Tell me a story, Bernie: Sanders in Sioux City

In my years of science communication, sometimes contentious, there was one thing everyone agreed on: tell a story. Data dumps don’t work. Use a narrative hook, get the audience engaged, lead them through the whys and hows and leave them with some resolution, a conclusion, and maybe something to leave them asking for more. Every successful communicator knows this through and through.

(You can also go too far this way, though: many TED talks are terrible because they’re all narrative fluff and not enough plausible, substantive content.)

So. Yesterday my wife and I drive off to Sioux City, Iowa to a Bernie Sanders rally. We got in with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, we got good seats up front, we got handed our Bernie signs. We listened to the band, we listened to the warm-up speakers (they were all fine), and then the main act, Bernie Sanders, appeared to wild applause.

He was good. I agreed with his position on every danged thing. But…

There was no story here. None at all. We got shotgunned with blipverts. It was a positive, receptive crowd, so it worked: chains of short soundbites evoked lots of applause, and it was clear that this was a well-honed stump speech that said all the right things to Bernie supporters.

“Medicare for all!” <cheers> “Support LGBTQ rights!” <cheers> “…Women’s right to choose!” <cheers> “Civil rights!” <cheers> You get the idea. Good stuff, I’m tempted to cheer and wave my sign, too, but I’m also feeling some dismay. Where’s the hook? Where’s the story? Where’s the focus? What’s the point? If I go home after this and meet some Biden supporter, how do I explain why Medicare for all matters, what’s the case for it as good policy, how do I justify it over some alternative? What are the alternatives? What are their weaknesses?

Worse, what if I’m arguing with a Warren supporter? How do I differentiate the two? He did make the case that a lot of the radical ideas he brought up decades ago, and a few years ago in the last presidential election, are now mostly mainstream in the Democratic field (with exceptions, obviously). What might make the difference is if Sanders had an emotional case that engaged his listeners with an intellectual punch that followed through. That rally was for people who already supported him, which was fine and valuable and part of the campaign, but where’s the part that reaches out and compels non-Bernie backers to pay attention? That’s needed to grow his support.

You might wonder what it will take to rally the Trumpkins to his cause. Nothing. Screw ’em. They’re a lost cause. There were two people who had the gall to show up in Trump hats, and they were politely escorted out, which is an appropriate response, I think. They were only going to disrupt the event and we might as well recognize that they’re unreachable, and talking to racists isn’t a viable strategy.

But talking to moderate conservatives or conservative Democrats is still on the table, as well as drawing together progressives. Bernie has to work on the persuasion game a bit more. And that means introducing a question or problem, building some empathy for people suffering under the current state of affairs, offering a solution, making a case for how it will work, giving us a compelling explanation that we can take home and share with friends and family.

Soundbites are fine, and needed to hammer blurbs home to a dumbass media. But they need to be imbedded in a constructive framework.

He needs to give us a story.

They all do.

Madness in Sioux City!

This morning, I’m driving off to Sioux City, Iowa for a Bernie Sanders rally, because my wife really wants to see him, and it’s unlikely he’ll be visiting Morris. It’s a 4 hour drive, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since we’re used to having to drive 3 hours to get to just about anywhere. It’s still going to rip the heart out of my day, just to listen to an old man rant at the system. I could do that home, alone, with a mirror!

I’d be OK with President Sanders. I’d prefer a President Warren, but I’d be content with anyone taking a progressive step forward. Right now my second worse outcome is President Biden, and that’s the establishment Democrats want to foist off on me.

My worst outcome is that Biden is the nominee, and Sanders decides to run as an independent, and we get President Raunchy Oompa-loompa again, and that is my one major reservation about Sanders.

Nothing like a little fearmongering to drag the citizenry into war

Life Magazine indulged in a little propaganda in 1916 to persuade the citizenry that we ought to be involved in World War I. If we weren’t, why, the Germans would invade from the east and the Japanese from the west, and we good Americans would be confined to a …reservation in the desert, a prospect offered without irony.

Curiously, Canada is labeled as a land of barbarians. Canada joined the war effort in 1914, though, before the US did. I’m not sure what they’re implying.

Meineapolis/St Karl are nice touches, as is Nagaseattle.

A series of unfortunate life-choices

I remember Katie McHugh mainly as a flash-in-the-pan obnoxious anti-semitic Islamaphobe — someone who got a job in the racist hothouses of Breitbart and the Daily Caller, made a little noise with some extremely hateful tweets, like a kind of mini-Katie Hopkins, and then got fired as the alt-right strained to appear a little less thuggish (they failed). Now Rosie Gray has a thorough article on her history, and it’s a sad, dismal story all around. McHugh regrets her role in the alt-right, although I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a genuine repentance — it’s more like she regrets how she has fucked up her own life by embracing a series of bad actors.

Her journey to remorseful failure begins in college. She attended a small liberal arts college where she stood out alone as a far-right firebrand, which was sufficient to win the attention of the far-right media. I’ve seen that happen at my university. Yes, you can stand out by acting the colossal regressive on a campus full of progressive, optimistic, intelligent students, but while it may appeal to the ego in the short run, it’s going to lead to catastrophe eventually. We had a student here who made a reputation for himself writing ugly crap for the alternative newspaper (not as ugly as McHugh’s stuff, though), which led to him making connections with James O’Keefe, which led to him getting arrested in a break-in in Louisiana. It’s not a great career trajectory.

McHugh’s story is similar. She leapt from writing for the college newspaper to working with Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the usual upstart conservative rags, and making connections with major racist white nationalist figures. The pipeline from young conservative to Trumpian conservative is apparent in her history, and she also exposes the real nastiness in their beliefs that these organizations try to hide.

The alt-right was at the time all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with high IQ confers them with some kind of super-ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”

The emphasis on intelligence confers the whole enterprise with a pseudo-intellectual veneer, and it also provides white supremacists with a way to elide accusations of white supremacy. According to their argument, they can’t be white supremacists because they say that Jews and people of East Asian descent have a higher average IQ. This both whitewashes their bigotry and feeds into the alt-right’s victim mentality, especially as it relates to Jews. The work of the anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald is a cornerstone of the alt-right movement. His Culture of Critique series argues that Jews, using their higher intelligence, employed Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” to perpetuate themselves and win out over other groups. MacDonald blames Jews for the very existence of anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism is a justified response to Jews’ plot to run the world.

If they’re so smart, though, how is it that looking at the details of their groups exposes great pulsing veins of absurdity? This is almost funny.

Their differences went deeper — and stranger — than that, and allowed McHugh to see inside a truly bizarre subculture. McHugh was a Catholic, while DeAnna was a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a group based near Lynchburg that was focused around a neopagan theology based on self-improvement and feats of strength, as well as coded white nationalism. The idea was to cast off the bounds of modern Judeo-Christian society and find a way back to pre-Christian northern European culture. McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.

One part of McHugh’s disaffection with the movement was over such silliness. She couldn’t accept it, so she reverted to…Catholicism. More absurdity, different flavor.

McHugh recognizes now how hard she screwed herself over. She’s working as a waitress in a small town somewhere unnamed, and struggling to keep up with her medical bills (she’s diabetic). She has regrets and advice, and not much else.

At age 28, she has made herself unemployable in the career field she chose — even on its fringes. She perpetually struggles to support herself financially. It’s easy to see how someone in McHugh’s position might regret the path she took that got her here. Would she regret it if she still had friends, still had a writing job?

McHugh has a message for the people on a similar path, though, one that can be considered regardless of whether you believe she’s actually changed.

“People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system, they have no chance, and they’re just harmful,” McHugh said. “There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people, and tell your story, and say, ‘Get out while you can.’”

Well, we can hope some college students somewhere read about her and recognize that hate is loud and gets you noticed, but it doesn’t make you a better person.

I am so tired of religious conservatives calling atheists immoral

Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.

Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.

Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.

Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.

He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.

You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.

Nope.

The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.

Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.

Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.

There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.

“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.

“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.

“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”

“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”

Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”

I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.

Wow, Jacob Wohl is really working hard to be the poster boy for Dunning-Krueger

Wohl is just full of ambitious plans, most of them revolving around presenting himself as a Machiavellian genius, despite being the dumbest man on the internet. One of his recent schemes was a company, the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence (ACPI), which would make money by manipulating political betting pools.

Bumbling conservative provocateur Jacob Wohl pitched investors this spring on a scheme to use fraudulent news stories to manipulate political betting markets, according to a fundraising document obtained by The Daily Beast.

The document indicates that Wohl attempted to raise $1 million to fund the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence, which he claimed would “make shit up” to profit from bets on political races and would suppress Democratic turnout in 2020.

“Make shit up” is a direct quote from his plea. It’s also the centerpiece of his cunning plan — all he had to do was lie, lie, lie, and nobody would ever notice his reputation as a liar.

“With a superior handle on American cultural nuances ACPI will be able to have a devastating impact on Democrat candidates,” the document reads.

The group also planned to create “high-impact political publicity stunts” to affect political races. The pitch praises two recent headline-grabbing conservative efforts—the GoFundMe campaign to fund the border wall and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York office—as activities to emulate.

“ACPI plans to execute similar sophisticated and impactful stunts as frequently as possible in order to influence political outcomes in the favor of our backers during the 2020 election cycle,” the pitch reads.

Wohl really needs to crack open a dictionary. Words he needs to learn the definition of are: intelligence, nuance, sophisticated. Everything he does is the opposite of those.

Also in his catalog of stupid schemes, he decided that Pete Buttigieg was a major danger for Trump, so his goal was to kneecap him.

That scenario jibes with how the Buttigieg smear circulated on Monday. After the sexual assault allegation appeared in a vague Medium post under Kelly’s name, the unverified claim was quickly trumpeted by a number of right-wing blogs, including Big League Politics, The Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars. From there, it circulated widely on conservative Twitter accounts and other blogs for hours until the accuser denied the allegations and The Daily Beast revealed that Wohl and Burkman were accused of soliciting men to make up stories about the candidate.

A source told The Daily Beast that Wohl and Burkman said the goal of that scheme was to take down the Democrat who poses a threat to President Donald Trump’s re-election. The apparent aim of ACPI’s plan was profit.

Fool. His pointless ploy was to no avail, because as we all know, you only have to wait for a Democrat to open their mouth before they’ll kneecap themselves. As Mayor Pete promptly did, saying something idiotic about vaccinations.

These exemptions include medical exemptions in all cases (as in cases where it is unsafe for the individual to get vaccinated), and personal/religious exemptions if states can maintain local herd immunity and there is no public health crisis.

Vaccinations are to prevent that public health crisis — complacency and obliging faith-based rejection of good medicine, as Buttigieg is advocating, is what leads to them. His statement is simply political pandering to both sides.

I married a Russian bot

I tend to be loud and angry in my political views, I freely admit. My wife, on the other hand, is more subtle and open to exploring other political perspectives, but she is also deeply concerned about the direction the country is taking. She’s been more active in local political organizing than I am (no one wants me in their campaigns, for some reason), and she’s also been quietly working in online communities. She’s far more interested in, and better at, healing the rifts and dispelling the nastiness, so, for instance, she’s been posting in some of the online fora in a positive way. She’s an advocate for Bernie Sanders, but she only says good things about other candidates and does not engage in trying to tear down Warren or even Biden.

I brought her her breakfast this morning, and she was shocked. She could not believe it. She had just been banned from Democratic Underground. She just ignored my lovely breakfast. I think her feelings were hurt.

I couldn’t believe it either. My breakfast was healthy and delicious, and Mary is a gentle vision of sweetness and light online, kind of the opposite of me. I guess DU is committed to fractiousness, though. Either that or they were unable to believe someone who wasn’t cutthroat and vicious was human.

I should have noticed that she said something strange like “doobryuh ootruh” when I brought her plate in, though. She also seems to be drinking a lot of machine oil lately. Should I worry?

Not subtle at all

Here’s a fascinating 18th century political cartoon:

There’s a short essay to go with it.

One could provoke debate about the sexualized imagery throughout the cartoon, the purpose of a racialized America, the ways in which imagery of class, race, and gender intersect, and the place of the “civilized” European versus the “natural” American in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Does the artist believe Britain holds the moral right; does the cartoon display America’s winning ideology? Which should win, or who shall?

One could. I’m just overwhelmed with the freight of associations here.

Jacob Wohl does it again

Fresh from his expedition to the savage wilderness of Minneapolis, rested from the harrowing experience of faking death threats from gay Hispanic diversity coordinators, Jacob Wohl launched himself fearlessly into his new mission, to defeat the candidacy of Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg by hook or crook.

Far-right activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman helped coordinate a fake campaign against Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg through a Medium post on Monday that accused the mayor of sexual assault.

The two men used fake social media accounts for a 19-year-old Ferris State University student named Hunter Kelly on Monday without his knowledge or consent to publish a vague post accusing the presidential hopeful of assault this past February.

It’s too bad that Don Knotts died, because he’d be the natural choice to play Wohl as a bumbling villain in the Disneyfied live-action movie of this caper. Their patsy, Kelly Hunter, has since released a statement disavowing the whole mess.

I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED

It’s important for everyone to know that I was not sexually assaulted and would never falsely accuse anyone.

To keep it brief for now- I was approached by a political figure to come to DC to discuss political situations from the standpoint of a gay Republican. When I arrived they discussed Peter Buttigieg and started talking about how they would be working a campaign against him.

I went to bed and woke up to a fake Twitter @RealHunterKelly and an article that I in no way endorsed or wrote.

I have since left and am working on a formal statement to give to everyone including the Buttigieg family.

Thank you for standing behind me and knowing that I would never accept or allow any of this.

You can’t be too bright to be a gay Republican, but even worse is to be the kind of liar who manufactures transparently phony hit pieces like Wohl and Burkman.

Burkman would be played by Tim Conway.