Politics can instantly bring out the ugliest side of the kindest person, especially when mixed with social media's inhuman design. We’re seeing our political discourse degrade day-by-day, as more politicians, pundits, and everyday people turn to politics for all the wrong reasons. Take it from two people whose work often requires keeping up with political news and debating it: staying grounded requires way more effort and self-awareness than most people today will admit.
How do we keep up with heated issues while not losing our heart and soul along the way?
I joined Adam B. Coleman of
on his livestream to talk about the subtle elements poisoning our political discourse, how to avoid letting your interest in politics eclipse the rest of your life, and:wins vs losses we see from the Trump admin
the ongoing change in our culture’s beliefs about the role of government
the difference between serious political thinkers and political junkies
Here’s a preview:
I love the example you used of the highly controversial new documentary No Other Land. It was made by an Israeli journalist and a nonviolent Palestinian activist documenting an abuse of power by the local Israeli occupation authorities. Both sides absolutely hated the film! Hardcore Zionists immediately labeled it propaganda. Meanwhile, Pro-Palestinian types blasted it as encouraging normalization of relations between Israel and the Palestinian people. As a liberal Zionist and lifelong supporter of Israel, I endorse the film and encourage everyone to watch it! Don’t listen to the crazies on both sides! Reactionary tribalism is how it is these days. You’re with your team no matter what and you hate the other guy and everything he does. If Mr. Trump is honoring D.J. Daniel a young boy with brain cancer than we won’t stand for him and accuse the POTUS of using him as a prop. We also won’t stand for an Afghanistan veteran, a farmer, a girl who suffered a brain injury from competing with a Trans athlete, or a hero who’s fast action saved many lives. Oh, and we’ll heckle Trump in the middle of the speech. Al Green made a total fool of himself! It was wrong when Joe Wilson did it to Barack Obama or when MTG and Lauren Boebert did it to Joe Biden and it’s wrong when Al Green did it to Trump! The Democrats have no policy platform. Their against everything and for nothing. What does the Democrat Party even stand for anymore? Basically “orange man bad!” and “we’re for good things and against bad things!” and throw in some fear mongering about whatever boogeyman of the week the Dems are using this time, be it Trump is Hitler, white supremacy, January 6th, or Project 2025. I’m a Rockefeller Republican not a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t like either party. They’re both terrible! But at least the GOP is competent, stands for something, and has substantive policy positions to offer the American people. As to Mr. Trump, I agree I voted for him but I will agree with him when I think he’s right and disagree with him when I think he’s wrong. For instance, I agree with the measures he’s taking at the border and the mass deportations, closing down USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine and Gaza, pushing our European allies to pay more into NATO, banning Trans athletes from women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors, and the invaluable work of the DOGE. But I at the same time disagree with abolishing the Department of Education, initially ending legal aid to migrant children, him trying to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, pulling out of the Paris Accords, getting rid of LBJ’s executive order on affirmative action, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office, and his tariffs. I’m not a sycophant for Trump. I think you’re absolutely right that people do reckless things when they get their hands on money that’s not theirs’. USAID is a great example of this! It is basically a big slush fund for the Democratic Party, the CIA and NGOs. They do very little actually humanitarian work. They topple democratic governments, foment color revolutions, run propaganda, spread misinformation, and spread DEI around the globe. That’s what they waisted billions in taxpayer dollars for. USAID is the biggest grift in human history! You won’t be surprised to hear that Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney both had close ties to it. Also, you mentioned politicians don’t seem to actually want to solve problems. That’s just it! They don’t want to solve these problems but perpetuate them so they have something to run on! If the problem actually got solved, they’d be out of a job. So we’re electing people who’s careers depend on them keeping problems alive. Same concept applies to pc pressure groups like the NAACP, NOW, GLAAD, the Urban League, etc.
Such a great podcast by you and the esteemed Adam B. Coleman, Salome! I was not able to listen to the whole podcast as it was just too long and I had to fast forward through some parts. But I heard enough to get the gist of the points you guys were trying to make. You touched on some pretty relevant and important topics. The mainstream media is indeed all about sensationalism and yellow journalism these days. We’ve regressed back to how it was in the Gilded Age before the birth of the muckrakers, where news outlets just said whatever they had to say whether it was true or not to sell papers. The news media is as Matt Taibbi dubbed them “Hate, Inc.” The mainstream media has long since stopped searching for truth or educating people on current events. Today the mainstream press serves two purposes: 1) divide the country for ratings and profits at the behest of their corporate overlords and their allies. 2) Protect powerful people from being held accountable for bad things they’ve done. Mainstream media’s whole purpose is to make you hate you’re neighbor who doesn’t look like you or share you’re same political views. Also, they seek to reinforce you’re previously held biases and give you your as George Orwell called it in his classic novel 1984, “two minutes of hate.” So you can sit in front of your tv or laptop and basically say “Yeah! F those Democrats!” or “Yeah! F those Republicans!” They distort how we see the world and turn politics into a WWF or TMZ type show. Do you think CNN for example has those panel discussions on their show to have a constructive conversation or help viewers understand the issues better? Nope. It’s just for entertainment purposes. They know their viewers will eat up seeing Bakari Sellers or Solomon Jones or Toure talk down to Scott Jennings in a condescending way and accuse him of being stupid or racist. Or Abby Phillip cut off Scott Jennings right in the middle of when he’s talking and call him a liar or laugh off his point. It’s more like Big Brother or Real Housewives of New Jersey then it is CNN. It’s not about news and information anymore. It’s about drama, juicy sound bites and watching the left and right go at it while the mob behind their TV or phone or laptop screen howls for blood. It’s disgusting. People are so consumed by hate for those who politically disagree with them these days. I saw this was especially prevalent in young people when I was in college and especially on TikTok which is a breeding ground for partisans and extremists across the political spectrum. I’d like to give everyone a piece of advice: don’t ever use TikTok it’s absolutely bonkers and will warp you’re brain. I saw so many videos of liberals attacking and insulting conservatives and visa versa in the most vile way imaginable. Like for example, people dancing to the rap song “F Donald Trump!” in a very cocky and arrogant way. Or a video with a young person saying they love Hamas and glory to the resistance! Like you touched on Salome, I ponder this, is all that swagger and confidence they have real? Are they really happy spewing all this hate towards those they don’t agree with or who they don’t like? Or is it all to cover sort of pain they feel deep inside them or come from a wounded place? Also, what is this accomplishing on behalf of those they claim to care about like POC, women, poor people, LGBT people, disabled folks, Palestinians, etc.? Nothing, you’re just putting more hate, intolerance and heartache into the world. Also, how will this hate content heal the suffering you feel or fix the problem you claim to be so concerned about? For instance, how does making a cringy TikTok video where you mouth the words to the Progressive Punk song “No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!” actually do anything to fight racism or build bridges or create love and understanding between people in real life? It doesn’t. Performative garbage, being smug and taunting and saying the worse things imaginable about people on the other side seems to have replaced real activism or taking tangible action to make the world a better place. Arguing with some random Trumper on X or Instagram or TikTok might momentarily make you feel good and superior but in the long run you’ve accomplished nothing and waisted a whole day of your life you’ll never get back. I feel so sad for those people because one day when their old and gray and look back on their life, they’ll realize they waisted it all and like Don Quixote, realize they spent the best years of their lives tilting at windmills, fighting monsters that didn’t actually exist and destroying their own lives. I’ve also noticed that these people who say things like “unfollow me if you voted for Trump!” or “you’re evil if you voted for Harris!” Tend to also post videos talking about traumas in their lives, struggling with mental health issues or being part of a minority group and feeling someone is out to get them. It’s like this is how they cope with how lost, sad, insecure, or adrift they feel in their life. Or they had a really bad experience in their early life that has led them to their extreme stand.
As somebody who's been in this fight for a long time, it's encouraging and almost bewildering to see other people starting to have the same conversations that I wanted to have, but felt kind of broken down at the same time years ago. As one friend put it, out normie friends are all just now finding out about the culture war.
It's kind of makes me want to go back through my original materials and start clipping it or something because somehow it all seems relevant again... Yay
I’m sorry - boy you are young, God bless you please try not to take offense because it isn’t meant that way, but you have history a little wrong. You said historically government wasn’t there to give things to people (true) that the King or whoever had limited role. Not true. Originally our small, then larger tribes, were definitely ruled, and I do mean RULED, by chieftains (think Powhatan & his confederacy) then Kings, who were absolute rulers/monarchs. Think Vikings. Think Kings in England before the Saxons arrived and took over. Even after, when there were alliances of not just kingdoms/families, but when there was an aristocracy built (after say William the Conqueror- the Saxon king who came from France to England) for the purpose of building & controlling larger groups of people and territories, they were still absolute rulers. The chieftains, then Kings words were literally law. And they attained their position of chief/king through strength of arms. And they accumulated, expanded, and consolidated their positions through warfare. This is the real way it has always been with humans since the beginning of our time, like it or not. Some rulers were good, even beneficial, a few even established rule of law - they still made the law, but they were written down and considered the people’s interests to some extent. After all, as tribes grew larger, it became apparent that chiefs and kings must also keep their people ‘happy’ or they would have a rebellion on their hands. Chiefs and Kings could, and in fact sometimes were, replaced. In addition, religion/God(?) -depending which culture and epoch you are referring to- “anointing” kings helped them solidify their validity to power over so many people. However, people can still be killed, challenged, or replaced. Therefore, when the aristocracy of England wanted more power & stability, and less at the whims of an individual king, they went to war against the king and taking him hostage made him sign the magna carter. This wasn’t the first time that power-sharing happened among human “governments.” Such things had happened in Ancient Greece and ancient Rome and even in ecleastical Rome. Eventually England got a parliamentary system, with the House of Lords (aristocracy), and the House of Commons. We developed a different system, new at the time because up until then all subjects of Chiefs & Kings, etc were the people and property of their rulers. They were NOT viewed as independent individuals/people. They were the property of their King, and he could order them to do whatever he wanted and they had to or die. Again though a despot could be replaced if he pissed off enough people, or enough of the wrong people. So that usually kept some of it in check, sort of. Note the qualifications on that statement, it’s meant. By the time our founding fathers came along, it hadn’t been since Ancient Greece & Rome that philosophers and others had even considered the “independence” of fifes, of slaves, of people just generally. Oh there was talk periodically, but nothing was done about it until the Enlightenment period, which so heavily influenced our founding fathers who were living in the thick of it. The American revolution, and especially the constitution and bill of rights that it was based on, was at that time truly “revolutionary.” I’m paraphrasing and rushing through all of this, but basically the constitution didn’t grant people their rights and powers, not limit people and their rights and powers, revolutionarily it granted in writing limited powers of government (of the people, by the people, for the people) and reminded government that people are imbued with inalienable rights by their creator (not King, Chief, aristocracy, parliament, or any form of government) only. That was revolutionary! That was essentially “new” and creating a new form of government that started there, not in aristocracy or feudalism, or anything that had come before that didn’t recognize people as people (!) but as property of a king/kingdom was amazing!!
Yes you are correct that this last election it wasn’t just “against” word-salad lady, it wasn’t even entirely “for” Trump, there are a lot of people who are fed up with the idea that the government rules top down and people should acquiesce their personal (“independent “) power to higher up’s. Not just recognizing “authority” but really reversing the perspective that our founding fathers had; by the people for the people with the consent of the governed .
Both parties, and the money in the election system, plus manipulation of other systems (electoral college choosing the electors - use a Captain Bly sort of system- and using the courts just to keep people, even third parties, off the ballot) have made things so bad starting in the 1990’s that we have an ineffective system and most people know it and increasingly don’t want it. A lot of us are independents or increasingly “political orphans”. Even people who belong to a party increasingly say they are only a Dem, or Rep, to be able to vote in the primaries; but this last election, Biden stepped aside after the primaries so on one in Dems had chance to elect their candidate!!
“The crazy person who doesn’t want wars!” Because it isn’t about the extreme simplistic postulations of “do you want war or not” not the more nuanced (and frankly mature) discussion will we need to go to war, are we risking war by not showing strength now, up front (ie punch bully Putin, who has already “gotten away with taking Crimea without serious repercussions” and therefore he invaded Ukraine after he failed to install a puppet president/government like Belaruse.) There is no talk about human nature, behavior of people, nations, ideologies that motivate or bind people together, etc. It becomes either/or. “Either you are for ‘US’ or you’re against us.” What if WE want to do what is best for most of us (Americans & Human beings?) The problem is a lack of shared “facts/truth”, objective reality, maturity, nuanced conversations, effective communication, logic, reason, and most especially trust, on any level really. Zero trust. And we need a certain level of mutual trust to work, live, get along, and make our “collective” democracy work.
You are right that people are more immature now too. Idk 🤷♀️
You mention the movie that recently won an Oscar and why, in some instances, people who should be for “bridging the divide” are reacting negatively “automatically” instead to the movie and it’s director and/or message. This one I can explain: many Jews and “Zionists” (people who believe that Jews should have their own ancient homeland, Israel, as a legitimate country without people trying to kill them or kick them out of the land of Israel) had a very nasty wake-up call on October 7th, 2023. 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians and families including children and babies, were slaughtered. No other word for it really, because while they were murdered, they were murdered in such a way that can only be described as slaughter. It made a lot of people who would have previously “bought” into the “narrative” (lie) that all Palestinians want is peace and to “bridge the divide.” But they don’t. The Israelis pulled all Jews (including cemetery bones!) and all IDF forces out of Gaza in 2005, and a year or two later Palestinians elected Hamas, knowing what they were, what they wanted, and what they would do to get it. They bluntly stated so many times including in their own charter. They only recently “changed” it for appearances sake, when enough people caught on and started to point it out more and more. We have a problem not being able to read Arabic, and not trusting “the opposition” especially if it is represented as the “oppressor”, to truthfully translate it for us. So someone more “reliable” was beginning to make noises about it, so apparently they changed it. However, on Arabic-language tv like Arabic Al Jezzera (not English language Al Jazzera) they freely state they will not stop until they have killed all the Israelis and taken over the land again, and kill all the Jews and ifidels everywhere. Any few Palestinians that are not raised from cradle-to-grave on Jew-Hate, Israeli-hate, Infidel-hate, like watching Arabic Sesame Street that actually tells toddlers to hate Jews & infidels, and manage to want peace or cooperate at All with Israelis, are murdered. Yaya Sinwar even made a Hamas member whose brother was believed to be a “traitor” bury his own brother alive. Yaya Sinwar also said he had murdered people by strangling them with his bare hands. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Many of the young people killed at the concert in the desert that day were not only Jewish, but peacenicks. So too were many of the people living near the Gaza wall/border, the ones who were brutally murdered, burned to death, raped, and or taken hostage into Gaza; like the Bibas baby & toddler who were strangled to death. I agree with you that people are behaving immaturely, believing simplistic things that simply aren’t true or aren’t the totality of truth. But remember, this is a “post-truth” world now, so the only reality that matters to most people is “my reality”, or if objective truth still matters to them, there are so many voices on so many platforms, most mature honest people have a harder time finding out what is really true. And you are right that mainstream journalism has been co-opted a long time ago. I remember back in the early 1990’s (no later than ‘93) meeting a journalism major in college at a party. She said she was being taught that people didn’t want dry dull facts and didn’t have the time or capacity to “digest” the news, so it was the job of the new kind of press and journalist to make news more accessible by “pre-digesting” all those pesky facts and sources into a more palatable “narrative” that read better (like entertainment/novel.) I think that was also a part of some kind of long march through the institutions started sometime in the 1969’s but beyond the first (& genuine) civil rights movement. Someone piggybacked off that success to take things even further to “the left” or just towards communism/collectivism in a much more subtle way. Hard to explain, harder to see. I’ll try to go into it in my own posts sometime. Interesting subject for conversation you have here. I like your Substack, it’s conducive to conversation and learning.
Unfortunately “compromise” became a dirty word with several things: 1.) the “post-colonial” review of history and slavery and putting a “post-truth” & Post-colonial framework on history: how did the founding fathers, even ones who weren’t slave owners or had doubts like Washington who freed his slaves in his will, how did they not get rid of slavery right away (compromise with southerners like Jefferson was the reason slavery wasn’t eliminated. In fact how could they ever do it to begin with? So they are clearly simply bad people, so all their ideas are bad), therefore compromise is bad, therefore No compromise. That will “stop” all obviously immoral actions by obviously completely immoral people & 2.) Bill Clinton’s 2-term election/administration, lies and sleeze, but also perhaps something more (I was shocked to see how much they HATED the Clintons, even before Obama) and things related to the Republican reaction to him. & 3.) the internet arose for broad use in the 1990’s. Its impact and the social media platforms that grew from it cannot be underestimated as contributing to a lot of negatives for humans and American democracy specifically (see next point) & 4.) I also think that the leftist/Cold War long march through the institutions with all the “down on/death to America”, “post-truth”, “post-colonial”, racial (“anti-racism”), etc - find all negatives and overly focus on them and build a self-loathing and universal-loathing “narrative” to destroy morale, unity, & cohesiveness. Destroy American-style democracy and any /all “western” democracy. Help to support collectivism/ authoritarianism/toltalrianism.