in front of Congress, his words broadcast to the whole world, and tell lie after lie after lie. After lie. After lie. For ninety minutes. And the whole time, without exception, the Republican majority clapped and cheered for his lies. The two grinning dolts behind him, Mike Johnson and J.D. Vance, grinned and laughed – because Donald Trump didn’t just lie, he was also needlessly, gleefully cruel, and appallingly stupid, again and again and again, and clearly that stupid cruelty was even more popular than his lies. Because the cruelty won’t even get the apathetic next day fact-checking that his bullshit has gotten today; the cruelty we just let go, maybe frowning a little at how our President doesn’t show the same decorum we enjoyed so much from President Obama (When he wasn’t bombing people in the Middle East or deporting families from the US), who was always polite and well-spoken and never overtly cruel and bullying like this guy, with his goddamn shit-eating grin when he tells some joke about innocent people he’s going to harm, because it will save money, or because it will win him points with his equally cruel, stupid, bullying base. But he won’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies or his stupidity or his cruelty; he did all the same things last time, and we elected him again. Because eggs were too expensive.
(Please understand – and know that I am in the middle of writing a piece about that, about grocery prices and inflation and Trump’s broken promises regarding the issue, but I had to address this absolute horror show of a “speech” – that I recognize the genuine damage and stress that inflation and high prices inflict on those of us who are on the edge of not having enough. I am a high school teacher: I can’t afford eggs. I am also a partial vegetarian: eggs are one of my primary sources of protein. So I get it. I only mock the idea of egg prices as a reason to vote for Trump because even if we do see that as a valid reason to elect a president – and I will argue all day that presidents just don’t have that much control over prices in our system – it ignores SO MANY other things about Donald Trump. I get the need for relief from the cost of living: but that’s not the only thing that matters. That’s why I say it. If you disagree with me about the right priorities to focus on for a vote, then so be it. We’ll discuss this more another time.)
For now, let’s start with talking about what Donald Trump lied about last night in his address. This is easy to find, of course – here’s a good source FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress – FactCheck.org, that gives a clear list followed by more careful analysis – but while they do include some of the things that sometimes slip past fact checkers, like that Trump ignored the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on creating the economic situation that the Biden administration dealt with, they focused on the specific lies Trump told in the speech: and that means they don’t talk about the lies he has used as the justifications for his actions thus far, which he then discussed in the speech. And that’s where I want to focus.
But let me also list out, if you are not interested in following the link – if you believe, as many people do, that fact checkers are unreliable, that only independent media sources are believable, which means you have not thought a whole heck of a lot about why “independent” is more important than “part of an organization whose business model relies on truthful reporting rather than garnering attention” – some of the more egregious falsehoods that Trump spouted.
First, the savings he and Elon Musk have found through the “work” of “DOGE.” They have not found hundreds of billions in waste: they have “saved” about $20 billion, claimed $105 billion, and proved that exactly none of it was savings from eliminating fraud. It’s all “savings” from firing employees. Which, sure, that saves money – but it also eliminates work and productivity. If you have three people working for you and you fire one, you save one-third of your payroll costs – AND YOU LOSE ONE-THIRD OF YOUR PRODUCTION. Seems like this would be already known by two guys who run such huge and successful companies, but maybe not. They do both seem to believe that they personally do the work which is actually done by their employees, so, maybe they’re unclear on the concept.
Or maybe the only fraud here is the one being perpetrated by Trump and Musk and DOGE.
Next: Social Security. Trump went on and on and on about the MILLIONS of people who Social Security “believes” are over a hundred years old, including some that he said were older than the United States. So let’s be clear on this: when we say that “Social Security” “believes” these people are impossibly old… who are we talking about? Is Social Security the name of the person in charge of the organization? Is it the hive mind of all the bureaucrats who work there? Is it the AI who runs the database? Is Social Security here in the room with us now?
No: social security is the much-beloved system whereby we ensure that senior citizens don’t have to starve to death in shantytowns after they stop working. And it is also the biggest “entitlement” in the Federal budget: and therefore it is the one the Republicans most want to cut. But since so many of their voters are senior citizens, they can’t cut it without facing the wrath of their voters: so they try to turn their voters against social security. By talking about it like it’s the Avatar of bureaucrats, and that it’s stupid enough to “believe” that there are impossibly ancient people still getting social security checks.
Here’s the truth: the social security database is enormous. Tens of millions of people receive checks every month; hundreds of millions of people make payments into the fund for those checks every month. When people pass away, there is a form that one’s survivors are supposed to fill out and file with SS to let them know that someone on the roll has passed and no longer need checks. But: people don’t consider that to be an important job, especially while grieving, so they don’t always do it. Also lots of people don’t have loved ones to file the form. I would guess millions of people, over the years. The ancient people in the database are not people that Social Security “believes” are alive, they are people who were on the rolls as alive, and who have never been confirmed to be dead. See the difference?
Trump doesn’t. Well: he does, he just lied about it, and pretended these two different things are the same. They’re not. If you want to see this as a moment when Trump is monumentally stupid instead of a liar, I’m fine with that. And yes, it’s monumentally stupid: if someone told me there were people on the SS database who were over 120 years old, I would assume there was a mistake in the data, not that Social Security “believed” there were Americans living over 120 years old. Especially not the millions whom Trump gobbled about.
And while thousands of those people – thousands out of the millions, which is fractions of a percentage point – may still get checks, and some of them get checks because living people are using the name of a dead person to collect social security (Frank Gallagher does this with his dead mother in Shameless.), which is fraud, the rest of the millions of unconfirmed-dead people on the roll are just – on the roll. In the database. They don’t get checks. Money is not wasted on them, and it would not be saved by cleaning up the database. Of course cleaning up the database would be a good idea, but how many man-hours would it take to confirm that millions of people are actually dead? And if you decide to remove everyone who is over, say, 100 years old, there will be at least 80,000 people who will want to have a word with you.
Several of Trump’s other lies were of a less serious nature: claiming that 38,000 Americans were killed during the construction of the Panama Canal (5,600 workers died during construction, mostly from diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Not all of them were American. Special Wonders of the Canal – PMC), that Biden inherited a great economy and Trump inherited a terrible one twice, that Europe has given less than the US to the Ukraine and that the US has given $350 billion – these are just bad facts; they’re definitely lies, but they are small, because none of them change people’s minds, and none of them serve as the primary justification for Trump’s bad policies: he wants to take us to war over the Canal because China has an influence there, not because some number of Americans died during construction; he constantly lies about his accomplishments and, especially last night, about Biden’s failures, but that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion about either man; Trump is going to give as much of the Ukraine to Russia as he can, because he wants to be allies with Putin, not because of how much Ukraine costs to defend. And he doesn’t want to be allies with Putin to save money, it is to make himself into a strongman, in appearance if not in fact. (Though I have to note here that when I said last night that Trump wanted to be Putin, my wife’s immediate response was “Trump will never look that good with his shirt off.” Savage, she is. But: she ain’t lyin’.)
But the lies I really want to get to with Trump’s speech are the ones about people who are disenfranchised in this country. Such as people who are described, by that shit-flinging gibbon and his handlers, as representatives of DEI: like General C.Q. Brown, whom Trump fired from his position as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whose fucking resume looks like this:
EDUCATION 1984 Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock 1991 U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. 1992 Squadron Officer School, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 1994 Master of Aeronautical Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla. 1997 Distinguished graduate, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2000 Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2004 National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va. 2008 Air Force Senior Leadership Course, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C. 2012 Joint Force Air Component Commander Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2014 Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2015 Pinnacle Course, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C. 2017 Leadership at the Peak, Center for Creative Leadership, Colorado Springs, Colo.
ASSIGNMENTS 1. May 1985 – April 1986, Student, undergraduate Pilot training, 82nd Student Squadron, Williams Air Force Base, Ariz. 2. May 1986 – July 1986, Student, lead-in fighter training, 434th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, Holloman AFB, N.M. 3. August 1986 – March 1987, Student, F-16 training, 62nd Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, MacDill AFB, Fla. 4. April 1987 – October 1988, F-16 Pilot, 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, South Korea 5. November 1988 – April 1991, F-16 Instructor Pilot, wing electronic combat officer, and wing standardization and evaluation flight examiner, 307th and 308th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, Homestead AFB, Fla. 6. April 1991 – August 1991, Student, U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course, Nellis AFB, Nev. 7. August 1991 – August 1992, F-16 Squadron Weapons Officer and Flight Commander, 307th Fighter Squadron, Homestead AFB, Fla. 8. September 1992 – October 1994, Weapons School Instructor, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner, F-16 Division, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nev. 9. October 1994 – July 1996, Aide-de-Camp to the Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 10. August 1996 – June 1997, Student, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 11. June 1997 – September 1997, Student, Armed Forces Staff College, National Defense University, Norfolk, Va. 12. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 13. November 1999 – June 2003, F-16CJ Instructor Pilot and assistant operations officer, 79th Fighter Squadron; Weapons and Training Flight Commander, 20th Operations Support Squadron; Operations Officer, 55th Fighter Squadron; and Commander, 78th Fighter Squadron, Shaw AFB, S.C. 14. July 2003 – June 2004, National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va. 15. June 2004 – June 2005, Deputy Chief, Program Integration Division, Directorate of Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 16. July 2005 – May 2007, Commandant, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, 57th Wing, Nellis AFB, Nev. 17. May 2007 – May 2008, Commander, 8th Fighter Wing, Kunsan AB, South Korea 18. June 2008 – May 2009, Director, Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff Executive Action Group, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 19. June 2009 – April 2011, Commander, 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano AB, Italy 20. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 21. April 2013 – February 2014, Deputy Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command; Deputy, Combined Force Air Component Commander, U.S. Central Command, Southwest Asia 22. March 2014 – June 2015, Director, Operations, Strategic Deterrence, and Nuclear Integration, Headquarters U.S. Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, Ramstein AB, Germany 23. June 2015 – July 2016, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Air Combat Command, Southwest Asia 24. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 25. July 2018 – July 2020, Commander, Pacific Air Forces; Air Component Commander for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and Executive Director, Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii 26. August 2020 – September 2023, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon, Arlington, Va. 27. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS 1. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a major 2. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a brigadier general 3. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a lieutenant general 4. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
FLIGHT INFORMATION Rating: command pilot Flight hours: more than 3,100 including 130 combat hours Aircraft flown: F-16A/B/C/D and 20 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft
MAJOR AWARDS AND DECORATIONS Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters Distinguished Service Medal Defense Superior Service Medal Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters Bronze Star Medal Defense Meritorious Service Medal Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters Aerial Achievement Medal Joint Service Commendation Medal Air and Space Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters Combat Readiness Medal National Defense Service Medal with bronze star Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal Global War on Terrorism Service Medal Korea Defense Service Medal Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal NATO Medal Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Tongil Medal) Republic of Singapore Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) Meritorious Service Medal Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Samil Medal) Brazilian Order of Aeronautical Merit (Degree of Grand Officer)
PUBLICATIONS “Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force: Creating Synergy and Minimizing Seams,” Air University Press, September 2005 “No Longer the Outlier: Updating the Air Component Structure” Air University Press, Spring 2016
Yeah. That guy was a DEI hire.
People who are endangered by the anti-vaccine movement that Trump supports and promoted last night – which is all of us, but is especially those who can’t work in close proximity to others, for any of a thousand reasons (permanent disability, mental illness, inability to travel, along with being immunocompromised, again for a thousand potential reasons), but who do work, and who who now have to return to work because Trump is a cruel idiot and a liar who claims that “not coming IN to work” is evidence of laziness or fraud. It is not clear to me whether the real goal here is just to fire valuable workers for a reason that Trump’s base can stand behind, so that Trump and Musk can channel the money “saved” from payroll into tax breaks for billionaires, or if it is to undermine the very idea that a person who cannot come into an office can nonetheless, in this day of complete interconnectedness online, still be a productive worker because that idea is, I dunno, woke or some shit. Either way, it is a stupid lie that is cruel to those who need the accommodation of remote work – and also cruel to those who just like it better, because what the hell is wrong with working from home if you can do the work?
Trump is going after people with neurodivergence, in addition to attacking those who need to live in a vaccinated world, by lying about the history of autism diagnoses, in conjunction with his comments about naming the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a post for which he is not only unqualified, but entirely unfit. It is not true that “not long ago” 1 in 10,000 children had autism; it is true that 50 YEARS AGO we did not understand autism nor how to diagnose the entire spectrum of conditions associated with the term. It is also emphatically not true that autism is a disability that would justify removing or changing the vaccine schedule, as Trump was implying. The entire argument that parents would rather risk their children dying of measles than “becoming” autistic because of the MMR vaccine is disgusting, along with being a thoroughly debunked and incredible lie. Even where autism does present as disabling, ask a parent of an autistic child whether they would rather have their child living or dead – and then duck, before they quite rightly punch you in the face. Though I’d be really happy if all of those theoretical punches landed on Elon Musk, and also on whoever suggested that Elon’s Nazi salute was a sign of Musk’s own autism. Remember: “Always Punch Nazis” includes punching those who argue that being autistic explains away Nazism.
But I will admit that, despite all of the terrible and cruel and stupid things that Trump said in that speech, the lies that actually bothered me personally the most were the transphobic ones. Maybe because they got the loudest cheers. Maybe because he seemed proudest of his anti-trans policies like the declaration that there are only two genders in the U.S. – which is both a lie, and a cruel and stupid statement. Or his executive order keeping men from playing women’s sports, which, HOLY GOD THAT I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CAN WE STOP? Can we just stop? Can we just agree to never again allow anyone to repeat the absolute and utter nonsense and poppycock that there are “men” playing “women’s” sports? There are women playing women’s sports. Nothing more. And 99.99% of those women are those who were assigned female at birth. And also, this is fucking sports we are talking about. Not something important. Sports are entertainment. They are inconsequential. They don’t matter. They matter plenty to the people who play them, both professionally and passionately, and therefore they are worth consideration for the sake of those people; but the idea that a national policy, as a focus of what is essentially a state of the union address, would make such a deal of opposing the existence of trans people, particularly in relation to sport? What the hell are we doing here?
The answer is simple: we, and by “we” I mean that orange-tinted shit-flinging gibbon and his flying monkeys and most definitely not me, are attacking and belittling and trying to destroy and torment and kill anyone whose destruction would make the stupid, cruel base of the Republican party feel stronger and meaner, which is how they want to feel. Trans people are not the danger, regardless of what nonsense some goddamn volleyball player claims (Want to know how many volleyball players get hurt every year? About 35,000. Volleyball Related Injuries in Adolescents: A Decade of Data | Published in Orthopedic Reviews How many of those injuries were caused by trans athletes? Conversely, how many trans athletes suffer injury and abuse and death because of the way they are objectified and demonized and ostracized and assaulted in every way by the entire Republican establishment of this country? I bet it’s more than the one injury Trump claimed was caused by a trans athlete.)
I don’t know why this one upsets me more than the other loathsome false accusations and attacks that Trump launched at everyone who is morally and ethically and humanistically better than he is himself. But it does. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it bothers me, any more than it matters why the base and the Republicans and the shit-flinging gibbon himself chose trans people to try to destroy: it’s just that they found someone they can harm, and I have found someone – millions of someones – whom I want to help protect from that harm, in whatever way I can assist. I don’t really need to justify which fight I choose to take on: I just need to be aware of who my real target is.
It’s not just Trump. Just like Adolf Hitler, who was a uniquely effective figurehead for the Nazi party and the apparatus that rose during the Third Reich, but neither the brains behind that apparatus nor the one in control of it, Trump himself is not the cause of the problem, he is simply the most visible pimple on the very wide flabby ass of the MAGA movement. It is possible that, after Trump is gone (Hopefully before the end of his term, though personally I’m hoping for impeachment and jail rather than the death that many others think he deserves), JD Vance or one of the other flying monkeys will take over as the chief shit-flinger; and that might even be worse. It’s not even the billionaires who back Trump and who are taking advantage of the distraction he is because of the shit he flings – shit that is flung like no one has ever seen before – because the wealthy have always been there, trying to control things, trying to take advantage of every opportunity to have wealth and power, without being in the spotlight themselves. I know it’s not Elon Musk: there’s a reason why the real power brokers don’t ever do what he is doing, and put themselves out front. It’s because when people get mad enough to pick up the torches and pitchforks – and the more effective Musk is, the sooner that will happen, as it always does when inequality gets too extreme – they look for an obvious target for their anger. We all know who Elon Musk is. Who the hell is Rebekah Mercer?
(Is it wrong of me to point out that, were she to become known to those with torches and pitchforks — or, let’s say, were she to get targeted by the next Luigi Mangione — nobody would miss the ENORMOUS target that is her head?)
Now we know what Megamind’s mom looked like
What I oppose is what Trump represents and distills. It is stupidity, chosen because it is easier than learning, and more comfortable than truth – because stupidity lies to us, even as we lie to the stupid. It is cruelty, because cruelty, also for the sake of ease and comfort, brings the displaced self-hatred of the stupid crashing down on the innocent; and not only do we then have that many more victims, some of whom will lash out at other disempowered people, but we also have those among the stupid who now cannot face enlightenment because then they would have to admit what they did to people who never deserved anything but the kindness and empathy due every one of our fellow human beings, and so those angry, cruel, stupid people will be even more incapable of changing what they are doing, no matter what truth is put before them and no matter what pleas for mercy they hear and ignore.
The worse we act, the less likely we are to stop acting badly. That’s why Donald Trump is the way he is: because he’s always been this way, he’s just been getting worse, for his entire life. And he’s an old, evil, man, now.
There’s my guy. My buddy Joe. Pretty regular fella — other than the fact that his 81-year-old face has fewer wrinkles than my 49-year-old one, which, sure, fine, lots of people use Botox and plastic surgery and all — but Joe is unquestionably at the stage where his face has been so thoroughly Zambonied that it looks more “plastic” than “young.” But other than a flat plastic face, overly-squinchy eyes, and those too-white-pearly-whites? Very normal man. Reminds me of my dad. Especially when he talks, since most of the time he sounds like he’s kind of running out of breath, unless he is particularly excited.
I have to admit, though, that for a normal man — a regular dude — he’s sure fond of supporting some pretty fucked up things. Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Hopefully we can all agree that the ones really responsible for the atrocities and the genocide are Hamas, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war-loving government, both of whom benefit from increased conflict and greater frequency and intensity of atrocity, as it increases their support by radicalizing more of the population; and also creates enough confusion among the smoke and rubble for them to siphon off wealth. I do not for a second believe that my old buddy Joe could put his arm around Bibi’s shoulders, lean in real close, and whisper, “Hey, man, cut the shit, okay?” and get any kind of real result. Netanyahu is never going to stop the war, because when the war stops, so does his political career, as he is epically unpopular now — but when he leaves office, he’ll no longer be able to avoid prosecution for his corruption, which is pervasive and pretty concretely proven everywhere but in that court of law he is avoiding. (Sounds like a certain would-be Fascist dictator in this country, doesn’t it? No wonder they get along.) But on the other hand, even though Ol’ Joe can’t stop the genocide in Gaza, I would very much appreciate not having my country supply the weapons to Israel for their genocide.
And then there’s Joe’s past support for crime bills targeting African-Americans, and a lack of support for abortion access for women, and for clearing Clarence fucking Thomas for the Supreme Court, and his willingness to destroy people’s lives at the southern US border, which he backs partly because he wants to be able to blame the Grand Ol’ (Fascist) Party, the GO(F)P, for their failure to secure the border, undercutting their own main talking point; but also because he’s clearly pretty comfortable with adopting said Fascist party’s framing of the issue as a crisis at the southern border, and the problem being one of too many people trying to live out the American dream and the ideals we claim to stand for, and with the argument that punishing those people as brutally as we can is definitely the best way to handle it.
All of that is garbage. And all of it is Joe Biden.
Plus there’s the simple fact of the man’s titanic goddamn ego, which makes him look in the mirror every morning and say, in all sincerity, “The only man who can be President is you. The only man who can stop Trump is you. You have to run again, Joe. You gotta save the world! All by yourself! LET’S DO THIS!” That’s Joe Biden, too.
But you know what else is Joe Biden?
He’s the most progressive president we’ve had in 75 years — even though he failed to provide Medicare for All or a livable minimum wage or a permanent child tax credit or a Voting Rights Act or a balanced and reasonable Supreme Court.
But the focus on climate change spending, particularly in the Inflation Reduction Act, is brilliant. The Infrastructure bill was good though not enough — but it was good, no question. The change in tone and the reintegration of the US into the world’s leadership, particularly NATO, was necessary. And his administration has done a good job of making sure the US did not fall into the economic malaise that the rest of the world has fallen into. I don’t like everything about the way they did it, because like always, inflation was brought under control mainly by punishing working and middle class families by raising interest rates to levels high enough to make us stop buying houses, even though the rent is too god-fucking-damn high; and like always, the majority of the GDP gains went to the top 1% so the corporations and Wall Street mavens could keep making campaign contributions to Joe and the Democratic party; but still, unemployment is ridiculously low — and there have been some actual gains to wages set against inflation and the cost of living.
So. Considering all of that, I have a request for all of you.
Vote for him. Vote for my man Joe in November.
I mean, to be clear, the only other realistic option for someone who could actually win is the fucking Fascist. And you — yes you, person who is reading this right now, who has felt enough connection to me that you came here to read this piece that I wrote — you better not vote for the fucking Fascist.
But that’s not the issue here. Right? Millions of cultish fans, and millions of people freaking out over the scourge of Socialism, are going to vote for Trump; but he lost the popular vote in both of his elections, so I expect he will lose again. The issue is whether or not enough of the voters on the margins, the ones who maybe don’t want to vote, who don’t care enough to vote, or who are wavering between the two choices, will swing the battleground states to the right side to win the Electoral College. That’s what the issue is, and what I want to talk about: will the undecided voters decide to go the right way?
It should honestly be pretty simple for every Democrat and progressive: Joe Biden is no progressive — but the progressive movement has made major gains with this administration, and importantly, Smilin’ Joe’s worries about his legacy, and also his genuine and historic support for unions and the working class, mean that he would likely continue to move slightly to the left of center, and might be able to enact and solidify some of the gains made in this first term. Any other president, from the left or the right, would be likely to ignore Biden’s accomplishments and try to create their own: but Biden will try to make sure that Biden’s wins stay in place. And Barack Obama doing exactly that is why we still have the Affordable Care Act despite all the best attempts by the fascists and corporate interests to root it out and remove people’s health insurance. Compared to Medicare for All, the ACA is hot garbage; but it was and is progress. It was and is a good thing. The same goes for Biden’s wins. Even though we’d like to have more of them, it would be useful to make sure what we’ve got, we won’t lose; like any other leftist/progressive idea, once it is in place, people realize it’s probably a good thing — and then they don’t want to get rid of it. Just ask Trump and his Republican congress about the ACA.
So re-electing Biden would make sure that we don’t move backwards. And let me point out how important that is: both Trump and Biden did a whole lot of stuff through executive order; and because those come from one man’s pen, they can be (and were) undone by another man’s (or a woman’s) pen. That fact, and the stark contrast between Trump’s foreign policy (Which is basically this) and every sane President’s desire to remain involved with the world on some kind of good terms, are why so much of the rest of the world is now wary of relying on the US for anything. And while I definitely think it would be better for the US and the world not to have the US in any kind of leadership role, since we have fucked up almost every other country on the planet at one time or another for our own desires or aggrandizement or simple profit, I do think that inconsistency from our policies or our economy has severe negative long-term knock-on effects on the rest of the world. So keeping ourselves in check is the best possible thing for everyone: and for that, a second Biden term, with his focus on maintaining American value around the world and renewing and continuing old policies about connection and cooperation, are the best possible choice.
I understand and agree that just maintaining what we have is not enough. We need to have an actual progressive administration, and more importantly, a progressive congress to go with a progressive executive, so they can name progressive judges, and then we can do some of the things we really need to do. And the more often we are given this kind of bullshit either-or, Lesser-of-Two-Evils choice, the longer we have to delay an actual progressive movement and the accomplishment of simple but necessary things that will save lives, like a livable minimum wage and Medicare for All. But to accomplish that, we need to start at the grass roots: and that’s where progressives suck. Don’t we? Because we won’t fear monger the same way the establishment and especially the Fascists will, we can’t drive the same kind of brand loyalty that only comes with paralyzing fear of the other side. We have to educate. And the political education of the populace relies on one thing: actual policy wins. Actual things being done, by government, to help people. And you know what we need in order to achieve that? More progressives in office, which basically starts with more progressives in the world.
And you know what drives more progressives in office? Anger and frustration with Fascists and with the establishment Democrats who appease them. In the large historical sense, the longer we have to deal with these people in charge, the better our side will do in recruitment and inspiration and drive. You cannot stop the pendulum from swinging: the GO(F)P has done a fantastic job of slowing down the swings for a long time now; but there have been lots and lots of little swings — LGBTQ rights, for instance, even though we’re seeing the violent Fascist reaction to that swing — and the big swing? It’s coming. And it’s going to swing a long way.
And then it will swing back again.
Let me also point out that the reason the GO(F)P has done so well for the last twenty-five years is because they started at the grass roots FIFTY years ago, and built up slowly; and the best news I can say for the future of the progressive movement is that Trump and MAGA have completely torn down the Republican infrastructure that helped put Trump into office. So if we can stay focused, and pay attention and do the work, we can take the country back. For real. I’ll write more about that another time.
And if none of that convinces you? Let me just remind you: the guy on the other team is a fucking Fascist. And no, I won’t tone down that language or that accusation: it is appropriate, and accurate. I will express that in greater detail another time, but I hope everyone reading this is already close to accepting that, if you’re not already there.
So let me sum up.
Biden has done a genuinely good job. He should have done more, but he has done more good than harm — and that’s an important metric for any politician. The first line of the Hippocratic Oath is “Primum non nocere” — first, do no harm. Politicians should all swear the same thing. Actually, we all should. And Biden has done good, for the economy, for the country’s manufacturing and infrastructure, for climate change adaptation, and for the international rules-based world order.
The best criticisms against him are: he has failed to end support for the genocide in Gaza, which is an entirely fair criticism, and the reason why I voted against Biden in my state’s primary, as I want him to recognize that this is an issue; he has tried to meet the GO(F)P in the middle of the aisle, particularly on the border, which shows far too much acceptance of Fascism and, essentially, racism and sexism, which were already issues for Biden as they are for so very many white male Americans; and he has accepted the current framing of issues like the economy, where he has failed to support the real change that would actually achieve his “from the bottom up and the middle out” economic growth.
Oh right — and he’s old.
And he sounds kinda dumb when he talks sometimes.
Those criticisms are bullshit.
He’s old. Granted. So why does he need to be young? Because only young people understand the needs of young people? Are we really that wedded to identity politics, that we believe that nobody can understand the needs of a group to which he doesn’t belong? That nobody can be sympathetic to those needs, and supportive of them? How different are those needs, really? Do we actually think there’s that much of a gap between the basic human needs of someone who is 8 and someone who is 80, when both people are human beings? Both love their family, both want to be safe and healthy, both love cheese and naps; must we have an 8-year-old president in order for 8-year-olds to live good lives? And if not: why do we need a 40-year-old President? Or a 50, 60, 70-year-old President?
He doesn’t speak well. And? Why does he need to speak well when he can get other people to deliver complicated policy platform announcements, or to handle press conferences with the piranhas of the press corps? Do we really need Joe Biden to inspire us with his soaring rhetoric? Or could we maybe read a book, listen to a poem, watch a Rage Against the Machine concert video, and get our inspiration from those? If we have a President who needs the help of other people to run his administration, then maybe we get something more like, I dunno, a representative Republic serving democratically. Instead of a strongman who handles everything himself, and who can and might want to build a cult of personality.
Whatever else you say about Old Joe, he is not going to build a cult of personality. None of us can stand his personality. No: he will build a team of smart and capable and driven people, who will help to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t have the best strengths. One of the best things about Biden is that he realizes who he is and what he can do (Other than his enormous ego, but clearly that is a prerequisite for an American politician), and he looks to others for help. He stood behind Barack Obama completely. That says a lot. I am also, despite my criticisms of his past shitty positions, genuinely impressed with his ability to recognize when he might be wrong, and to listen to others with better ideas. The fact that he is not the same man with the same ideas he had fifty years ago? That’s a good thing.
Look. Seriously. The President doesn’t need to be young. The President doesn’t need to be strong. The President doesn’t need to be a good speaker. We like all those things in our politicians, as we like them in all of our celebrities: but the reality is that the President is a politician and a leader. And that doesn’t require strength in a physical, youthful sense. It requires determination and drive: and Biden has those. Even if he needs to take a nap every day (And don’t pretend we wouldn’t all support a President who mandated a daily nap), he gets up and still has the same absolute convictions about the right things: the goodness of America, the desire to help people, the opposition to cruelty and violence. Right? You can’t miss those things when you talk about Biden. That same ego I was mocking earlier actually shows his strength in this area: he believes he is right, and a lot of the time, in a lot of ways, he is.
Let me also note: if our President is strong-willed, so strong that nobody could stop him or oppose him or stand in his way — how do we not end up with a dictator? Hell, we almost got a dictator with the last guy, and he only thinks he is strong and commanding. Someone who actually is? There’s a real risk there. And there’s only a benefit in that if we think that this country is actually carried by one guy.
It is not. The strength of this country is not in the leadership. It is not in the White House. It is not in our politicians, at all: they are all — or almost all — weak people. Weak morals, weak wills, and a lot of weak minds, especially in the GO(F)P.
We are the strength of this country. We are smarter, stronger, braver, wiser, kinder, and better in every way than our political leaders. As we should be: because we are the ones who run this country. We are.
When we abdicate those roles and those responsibilities, when we elect politicians intending for them to carry the load for us, to do our thinking for us, to do everything for us so that we need to do nothing for ourselves — we get exactly what we want. We get controlled. We get exploited. We get screwed: because we put people in power over us, people who want to screw us, and we hand them the tools to do it.
Joe Biden, whatever else he is — old, weak, stumbling, mumbling, moderate, somewhat racist, somewhat sexist — he is not looking to screw us. He just wants to help.
Just Dusty 