[Once upon a time I wrote Face­book posts for hours a day and then turned around and wrote a blog. Then one day, some­one asked me, “Are you count­ing the hours you spend on Face­book as writ­ing. Because, that’s writ­ing.” So now I bun­dle the best of them up and take Thurs­days off.]

Look, I already watched you storm the capi­tol and, a few years before that, put fed­er­al agents in sniper crosshairs over cat­tle graz­ing, and a few years before that, speak open­ly of vio­lence against the state while cos­play­ing the Con­ti­nen­tal army of the US rev­o­lu­tion.

So I already know this sud­den respect for law enforce­ment and the feds is so much hyp­o­crit­i­cal bull­shit. The only under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple here is par­ti­san hatred, and you’re not near­ly as slick as you think you are.

But you know you can hop to that posi­tion (and fool a few moderates—and no small num­ber of liberals—into turn­ing left and telling us not to judge) when what you real­ly want to say is “I could stand to see a few more left­ists who are stand­ing in the way of my white suprema­cy get extra­ju­di­cial­ly exe­cut­ed for hav­ing the temer­i­ty to be imper­ti­nent.”
It’s just that you’re not fool­ing ME.

Let me let you in on a lit­tle secret.

I’m about as left­ist as most peo­ple in the US get. I’m an envi­ron­men­tal social­ist, mod­ern abo­li­tion­ist, and lib­er­a­tion move­ment sup­port­er.
I’m ALSO a prag­ma­tist, a pub­lic-fac­ing fig­ure who some­times mod­u­lates my lan­guage for diplo­ma­cy’s sake, and I get how pow­er works and what can and can’t be done in a par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal land­scape both with­in and out­side the sys­tem. How­ev­er, I don’t for a minute lose love for the DNC or a politi­cian (even with a D after their name). I’ve got absolute­ly NO prob­lem hit­ting Democ­rats from the left.
Still… when six rep­re­sen­ta­tives from pur­ple AF dis­tricts jump the fence on a bill that is going to pass the House any­way, and I hear left­ists start say­ing, “Democ­rats” did X, I start tun­ing those peo­ple out, and so do a lot of peo­ple who actu­al­ly oper­ate in and under­stand the world of pro­fes­sion­al pol­i­tics. You might as well jump up and down and say, “I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how ANY of this works.”

And in a world where it is absolute­ly more than pos­si­ble to waste time and ener­gy get­ting noth­ing accom­plished, mak­ing pre­cise­ly the plays that Russ­ian Psy Ops want you to make to ham­string those who will put a speed bump in front of their autoc­ra­cy, or giv­ing away your pow­er, paint­ing every per­son in a big tent par­ty with one brush looks amaz­ing­ly sophis­ti­cal and naive.

And that’s kind of how we all start to think of folks who do that.

Maybe social­ism DOES work, and we should­n’t be lis­ten­ing to pedophile bil­lion­aires tell us we’re crazy.

You know it is ENTIRELY pos­si­ble to under­stand the white suprema­cist his­to­ry of this coun­try, the fas­cist lean­ings it’s had since the civ­il war end­ed, the sur­veil­lance state, the ways that the pop­u­la­tion is con­trolled, the harms of cap­i­tal­ism, and the fact that Democ­rats do not have ide­o­log­i­cal­ly “clean hands” when it comes to left­ist issues (due to fac­ing reelec­tion in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that is itself out­num­bered by white male suprema­cists whose hearts and minds have not yet been won, or due to their own mil­que­toast pol­i­tics)…

… and STILL acknowl­edge that things are demon­stra­bly worse when the par­ty in pow­er sends para­mil­i­tary forces into cities, builds con­cen­tra­tion camps, there is a 6–3 SCOTUS major­i­ty push­ing con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues into legal inter­pre­ta­tion, body auton­o­my is under direct assault, every­one is los­ing their health­care, and NATO is poised to defend Green­land from a pedophile r*pist with increas­ing signs of being con­sumed by a sort of nar­cis­sis­tic demen­tia.

It’s pos­si­ble to work for a bet­ter world and still spend two hours on a Novem­ber Tues­day mak­ing sure peo­ple have health­care, access to abor­tion, some pro­tec­tions, and there is an under­stand­ing that roads, edu­cat­ed humans, infra­struc­ture, and stuff will make life bet­ter for every­one. You don’t have to call peo­ple bootlick­ers because they see very lit­tle dif­fer­ence in the Mid­dle East pol­i­cy between the two par­ties but can absolute­ly tell the dif­fer­ence between a $260 and a $1400 insur­ance pre­mi­um when they can’t afford milk.

There’s a rea­son the dis­course has to go back ten years to Oba­ma to point at Dems and say how bad they are on depor­ta­tions. It’s because they went WAY down under Biden, and that does­n’t fit the nar­ra­tive that Dems are even WORSE about deport­ing peo­ple, “so let’s attack them even hard­er than we do Repub­li­cans.”

See, the issue is, that’s how it’s sup­posed to work. That is EXACTLY the way a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety with an exchange of ideas should work. It should­n’t be a ques­tion of which side gets to get every­thing they want and fuck the oth­er guys—it’s about con­vinc­ing peo­ple. (Not cal­ci­fied Foxnews­rot brains. But there are oth­ers.) And that’s hard­er work than dream­ing of the rev­o­lu­tion. It takes more time. It takes more ener­gy.

But yes, it worked like it was sup­posed to. The hearts and minds shift­ed over time. The peo­ple who gov­erned real­ized that soci­ety’s val­ues changed and they eased off. (In Biden’s case, WAY off.)

But that does­n’t fit into a tidy sto­ry about how Dems are all just as bad. So, they kind of skip over Biden and jump back to two decades to get their num­bers.

(And frankly, watch­ing Oba­ma get plas­tered by white suprema­cists who thought every left-of-cen­ter thing he did was proof that he “brought com­mu­nism from Kenya” or some­thing prob­a­bly con­tributed to a very care­ful cal­cu­lus about optics and more than one deci­sion with a Faus­t­ian com­pro­mise.)

You got­ta believe me, that peo­ple see you. If the only time you’re about men­tal health or neu­ro­di­ver­gence when some­one screams a slur throws a Nazi salute or shoots up a school, but the rest of the time they need to eat kale, do yoga, and not incon­ve­nience your life one iota, you aren’t near­ly as slick as you think you are.

I “agree to dis­agree” about whether a three per­cent pro­gres­sive tax rate on the wealth­i­est 2% of Amer­i­cans that goes to fund the social safe­ty net will do more good than a tax CUT on those same folks will turn around and ins­ta-cre­ate a com­men­su­rate amount of jobs.

I do not “agree to dis­agree” that child traf­fick­ing rings are okay as long as the peo­ple involved are real­ly impor­tant, that open and naked misog­y­ny and racism is okay, that pol­i­cy designed to make big­otry all right again (and even offi­cial) is accept­able, and that racial­ly moti­vat­ed con­cen­tra­tion camps are no big deal so long as the per­son who lies about every­thing and can’t seem to fig­ure out who pays tar­iffs pinky swears despite moun­tains of demon­stra­ble proof that he’s only fill­ing them to the brim with the worst of the worst.