558 Comments

We truly do not know how the midterms will shake out, and we can’t use any of the normal methods of prediction because there is nothing normal about any of this.

But we have had a few wins this week. And it is important to recognize that even if just for the morale boost.

Expand full comment

Because you are such an important truth teller in this incredibly lie-filled country, your letters should be read by every American, Professor. Thanks so much for this work and for bringing light to the shadowy areas that truly threaten to destroy the very fabric of our nation. I fear the brainwashing of the cult-followers is so complete that even when confronted with truth they will never accept it. The normalization of ugly behavior, disregard for truth on every level, acceptance of complete selfishness in behavior by “public servants” is intolerable-but can it be reversed? Can we ever come back from this? I truly fear for our nation if enough people who represent we the people do not put a stop to it. Will our votes be enough? I hope so, but I just don’t know...😞. Your telling of the truth brings some hope-thank you for that. Really, thank you.

Expand full comment

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the end game for Russia was to cause discord among the people. A very good way to weaken the United States.

Also John Eastman really is living in a different world. Expecting Trump to pay a bill.! Not sure where he has been. Had to laugh at that.

Expand full comment

The well has been poisoned, and once this happens, it is a monumental task to exhort the toxin.

Today we live in a post truth world, where the Alex Joneses can and will attempt to create an alternative reality. Have you tried using facts and evidence to convince those who believe in the Big Lie that it doesn’t exist? Good luck with that.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

And remember the words of fifty years ago from Pogo:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Smart little possum.

Expand full comment

Thank you, Heather! What still does not make sense to me is how obvious and open Trump was about his alliance with Russia and yet we continued down that road in 2016..

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” Did anyone else wonder at the time where this was going?  I remember being quite stuck by it.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022

Thank you Heather.

“The ideal subject” for such a dictator, Arendt wrote, was not those who were committed to an ideology, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.”

I have family and friends who are squarely in this camp. With them, there’s nothing to discuss. :’-(

And then there’s this horrifying premise…

“We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...”

Will the outing of Alex Jones change the state of our union? Would convicting tfg or defeating Putin?

Expand full comment

"I wonder if reality is starting to reassert itself."

What a sentence! This letter is masterful, tying together so many related things: Putin's sweeping efforts to maim the U.S. with Trump and through wave after wave of misinformation, the iconic double speak of "1984" that seems more plausible with every passing day, the perpetuation of the Big Lie, the evil and cruel buffoon Alex Jones, and Karl Rove (unnamed) boasting in essence about creating false realities for the George W. Bush administration.

Truth creates reality. Perhaps the most shocking development of my long life is the diminution of truth. In other words, the decline of basic honesty. Not just in government but is so many aspects of everyday life. Lying has become like breathing for an astounding number of people. Not the occasional white lie, but blatant dishonesty — with never a penalty.

I hope "reality starting to reassert itself" means few liars will lead our nation and states.

Expand full comment

If there's one guy on the right for whom Clarence Darrow's famous statement, "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great relish" applies, it is Alex Jones. I would love to read in his obituary that he was taken by persons unknown to a remote mountain cabin, where over the course of about 30 days, he finally met an "excruciating end ." and that he was "howling in the deepest pain" as he expired. It wouldn't be a fair exchange for all the pain and hurt he has spread throughout society, but it would be a good start. And then leave the body dangling by one foot, for all the carrion eaters to dispose of.

The only person I hate worse than Alex Jones is Fatso Fatass.

Expand full comment

Do Americans know what reality is? Let’s hope that reality can be based on facts. Thank goodness for the January 6 committee and their work to get to facts and let ordinary citizens know what has been happening.

Expand full comment

I found a special gift in my inbox today. It was a newsletter written by our other “daughter”. Dr. Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and was a “big sister” to our daughters and son as they were growing up.

I decided to share some extracts from the newsletter here, with the thought that something she has written might spark some fresh initiatives within our digital community.

I hope you find the reading worth the time spent.

Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.

— Ruha Benjamin

Seeding the Future <> August Edition

“We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story,” so says cultural historian Thomas Berry. In part, I think what it means to be “between stories” is that while more people may recognize past wrongs, we struggle to live in Right Relation.

The Old Stories, in my view, are those scripted by colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy… master narratives like Manifest Destiny, “survival of the fittest,” and the Doctrine of Discovery. The latter refers to a principle of international law issued by the Catholic Church in the 15th century – a doctrine that gave Christian nations license to seize and colonize any land they found occupied by non-Christians and to convert and enslave the people already living there. Talk about a deadly story of entitlement and domination (and how different it is from Star Trek’s Prime Directive!). Nevertheless, those cast as victims in the master narrative have always resisted.

Just a few days ago, a large procession of Indigenous protestors made their way inside Canada’s national shrine in Quebec City, where Pope Francis was scheduled to hold mass as part of his nationwide tour. He was there to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church in the country’s brutal “Indian residential school” system in which an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were stolen from their families, physically and sexually abused, with at least 4,000 dying under horrendous conditions.

Those gathered in silent protest on July 28 held aloft a giant banner that read, in bold red and black letters, “Rescind the Doctrine.”

From Latin, rescindere, “annul, cancel, abolish, remove by cutting off,” and scindere “to cut, rend, tear asunder, split, split up, part, divide, separate.”

Rescind, not simply regret.

Abolish, not simply apologize.

Tear asunder, not simply empathize. Why?

Because unless the old scripts animated by false notions of superiority and inferiority are ripped to shreds, we will be caught in an endless purgatory: forced to inhabit the same tired roles as we advance predictable and deadly plots. Instead, let us clear the way for new stories! Let’s follow the example of those Indigenous protestors who demand that we smash death-making structures and craft new ones that give us life.((O))

OUTTAKES & ARCHIVES

“Chile has a new best seller!” This is how a recent article in Nature described the final draft of Chile’s new constitution. Since it was finalized on 4 July, the document “has commanded massive numbers of online downloads and crowds waiting to buy paperback copies.”

In the Intro to Viral Justice, I briefly discuss this historic rewriting of the Chilean constitution: Consider what began with mass protests over social and environmental injustices in 2019, where Indigenous communities led the charge for a nationwide “reinvention.” Hundreds of thousands of Chileans mobilized, and in late 2021, they elected 155 representatives to completely rewrite their dictatorship-era constitution amid a “climate and ecological emergency.”

An Indigenous language and literature professor, Elisa Loncón Antileo, a representative of the Mapuche people, was elected president of the constitutional convention. She and the other participants posed fundamental questions that citizens of most nations have probably never considered:

“Should the country retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?”

This is world-building on a grand scale with local communities and Indigenous values guiding every step—a process of re-worlding that doesn’t try to smother differences, one that envisions a “pluriverse” rather than a universe, welcoming heterogeneity rather than enforcing singularity. As professor of Africana studies, Greg Carr, tweeted last December,

“The fight to rewrite Chile’s national constitution should be leading global conversations & everyday talk alike. The people have forced a social structure confrontation, with structural inequities and our planetary environmental emergency at the center. We should all be watching.”

Watching, yes, and asking how we might rewrite our own constitutions; how we might even reconstitute the outworn political imagination that carved up the planet into nation-states to begin with… “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens,” the Baha’i Writings remind us.

This week, as part of a new project I’m working on, I have been looking at how artists and architects have been reimagining borders and belonging. I am reading Ronald Rael’s book Borderwall as Architecture, in which he has repurposed dozens of different walls and structures along the Mexico/U.S. border, asking the question at the heart of all world-building: “What if…?”

Rather than electrifying the border wall to kill anyone trying to cross, as presidential hopeful Hermain Cain proposed in 2011, “what if some of the funds currently used to maintain the borderwall were reallocated for the construction of energy infrastructure?”

For the same amount of money used to build an 87-mile stretch of wall between Nogales and Douglas, Arizona, $333.5 million total, solar farms producing 60 megawatts of electricity could power 40,000 households for “energy-hungry cities of the Southwest.” This and Rael’s many other designs remind us to not only critique the world as it is, but work to reimagine it as it could be. ((O))

Each month I spotlight an organization or initiative seeding justice, usually in a locale where I’m speaking, virtually or in-person. Looking ahead to the event above, I want to shout out ColorCoded LA!

ColorCoded is a space that “centers historically-excluded people in the co-teaching, co-creation, and co-ownership of new technologies.” The ColorCoded team utilizes radical imagination to envision tangible strategies for building a world where Black and Indigenous people are truly free, and where regenerative systems are in place with the intention of caring for the land, water, plants, and animals.

Their work affirms that #TechIsNotNeutral and that #EverythingIsByDesign. By facilitating workshops, participating in projects, and building tools, Color Coded is designed to help us “keep our digital bodies safe.”

Expand full comment

One way to look at it is that reality never stops asserting itself, but there are lulls, some times in terms of human's sense of time, extended lulls in which it is possible for humans to pretend that something else entirely is going on.

Reality is indifferent to our games, of course, and will go on and do whatever reality does regardless. If that involves rolling over and flattening fools, so be it. The sad thing is when fools are in charge of the ship of state, and steer into an all -too-real iceberg, a great many innocents tend to go down with them, not all of them even human.

Reality can be a robust, if temperamental, ally when when we choose to play by reality-based rules;, but sooner or later, proves to not suffer fools gladly.

Expand full comment

Does Alex Jones have the potential to be the Rosetta Stone that unlocks a flood of indictments? His allegiance seems to be to himself, not Trump or GOP per se. Looks like he may have (a lawyer needs to compare word for word to see if he said X and -X unambiguously, we don't know until we see the materials side by side) multiple perjury counts coming both from state court in Texas and perhaps Congressional Committee, perhaps a Contempt of Court conviction for lying about Discovery materials to the judge's face...before we get to any potential but as of now unknown criminal activity related to the breach of the Capitol (but NYTimes reports that texts expose Jones to criminal liability) found on that phone. (I am surprised lawyers didn't claim privilege, though maybe a bogus claim, just to tie it up for a while). Jones is a guy who touches sooo many actors in the Big Lie and Insurrection who maybe does not have inside planning knowledge, but saw heard enough to convict those that do, if he were to cooperate. Once the conviction co-operation ball overcomes its potentially immovable initial inertia, it is hard to stop!

Expand full comment

Thanks for the Hannah Arendt quotes. When totalitarian rulers (and wanabees) condition their followers to reject objective reality, it's a short hop to "believe only me."

In the hundred days to come we must confront these liars with the truth and point out their lies again and again and again, right to their lying faces.

Expand full comment

The truth will set you free...

Has a nice ring to it, yes?

Expand full comment

"We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...”"

That was the operating principle of the entire Republican party once Trump won the primary. They served to spin his bad impulses into worse facts on the ground. To use their populist base to serve their plutocrat paymasters.

Of course the GOP pump was earlier primed to serve Big Lier Reagan (later repackaged as a gently used 'fabulist') in the same way. It goes back to the Big Lie of racial superiority and the Big Lie of American Christianity that great wealth is a demonstration of great godly virtue. Repackaged as 'trickle down' economics. Which perpetuates the privileges of unearned wealth and the burden of undeserved poverty. Along racial divides.

Expand full comment