Setting the Record Straight

Dear MAGA,

Let's talk, because no matter what happens this November and that of 2020 we're all in this country together and we on the left, Dem or Indy, aren't planning on going anywhere.

We have to get some things straight here, and I'm going to go out on a limb and speak for most of my team. I'm comfortable doing so and so away we go.

1. WE don't want open borders. The phrase "Open border Dems/left" is being tossed around quite a bit. It has been for 8-10 years now and it simply isn't true. Open borders are dangerous and leave little room for even keeping count and none for vetting. We want secure borders, but we also want to grant every opportunity for those in need to come to the US and become productive American citizens. The current population can't fill all of the open jobs. 1st and 2nd generation immigrants are shown to be harder workers and commit less crimes than long time Americans, in general. I like that. We NEED that. It raises the bar for all of us and for the most part these new Americans will not be taking your job. Mechanization will. A robot will. Automation will. These folks will not.

Even as an Atheist I recognize helping those in need is the "Christian" thing to do. More importantly it's the HUMAN thing to do. We have room. There's no shortage of land or resources if we as a country did a better job of managing those resources. We don't. We could. We should.

2. WE don't want your home protection guns or hunting rifles despite many of your talking heads saying so. I own some of these myself. I enjoy shooting. I don't ever want to have to shoot a person, but I like to be prepared for all eventualities. I bought my guns knowing that they were far likely to injure someone I love than to stop a criminal or crime in progress. It wasn't a rational decision, but as an actual responsible gun owner I trusted my wife and myself to take every precaution, even those which could slow our response to an intruder. Some of you want your semi-automatic high capacity rifles. Shooting one is a joy which I've experienced, but I would never buy one for hunting or protection. There are better choices. I also don't take stock in the landslide argument that "my team" will start with those and work down. All we want to do is decrease the body count from mass shootings without having every civilian armed and every building protected. That would be ugly and totally unnecessary. I don't want my country to be THAT country. I'm an advocate for freedom so I don't want what I think to determine what you can buy. So I'm asking that you give up these guns, because guns are death. We need less needless death in our country.

Yes, there are handgun and shotgun deaths. There are gang related shootings. There is city crime, and drive-bys and all manner of needless gun deaths. We want to stop those as well. Those solutions are less sexy than gun restrictions. Preventing those deaths are part of a much larger conversation of inequality and inequity. We would also like to sit down with you on those. We're ready when you are.

3. WE don't hate Christians. We aren't waging war on them. Some of us dislike organized religion because we see it as impeding logic and as a rigid and outdated construct which subverts practitioners. Some of us hold dear the separation of Church and State. I recognize that my local churches do amazing things for the community. So do my local Temples and Mosques. So do my local atheists. There is room for everyone. There is room for inclusion, and brother-/sisterhood. We ask that if your church or religion is preaching exclusion, hate, or intolerance (and this goes for ANY/EVERY faith) that you reexamine where you choose to celebrate your faith. We also ask that you take a day and sit in with a different faith, before you judge an entire religion. There are bad folks in any religion. Don't let the few determine how you view the entire group. Find out for yourselves how your neighbors practice. It's always the best way.

4. WE aren't violent mobs any more than you are all White Supremacists out to run down the Heather Heyers of the world. Some folks want you to believe differently because that keeps us divided and benefits them. There are party operatives, foreign agents, and folks just trying to make a buck who ALL benefit from our lack of unity. We have to stop handing them our minds and country because we ALL lose when they're running the show. Many of my "lefties" are VERY vocal about our thoughts on and disapproval of ANTIFA style tactics. I. Don't. Approve. Are you as vocal about shouting down the Proud Boys? David Duke? AFP? Aryans? NPI? Maybe you could do more? Be louder? Because not standing up to these people is tantamount to giving them approval.

I wasn't raised to judge people on their looks, sexuality, or faith. Maybe some of you were. You don't have to stay that way if that was the case. We are all meant to be better people than our parents were and a little change goes a long way.

5. WE don't love abortions. I HATE abortions. They sicken me. I want to end abortions. To me that has NOTHING to do with making them illegal. If we all want less abortions then why the hell aren't we working together? Because folks in power don't want us to work together. We need to work together. Abortions are on the steady decline. There were about 650k in 2014. What if we worked together through options, education, and health care to take that down by another 250K? Would you see that as a win? I sure would. We could do that... together, and keep whittling them away until they approached closer and closer to zero.

6. WE don't want to give tax money away to moochers or offer FREE healthcare to the entire country. We want to collect taxes in a sensible manner which would actually PAY for food programs, energy assistance, full health coverage for YOU and US and EVERYONE. We want college to be available to anyone regardless of social or financial status. We want the best K-12 schools in the world so that YOUR children grow up to be badass brainiacs. We DON'T want to keep running the football backwards away from our goal posts, but we are because the debt and deficit are climbing. They climb under EVERY Congress and POTUS no matter blue or red. Only we, all working together, can stop that trend. We already know how. There cannot be 0% taxes on mega-corporations through laws and loopholes. If you and I are paying 28-33% then the 1% should be as well. Doesn't have to be more, but it sure as hell shouldn't be less.

Let them help support the people and country which made them wealthy. Trickle down is a myth. Trickle up is not.

7. This one's a bit trickier, because tempers are high. I'm gong to speak for myself here. I DON'T hate you. I don't hate the president. I hate no man or woman. There's no room in me for hate and hate keeps us all from seeing and hearing each other clearly. This doesn't mean I'm not angry. My anger may be immeasurable. I'm angry at people who would allow or even worse, encourage, injustice, inequality, inequity, and prejudice against ANYONE who is just trying to live their lives in peace and it makes me sick just to think about it. I'm angry with you for supporting someone who I perceive as an incompetent, megalomaniac madman and asking him to represent us as President and on the world stage. I'm angry with those of you who support legislators who seek to limit rights rather than grant equality. I'm angry with those who signed off on a bill which takes our tax cuts but grants them to the wealthy instead. I'm angry at people who ignore actual facts in lieu of "information" from talking heads and pundits, no matter who they are. I'm angry at anyone who still proudly exclaims "#MAGA!" with everything going on in this country. But that doesn't mean I'm not willing to talk or listen. YOU just have to be willing to REALLY listen when I talk, because I'm not fighting to take anything away from you. When the things I desire for this country come through, then everyone benefits. That's sort of the whole point to me. That's the whole point of everyone who believes as I do... and I think that most of us on the left do.

There's much more for us to discuss! Let's let this sink in a bit and we can come back to it or add it.

Until then, be well. Be safe. Be kind. Be understanding if you can. Take a break from the talking heads. Talk to a real liberal or lefty IN PERSON and do so with patience, calm, and compassion. Ask them to do the same. You might like the results.

Caustic the Clown

Who Are the Resistance Leaders and What's With These Far Left Sites? - Part 1

G'morning Clownies.  A year and a half ago Mrs. Clown and I were enjoying the telly, watching a wee HBO show called Homeland.  A scene came on where the season protagonist Brett O'Keefe, a dastardly mash-up of Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and other notable nut-jobs, was shown working in a warehouse/bunker where he had a social media account farm.  On this farm he was growing, under the dim and creepy grow of LED/LCD lights, the bots, trolls, and extremest pages we encounter everyday on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and beyond.  My dearest, sweetest, innocent, near-Luddite wife queried as to whether I believed such places really existed.  This was pre-2016 election and I assured her that art was most adeptly imitating life.  What I had yet to realize at the time is that these accounts were not all far-right accounts and not all of them were confined to bot-farms.

Division works best when the tugging, pulling, and finger-pointing are done from both ends or sides, and my multiple parties.


I'm already all over the place.  While I love a good outline I simply don't have the time today to structure this properly.  Suffice it to say that imposters are found on all sides and that there are far more groups than Russians who profit from our division, and I mean literally profit.  The endgame, in my mind, nearly always comes down to greed.  What troubles me more so is when the endgame is less apparent.  So this has just become a multi-part series on the mystery players and biased sites who are not "behind" #Resist, but along side or even outside of it.

Let's talk about some players first, where their motives are not entirely clear.

Imma start with @socialpowerone/#TheResistance on Twitter.  Their name is a little on the nose, yes?  Resist is bigger than one person.  So what do we know about @socialpowerone?  Very little it turns out.

Five-plus years on Twitter.  That's solid.

151,000 followers. That's scary influential.

He/she/they post nary an original concept, but regurgitate ad nauseam from sites like Crooks & Liars, Shareblue, Mother Jones, and others like them. I'll do a separate piece on sites like these, but folks these are not news outlets. More often than not, with MJ being the best of the bunch, they rehash articles from Washington Post, New York Times, NY Daily News, and other MSM.  They simply spin the original information harder than a dreidel at Hanukkah.

Here's SP1's profile pic:


That's a handsome and well assembled dude. He looks socially conscious too!  Stern.  Thoughtful.  But this isn't "SocialPowerOne".  This is Sierra Leone model Salieu Jalloh. In other words, rather than using their own pic, or an ambiguous one, they've picked a person who is unaffiliated with Resist and used their likeness as a false representation.  Here's a pic of Mr. Jalloh in full model mode:




Now I use an altered picture of myself as I treasure my anonymity, but that pic is 100% me.  I didn't scour the web for a more handsome, more colourful, more bow-tie modely version of myself.  So what I need everyone to ask themselves is, who would do this and for fuck's sake why?  Why would you trust what this person posts when they are all about obfuscation and misdirection?  That's a really bad start in my opinion.  Add to that their unoriginality and one could start to get really concerned about why this account has 150k followers.

I have a theory, and this theory goes well beyond SP1, but that account is one of the worst offenders.  My theory is that many of these folks are founders or humble "writers" (not journalists) for the sites which are Resist popular on social media.  Why else incessantly post from the same 3-5 sites?  To me this is the most logical conclusion, although I fully intend to try to connect the dots between all of these sites if I am able.  Humans are enterprising.  There are folks who saw the division under Obama (under, not created by) and said, "Hey, we can use this."  Then when Trump announced his candidacy they said (allegedly), "Holy Flerking Ballsnuts!  We can use the mother-loving-fuck out of this!!!".

And here we are.  Up shite creek (AKA the Potomac) with naught but a swizzle stick for propulsion.  Ask yourselves, who is SocialPowerOn?.  Why are they posting, almost exclusively, spun and biased versions of the work of real journalists.  What do they have to gain.  What do you have to lose by listening to a stranger of whose motivations you know nothing?  Why do they tell you less about themselves than a clown who is attempting to remain anonymous?

Before I get to the left-wing spin sites themselves I'll going to tackle a few more folks like Scotty Dworkin, Billy Palmer, and more accounts like our very own poseur Jalloh.  Some folks may ask why I'm not going after right wingers. I'll tell you.  We know who those arseholes are and can all see them coming from kilometers away.  I'm far more concerned about those who would pose as Resist and seek only to profit from us, blind us, misdirect us, or use us for god only knows what.

That will not stand.  Not on my watch.

Caustic the Clown

Thoughts on the Twitsistance

Mornin' folks.  I have some bad news for you.  You're not likely to care for what comes next.  There will be some harsh truths, at least as I see them.

As I perused my Twitter feed yesterday I realized that I was having a hard time distinguishing the tone of posts from alleged Democrats, liberals, and so-called Resistance members from what I used to see of Trumpers on Facebook.  I say alleged, because unlike my old FB feed I don't know who the hell these people are in real life.  They could be Russians.  They could be marketers.  They could be paid posters.  Who the hell knows?

These are a few of the shared post characteristics which immediately jumped out:

Hatred.  Calls for violence.  Lack of interest in fact checking.  Hypocrisy.  Fear.  Demonization and dehumanization of a group of people based on one or a few.

These are not charming characteristics.  They're not even edgy.  They fucking suck.  I don't want to be a party to these sorts of posts.  That's not how I was raised.  These same folks decry Fox News and yet still refuse to see why CNN and MSNBC are not the best places to get facts.  They should not be trusted.  They have an obvious agenda.  Speaking of agendas, some still post things from Scott Dworkin, Occupy Democrats, the Palmer Report (the list goes on) and do not understand why these biased sources are total shit.  I've lost my patience with this behaviour.  It's a runaway train of suck and there's nobody to pull the brakes.

Do you know why it is so easy to blame the Russians for Trump?  Because it means you don't have to blame yourselves.  There are those of you who never marched, never phone banked, never went door to door for your candidate.  You didn't SELL your candidate.  In some cases they were hard sells to be sure, but after Bernie lost the nomination I went door to door for Hillary.  I wasn't happy about it, but I put on my biggest smile, went out and sold her the best I could.  Back then I thought I knew what a Trump presidency would mean, although now I can admit I had no fucking idea how bad it could get.  So I fought for her.  There weren't many of us out there and organizing people to go fight for her wasn't easy, but it was important.  So it got done.


Clearly it wasn't enough.

So while we know Russians interfered with social media, and hacked some computers, and likely colluded with the Trump campaign among other truths and allegations, the responsibility lies right here at home.  If you didn't do enough, there's no sense in brow beating, but I sure as hell hope you're going to step up your game over the next 2 to 100 years.  Democracy cannot be maintained without a fight.  There's a song from the 60s called "Love Me I'm a Liberal".  Phil Ochs maybe... but it doesn't matter.  It's a scathing take on NIMBY, do nothing, check writing, phone-it-in lefties who are too busy to actually get their hands dirty.  I never really got that song until Trump won the presidency, but now I do.  Blame is almost always counter-productive and fixes are what we really need, along with solemn promises to do better.  We're not even CLOSE to that point yet.  Can't have change without acceptance.

I was thinking about my second job as I drove in to work this morning.  I teach at night.  I mentor apprentices who are in a 5 year trade program.  At the end of those years, if successful, those students become licensed journeymen in a skilled union trade.  These students are from all walks of life.  They are from cities and the country.  They are typically from working class families or none at all.  They are all different colors, of different faiths, often from different countries.  Some are conservative and some not so much.  Part of what I teach them is the union side of basic socialism, and what that means as a brother- and sister-hood.  That to be strong we all have to work together and "Be Best", because if we don't then we all fail together.  Believe me, that ain't easy.  It's a long slow process which takes 5 years of learning and working together.  Some never quite get it.  Most do though, and that is why I keep doing it.  That is what I'm going to keep doing.  While I'm not leaving Twitter I've realized over this extended break that I don't need it or it's fun house mirror version of The Resistance.  I'm just going to keep doing what I always have, which is march when marching needs done, calling and writing those elected officials who need my opinion (whether they know it or not), teaching 25 or so people a year the meaning of unity, and stumping for candidates which I either believe in or I need others to believe in.

That's it.  It's been real.  I'll be around if and when it seems appropriate.  I still have a piece to do on why Palmer, Dworkin, Hummingbird, and SocialPowerOne should not be trusted.  We'll see if that materializes.

Clowntacularly Yours,

Caustic the Clown

P.S.  Go high.  That doesn't mean abandoning a fight.  That doesn't mean tolerating oppression.  If you don't know why losing our civility or humanity means we can never really win the war then you're probably not going to figure it out from reading something I write.

But think about it.  Taking the short road to win a race means you never really win at all.  Doesn't it?