“The gravest threat we face is ‘notseeism’ – that is where otherwise intelligent people choose to not see what is too uncomfortable to look at.” – Swami Beyondananda
I am going to violate the cardinal rule of comedy. I’m going to begin with the punchline.
I know a couple who may be our political bellwether. We’ll call him Punxsutawney Phil, after the legendary Ground Hog Day groundhog, and we’ll call her Punxsutawney Phyllis. He characterizes himself as a “Sierra Club Republican”, and indeed has sold solar power for a living. She is a lifelong progressive Democrat.
For all the time I’ve known them, they would dutifully go to the voting booth each election day – and cancel each other out. They could have done that by staying home. Instead, they chose to go vote as a proactive affirmation of political will.
The pattern changed in 2016. He could not in conscience vote for Donald Trump, so he pulled the lever for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. She could not bring herself to vote for Hillary so she wrote in “Bernie Sanders”. (Being California residents, neither of these votes likely figured in determining the outcome.)
Along comes 2020, and guess what?
She votes for Biden. He votes for Trump.
When I spoke with them recently, he revealed, “Right now, I’m supporting Bobby Kennedy, Jr.”
She said, “Me too.”
Same here.
Maybe by tracking my own political journey, you’ll understand why.
Dark Night of the Soul, Dark Knight of the Soulless
Election Day 2016 was for me a dark night of the soul, as in my view we elected a “dark knight of the soulless.” It was my most devastating political moment since November 22, 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated.
As the results came in, I was in such a rage that I had to leave the “party” (which was becoming noticeably unpartylike) and go for a long, long, long walk.
I kept asking myself, how could this have happened?
How could so many people vote for someone who was obviously (to me, anyway), a liar, cheat, and crook who has a history of not paying those who do business with him, and who is a toxic, vindictive divider?
Right after the election, I began an inquiry to address that question.
The first helpful piece I found was from MIT’s Otto Scharmer (Theory U), who wrote that when a system is in decline on its way to failure, there are three responses:
Move forward together.
Go backward to the past.
Muddle through with the status quo.
Bernie Sanders in that election represented the closest to moving forward together – but despite his popularity, he was thwarted every step of the way by the Democratic Party establishment. Hillary represented the status quo that was associated with the system failure itself. With Bernie absent (except in Punxsutawney Phyllis’ futile write-in), Trump was the only candidate who promised change.
(As an aside, when my wife Trudy and I drove cross-country in the early fall of 2016, after the conventions, we saw Bernie signs everywhere, urban, suburban, and rural. We also saw Trump signs, not nearly as many as the Bernie signs. We saw one – one – Hillary sign, and that was outside a Democratic Party headquarters.)
Next, I discovered and watched Oliver Stone’s series that aired originally on Showtime, The Untold History of the United States, and that reminded me of the inconvenient truths American citizens were not supposed to know that offer perspective above and beyond the two-party puppet show. If you want to understand where we are and how we got here, watch this series that was made ten years ago but is still highly pertinent.
The most enlightening, and liberating piece I read however, was a long article written by Andrew Markell (Exile Leadership) with the provocative title, The Progressive / Liberal Mind: Lost, Confused and a Strategic Failure. I suggest you read it.
His pull-no-punches article deconstructs progressive liberalism as an enabler for the “extractor economy”, so that well-meaning progressives can feel good, while keeping the exploiter / extractor system in place. Markell writes, “The Extractor acts. The Liberal / Progressive indulges in a state of consoling illusion.”
Regarding the progressives he writes:
“Their job is to move all the energy and resources for change into a diverse swath of discoordinated efforts loosely bundled around a strategy of resistance. And they have been carefully programmed for this job by the very Extractors they believe, in their hearts and minds, they are fighting against. This widespread confusion and impotence has been carefully orchestrated by the Extractors; they have been owning the rules of the game now for a long, long time.”
It began to become clear to me how virtue devolves into virtue signaling, and identity issues become easier to identify with than facing together the “identical issues” that impact all of us. It was the pandemic year 2020, where this was brought home to me fully, once and for all.
Herd Immunity or Herd Mentality?
At the outset, just like everyone else I knew, I was on board with the “flatten the curve” lockdown.
I wore a mask and those blue rubber gloves to prevent transmission. I tracked the stats daily to see how many new cases and deaths there were. Then two things happened. First, a trusted chiropractor friend told me about an associate of his who had successfully treated 35 cases using natural medicine – not even Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine. No deaths, no hospitalizations, no long COVID. Yet he could not publicly share his protocol for fear of losing his license.
Then I interviewed the late Dr. Andrew Saul, expert on Vitamin C – whose protocol was used in China, then later adopted at hospitals in New York City – and he revealed that his posts regarding Vitamin C had been arbitrarily removed by Facebook.
Shortly after that I heard from another couple, both of whom had been severely poisoned by an outdoor pesticide being used indoors more than 20 years before. She almost died, and because of their already-compromised conditions, they were even more concerned about catching COVID. This was many months before the shot was available, so they began looking for ways to preemptively protect themselves. As soon as they began to research, they realized they – we – were being lied to, as viable treatments that could have saved lives were being suppressed and de-platformed. These people are smart, progressive, not given to “conspiracy theories” or wacky medical treatments. Upon doing their research, they chose to not get the shot – nor did they end up getting the infection.
Given my own experience using holistic medicine and avoiding drugs and surgery successfully, and after consulting with the medical experts I trust, I ended up making the same choice. I was condemned as a selfish “anti-vaxxer”, disinvited to parties, and drummed out of my drumming circle.
In the wake of the 24/7 fear narrative that flew in the face of my own knowledge and experience, I felt like the subject in the classic Solomon Asch “conformity” experiments in the 1950s -- one of the psychology experiments done in the post-World War II era, seeking to explain how otherwise sane humans could fall prey to toxic mass movements like Nazism. In this experiment, first done at Swarthmore in 1951, groups of eight male college students were shown one card with a line on it, and another with three lines of varying lengths. They were then asked to choose the line on the left that was longer than the line on the right. In reality, only one of the eight individuals was the actual “subject.” The other seven were actors, and the seating set-up insured that the subject would answer last.
Subjects completed 18 trials. On the first two trials, both the subject and the actors gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, however, the actors would all give the same wrong answer. You can read about the experiment in more detail here, but here is the bottom line. Only 25% of the participants were able to consistently to stick with their own perception in the face of “social influence”. Concluded Asch, "That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white ‘black’ is a matter of concern."
Have You Worn Your Mask This Week, Ann?
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, I found myself on a Hillary email list, and they thought I was someone named “Ann”. After each debate, I would get a message from Hillary: “Did I make you proud last night, Ann?”
Obviously, as “Ann”, a woman, I was expected to be vicariously inspired by and vote for a fellow woman, Hillary. Makes perfect identity politics sense. Of course, we’ve come a long way since then. “Ann” would now be re-identified as a “person”.
I haven’t been able to unsubscribe from that list, so for the past three years – even recently -- I have gotten messages under the header, “Have you worn your mask this week, Ann?”
Obviously – to me – politicizing mask-wearing in this way has more to do with creating “herd mentality” than herd immunity. It’s a virtue signal that you’re on the right side, even though Dr. Fauci himself admitted before changing his tune that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” – you can see in this article how the narrative machine spun and dismissed this clip.
As I hiked in Berkeley’s Tilden Park and saw people “protecting themselves” from the fresh air all masked up, and individuals alone in cars wearing them as well, I could only conclude this was a symptom of “masked-insanity”.
When Mark Crispin Miller, long-time professor at NYU and renowned expert on propaganda – he wrote the introduction to the 2004 edition of Edward Bernays’ classic book “Propaganda” - was teaching his online class on propaganda during the pandemic, and brought some pre-COVID studies questioning the efficacy of masking for his students to consider, his class was shut down, his colleagues signed a letter condemning him, and his utterances were designated as “explicit hate speech” – and “micro-aggressions”. Article here.
Hate speech. Are you paying attention here? Or should we just ignore it and leave Orwell-enough alone?
It’s been astounding to me how so many of my “tie-dyed-in-the-wool” progressive colleagues who came of age during the Free Speech movement, stood silent in the face of censorship, as the powers in power came up with terms like “mal-information” referring to something that is true, but contradicts the Official Narrative. Not to mention those who celebrated “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and somehow dismiss the right we have to determine which medical treatments we take, particularly when there are no long-term studies regarding safety or efficacy.
Talk about irony deficiency!
Here’s a story that would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragically ironic. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published his book “The Real Anthony Fauci”, a colleague of mine wrote a scathingly negative review. Thing is, he didn’t even read the book! And he said so. Consequently, his audience never discovered that beneath the “anti-vax” label, the book was really about the corporate capture of the regulatory agencies supposed to protect the public.
And you know what has shocked me most? That so few people who bought this narrative seem to be fazed by having their intelligence insulted in this way. I’m old enough to remember when that old Grey Lady, the New York Times, referred to “Mr. Hitler” … “Mr. Stalin” … “Mr. Manson”. Now every time the name Robert Kennedy, Jr. is used, it MUST be preceded by the epithet, “anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist”.
And while my view of “Mr. Trump” hasn’t changed over the past eight years, my view of those who support him has.
In certain important regards, they are awake while progressives are still sleeping. Notice how poorly Jeb Bush did in the primaries in 2016. Ordinary people on the right – those who used to proudly display “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers – came to see that the Bush-Cheney Iraq War was a betrayal of their valor. Today, ironically, it’s not the progressive left (who find themselves in bed with the neoliberal Biden administration) but the populist right who proclaim that our military industrial complex is more concerned about protecting the American empire than protecting you or me. They see the real danger as a top-down imposition of rule by the World Economic Forum, which they recognize as neo-feudalism.
Meanwhile, those on the progressive side, who’ve been exposed to anti-Trump rhetoric 24/7 for more than eight years now, who stay inside their siloed echo-chamber, fail to recognize the other, Orwellian dystopia we face – as we are told what to think and what to say. Indeed, during the depths of the COVID hysteria, there were public and media figures who suggested that people like me – who said no to the shot – should be put in jail or worse. A real-world, real-time, “Step out of line the man come and take you away.”
A People’s “Upwising” vs. Dueling Dystopias
There’s a lot more to say on this issue, that will have to be left for future posts. So I will cut to the chase. Everything I have seen, heard, and processed since that fateful election day has convinced me of one thing:
Above and beyond any of the divisive issues we face, the system itself is the fundamental problem we must confront as a coherent, unified body politic.
We have a one-potty system with two heads, designed to make sure the body politic stays divided so as not to hold our governance accountable – and assures corruption continues unabated, and in fact gets worse.
This dire – new word – “shituation” calls for a people’s “upwising”, where we wake up to how we’ve been divided through fear and anger, wise up to the power we have to move forward together, grow up to become independent thinking adults instead of being spoon-fed the “Babblum” of polarizing narratives, and show up on a new playing field of communication, collaboration, and cooperation.
That is why two years ago, my podcast “podner” Michael Maxsenti and I launched our Front and Center podcast, with three key intentions / principles:
From political battlefields to cooperative playing fields.
Seeking the whole truth together.
Put government on the side of the people.
These three principles seek to awaken us individually and collectively from the trance of separation so that the entity “We the people” – the opening phrase of our Constitution – can finally take its rightful place as the true sovereign of the United States. The Founders of our country have in recent decades been blasted as “white men slave-owners”, so as to diminish the radical and enlightened ideas they brought forth. It’s been a recent trend to “flatten history” and hold those in the past accountable to modern standards earned through blood and activism over the past two centuries.
When we awaken from the trance of separation, the “bi-polar insanity” reinforced by those who benefit by keeping us separate, we recognize we are facing “dueling dystopias”. One seeks to return us to a patriarchal, Christianist “Daddy State” where abortion is illegal under any circumstances, where homosexuality is outlawed, where males dominate – as they cheer the destruction of the physical world and human society as signs of a Savior’s imminent arrival.
The other – the “Mommy State” – seeks to impose an Orwellian system where we get taken care of cradle-to-grave and lose individual agency and sovereignty to the Know-It-All God of Artificial Intelligence, where language police tell us what to say and how to say it, and recalcitrant folks get to be “re-educated” lest they lose their government benefits. The idea of “equality” is twisted and distorted into the Total Equality of Totalitarianism.
To quote the Swami: “Daddy State or Mommy State, either way you end up with Big Brother.”
Now of course, most “normal” humans would find each of these scenarios horrific – but in a system based on narratives, not news, the extremes tend to dominate the conversation. For most people who get a steady diet of “my side” news, when they think of the “other side” they see the extreme stereotypes I suggested above. They may even view the other side as evil incarnate.
The truth is – and this is a happy truth – the vast majority of Americans, and people around the world, long to be liberated from the mutually-destructive tug of war and empower a “tug-of-peace” where we all pull together in the same direction. The better news is those who are ready to step off the “dueling dystopias” battlefield that reinforces our collective impotence and on to a new playing field of mutually-constructive creation now have a place to go.
Which brings us back to the “punchline” I suggested at the beginning of this post.
Moving Forward Together
In contrast to 2016 and 2020, where the political question we asked each other was, “So …which candidate are YOU voting against?” we now have something we can vote FOR rather than having to choose between the “lesser evils” of a sociopathic individual, or an increasingly sociopathic system cloaked in the thin veneer of “democracy”.
There IS a candidate holding the space for “moving forward together” and that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Do I agree with him on all his positions? Of course not. However, I do recognize he brings three “C’s” rarely “seen” in politics of recent decades: Clarity, Context, and Courage.
Surely, you must remember courage – the political virtue that got shot down (literally) more than half century ago by the KKK-KKK (Kill Kennedy, King, Kennedy, and the Kent Kids). Other than a few intrepid souls, like Edward Snowden, the quality of courage has been relegated to cliches from the past. Notice too that the Biden Administration has consistently refused to give RFK, Jr. Secret Service Protection. Does that tell you anything?
The cynical and toxic media could never, ever, ever afford to identify Kennedy’s candidacy as courageous, so it seeks to paint him as some unhinged nutcase. We have become so unaccustomed to courage, that we cannot recognize it when we see it -- until we do.
Kennedy brings another sorely missing piece to the conversation – context. The last thing a battlefield system wants or needs is a contextual meta-view of the situation that encourages conversation and inquiry – the qualities of political intelligence that have just about been drummed out of us by our black vs. white, me vs. you system where we aren’t able to acknowledge anything good coming from the other side, lest we give comfort to the enemy.
Let me ask a frequently unasked question: Why do two differing points of view have to be “enemies”? Why can’ they be “dance partners” helping us uncover a bigger truth that moves us toward more functionality?
This is what the vast majority of us long for in our heart of hearts, and that is the clarity that RFK, Jr. brings to the conversation. Because he speaks clearly and directly to the functional aspects of Trumpism, he is the only candidate who can “metabolize” it – extract the nourishment and leave the rest to the shrinking minority who fit the racist, sexist stereotype.
Imagine the morning after election day 2024, and Kennedy wins the majority of votes. Will there be MAGA riots in the streets? I very much doubt it. That side will be eagerly awaiting a new openness where each side need not be afraid to hear the other. As for progressives, what will they lose? Issues like gun control, legal abortion, crime, homelessness, and immigration will be liberated from captured narratives so that we can collectively address these issues from a “sane and sacred center” – that very likely will result in sane and sacred policies 60% or 70% of us “normies” can agree on.
Most importantly, it will mark a “truce” in the American vs. American uncivil war we have been manipulated to fight. Stepping up and above what “your side” has been relentlessly hammering into your head is an act of courage. It’s the opportunity our Founders dreamed of 250 years ago …the body politic finally achieving political adulthood, so we can be worthy of the responsibility of self-governance.
Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is putting his ass on the line for you and me. Here is his State of the Union address.
If it resonates with you, support him.
We have a chance. We have a choice. Take it.
Thanks for all of this. A few points
My dear friend, Sam Husseini has a project called Vote Pal where people like your couple, team up and vote for another candidate, rather than cancel each other out. I suggested he add a tag line, "Unspoiling the election" or "Hacking the spoiler effect" or "Offramp from two evils" and "Post partisan"
I think Bobby is our best bet for now but needs some serious rehabilitation has he lost many supporters, including people in his campaign, over his positions on Israel and many of us who marched in the Kennedy contingent of a July 4 parade in progressive Takoma Park, MD, active in CHD who got booed. My problem is not as much his positions as his rigidity, mindlessness and refusal to learn or think deeply. His campaign is using rational inside the box strategies and NOT doing things to correct his flaws. I have communicated directly with several people in his campaign and they don't know what they don't know. Hit pieces on him treat him like a cartoon character and are not journalism. There are several specific, plausible things they could do to correct flaws but I see no signs. That said he is our best bet but not without immediate wise interventions.
Also - my tip off to the Covid lies, like with you, was the studies in China and Italy of high dose iV Vitamin C and noticing they were not doing it here. Also I was a fellow at the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopoltiical Conflict at U Penn in 1999.
Check out Sam's strategy. For this to work Bobby needs to change deeply - not just superficially by talking to Israelis and Palestinians.
One more point - My brother who loved Trump (less so now) was open to Bernie, but hated Hillary. It didn't hurt that our father's name was Bernie.