Mountain Dreamers
Vincent Fichot- A French father, derivatives trader, smart and committed father is going on hunger strike to see his children. Vincent has even spoken with President Macron- and still no movement to see his kids.
My heart is with you Vincent. Bravo!
The lack of moral courage in government, courts and everyday people is incredible. They will not stop such an obvious tragedy. The
Read France24 here.
Brig, Soren and Reidar-
It must appear somedays that you are living in a virtual reality. Be Brave, find your manhood. love papa.
Watch Jack Murphy and Jesse Kelly ruminate on the value of fatherhood and masculinity in an age where society constantly subverts the meaning and purpose of manhood.
This is not brave- or anything like the Gendarme in last post. Beware of French Health Service. We know all to well what happened with the French Committee on Public Safety.
Issued on: 26/05/2021 – 20:23
Text by:Sarah Elzas with RFIFollow3 min
France’s National academy of medicine recommends making the Covid-19 vaccine compulsory for a range of professions in order to reach enough of a herd immunity in France to protect against increasingly contagious variants.
Vaccinating essential workers, along with children and adolescents, is the only way to achieve “enough of a collective immunity to control the pandemic” the Academy wrote this week in a statement entitled “‘Obligation’ is not a bad word”.
Measures like wearing masks and confinements will be “insufficient” to control the spread of the virus over the long term, says the Academy, and they are “overwhelming, in particular socially”.
In order to achieve herd immunity, 90 per cent of the adult population, or 80 per cent of the entire population, including children, must be vaccinated.
The idea of making the Covid-19 vaccination compulsory is not new, but now that there are enough vaccinations to go around in France, it is feasible, and necessary in the face of vaccine sceptics.
“We believe there are a certain number of people who are reticent, up to 30 per cent of the population. And 70 per cent immunity is not enough in the face of new variants,” Christine Rouzioux, a professor of virology at Paris-Descartes university, and a member of the National academy of medicine, told RFI.
Compulsory vaccination would help France avoid a fourth wave of the virus in the autumn.
The Academy recommends a progressive approach, starting with so-called ‘essential’ workers, like teachers, public employees and healthcare providers.
Reticence
“A certain number of health workers do not want to get vaccinated, notably workers in care homes,” said Rouzioux, who notes outbreaks of the virus in retirement homes where all the residents have been vaccinated.
Other professions in contact with the public, like supermarket employees, hotel workers and those working in sports and cultural institutions, should be required to get vaccinated, as should university students.
“Imposing it on students would assure a normal university school year,” said Rouzioux. “It is true that young people have trouble understanding the need to vaccinate, as they get less sick than older people. I understand it. But the virus circulates among young people and adolescents. As long as the vaccine is largely accessible, we should take advantage of it rather than act against it.”
The government for now has ruled out making the vaccine compulsory.
France has notoriously notoriously high vaccine scepticism, though generally high vaccination because many are compulsory. Since 2018 children must be vaccinated against 11 illnesses, including polio and measles, in order to start school.
For Rouzioux, making the Covid-19 vaccine compulsory would make public health sense.
“There are mandatory vaccines. It’s a decision to protect the population. It’s not a privation of liberty,” she said. “Vaccinations are individual and collective protections.”
Watch this French Cop. He is brilliant and brave.
And watch how the VIOLENT woman is hysterical and fragile. She is not a warrior. She is fragile and weak, yet she is the criminal and violent.
Open your mind- DANGEROUS people are typically weak and fragile. Not strong. It is opposite of what they teach you.
Read Angelo essay here:
Over the past fifty years the rules of public and even of private life in America have well-nigh reversed, along with the meaning of common words, e.g. marriage, merit, and equality. Social inequality, even more than economic, has increased as personal safety and freedom have plummeted. People are subject to arbitrary power as never before. No one voted for these changes. Often, as with the negation of the Defense of Marriage Act and of the referendum-approved California constitutional provision to the same effect, these reversals expressly negated law. Just as often, as in the case of our mounting restrictions on freedom of speech, they have happened quite outside any law. Altogether, they have transformed a constitutional republic into an oligarchy at war with itself as well as with the rest of society. The U.S. Constitution and the way of life lived under it are historical relics.
Our ruling class transformed America’s regime by instituting a succession of scams, each of which transferred power and wealth to themselves. These scams’ blending into one another compel us to recognize them, individually and jointly, as the kind of governance that Augustine called “magnum latrocinium,” thievery writ large. Thievery of power even more than of money—colloquially, scamocracy.
Neither Aristotle nor anybody else ever counted scamocracy in their category of regimes because rule by fraud exists naturally only as regimes reach the terminal stages of their corruption.
Power over substance
How did they do it? Consider: Does the ruling class’s shutdown of America, supposedly to save us from Covid-19, have anything in common with its campaign for all manner of racial preferences in the name of racial equality? How about with its campaign against fossil fuels to save us from Global Warming? What does it have in common with establishing the proper relationship between the sexes by promoting divorce and abortion, by presuming men guilty of sexual assault, and by redefining sex? Does it resemble in any way the dumbing down of American education that resulted from the manifold increases in educational spending that promised the opposite? And could any of these ever-so-diverse campaigns possibly be related to the War on Poverty that swelled America’s underclass, or to the post-1945 wars that produced defeat upon defeat but filled corporate boards with retired generals?
What do all these preoccupations that have dominated American life the last half century have in common? All—the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam—have been ginned up by the same people, America’s bipartisan ruling class. All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.
Not incidentally, somehow, all these scams ended up putting more power and money into the very same hands—their hands—while diminishing the rest of Americans’ freedoms and prospects. Accident, comrade? No. Taking valuable things under false pretenses for the falsifiers’ benefit is the very definition of fraud, of scam. The scams that have flowed from society’s commanding heights are products of our ruling class’s ever-growing internal solidarity, of confidence in its own superiority and entitlement to rule. They are the other side of its intellectual/moral isolation, and of its co-option of ever-less competent members—hence of its corruption. Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on behalf of the scamocracy, you may be sure that person is a fraud.
Intersectional politics
Support for locking down Americans in the name of saving us from the Covid-19 virus instantly became as integral to the Establishment Left, i.e. to the Democratic Party, as belief in abortion, global warming, open borders, and as censorship of whatever they choose to call “hate speech.” The ruling class’s manifold components have integrated the Covid’s health challenge into their identities just as they adopted each other’s demonologies and demands as their own. Readily, naturally, activists for BLM, Feminism, Global Warming, etc. adopted support of all manner of socioeconomic restrictions on the pretend basis of saving lives from Covid as if it were their own cause. And vice versa. BLM, for example, aims to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” to dismantle what it calls “cisgender privilege,” calls itself “queer‐affirming,” and commits itself to increasing federal funding for abortion—never mind that abortion kills black babies predominantly. That is no part of black people’s concerns. Rather, it is the practical manifestation of the latter-day Left’s theory of “intersectionality.”
By the same token, every one of the ruling class’s constituencies, the disparity of their foci notwithstanding, has adopted as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties. That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the entire ruling class free from the voters.
The Covid event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the ruling class’s sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables. In a Tweet, North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper “a face covering signifies strength and compassion for others,” adding that “wearing one shows that you actually care about other people’s health.” On the same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool. … Wearing a mask is officially cool.” Anthony Fauci, who in March had told 60 Minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.” Rioters also wear masks as signs of social responsibility!
At its core, the ruling class politics of Covid-19 is now no more about public health than environmentalism is about the environment, or Feminism is about doing good to women, or BLM is about saving black lives, or the education establishment is about cognition, or the national security establishment is about public safety. None of these causes are about their purported objective than communism was about equality or the proletariat. Lenin made clear in “What Is To Be Done?” (1902) that the revolution is all about power for “the vanguard of the proletariat.” The Party. Like communism, each of today’s revolutionary movements is based on its own lie, and all are all scams—the purpose of which is to transfer ever more power to the ruling class —specifically to its “vanguard,” the Democratic Party.
Brig, Soren and Reidar-
100 years ago today, a mass murder of black occurred in Tulsa Oklahoma due to false allegation of a black guy against a white woman. More than 300 died. It is was racial hysteria. There was NO CRIME.
Today we are in a similar situation. The media is gaslighting you with GeorgeFloyd, and #BLM riots. Soon there will be a massacre in a white neighborhood with all this narrative about White Supremacy. It does not exist, but the violence against whites is very soon happening.
The Tulsa Race Massacre: A Mindless Rage of Collectivist Groupthink
In a single horrifying night in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, nearly 40 square blocks were burned to the ground, nearly 300 people died, and at least 9,000 African Americans were left homeless. The dead, however, will not be forgotten.
On June 1 of next year, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, will mark the centennial of a catastrophe—an entirely man-made one. More specifically, an entirely thought-made one. It will be very painful to acknowledge. In its immediate aftermath, in fact, Tulsans of a few generations ago tried hard to ignore and forget it. But you can’t learn from history if you choose to pretend it never happened. So the story must and shall be told.
The event was a single night of violent, race-inspired rage that left hundreds dead and caused property damage in the millions of dollars. For years, the event was known as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, but in recent years it was given a new name: the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Readers can determine for themselves which name is more appropriate, but here is a description of the event from historian Scott Ellsworth:
Overnight, over one thousand homes occupied by blacks had been destroyed in Tulsa. The Greenwood business district had been put to the torch. The city had been placed under martial law. Many, both black and white, had died or were wounded. The history of the Tulsa race riot is but one chapter in the troubled history of racial violence in America. In terms of density of destruction and ratio of casualties to population, it has probably not been equaled by any riot in the United States in this century.
A thriving black business district, labeled “Black Wall Street” by renowned educator Booker T. Washington, was located along and near Greenwood Avenue. Historian Ellsworth notes that this part of Tulsa included schools, a hospital, two newspapers, 13 churches, three fraternal lodges, 11 rooming houses and four hotels, two theaters, numerous retail stores from restaurants to billiard halls, and a public library.
Today, the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa describes it as “a hotbed for jazz and blues, and the site where Count Basie first encountered big-band jazz,” as well as “the richest African-American neighborhood in North America.”
An oil boom in Oklahoma fueled a massive expansion of the region’s growth at the turn of the century. On the eve of statehood in 1907, Oklahoma’s wells were out-producing those of every other state or territory. One stunning measure of growth was Tulsa’s population, which in 1900 was a mere 1,390. A decade later it stood at 18,182.
By the time of the 1921 riot, Tulsa had soared to an astonishing 98,874—more than 70 times its size of just 20 years earlier, an increase virtually unmatched by any other town in America. Blacks comprised just under 12 percent of the city in 1921 (about 11,000 people), concentrated both by law and white racism to the area north of the St. Louis & San Francisco (the “Frisco”) Railroad tracks.
In practical terms, Tulsa was two towns in one; at night, whites stayed home south of the tracks, while blacks retreated to their homes just a few blocks north. Historian Randy Krehbiel writes:
Most black Tulsans made their living…as domestic workers, cooks, waiters, porters, shoeshines, laborers, truck drivers. Some were in the building trades, skilled and semiskilled: plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, bricklayers. They worked for whites, by and large, but were not bound to them. They could leave a job they did not like, could spend money with whomever they wanted. Mostly, they spent it in Greenwood [the Black Wall Street area]. It was not that downtown businesses necessarily barred African Americans; some did, especially restaurants and hotels, and stores that did not outright refuse service to blacks often humiliated them. But, in the end, most were more than willing to take black people’s money.
Racism, the undeniable backdrop and precursor to the violence of June 1921, wasn’t new to Oklahoma. The territorial legislature had passed its first Jim Crow laws in 1890, years before achieving statehood in 1907. Later, the state even became the first in the country to segregate its telephone booths by statute. Legislators in 1910 passed a law intending to prevent Oklahoma blacks from voting, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court five years later.
Local ordinances often made it difficult for blacks to start a business or patronize white enterprises or to avail themselves of public services. Some whites resented it when they saw many black families prospering despite the legal and cultural obstacles.
Racism tends to be tempered in free markets because it’s economically disadvantageous to turn down customers, workers, goods, or services for reasons of color.
Let’s not pick on Oklahoma, however. The economic progress blacks were making around the country at the turn of the century prompted a white backlash almost everywhere. Racism tends to be tempered in free markets because it’s economically disadvantageous to turn down customers, workers, goods, or services for reasons of color. So racists often turned to the government to do the prejudice-based segregating for them. Northern cities like Boston and Chicago were not immune to this hateful impulse.
Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that during this period racism and segregation were promoted by the president of the United States, “progressive” Woodrow Wilson. During his administration, black postal workers across the country lost their jobs, and federal agencies adopted segregation. Wilson even hosted a screening at the White House of D. W. Griffith’s pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation—and boasted afterward about how good it was.
The spark that set Tulsa on fire involved a 19-year-old black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland who worked in the white section of town. By arrangement, he had permission to use a men’s room in the Drexel Building where a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page, operated the elevator. The two often spoke to each other, but on May 30, 1921, between the first and third floors, Sarah let out a scream. Some, including Rowland, say he tripped and fell against her. Sarah herself was ambivalent and later refused to press charges. In any event, though the girl was completely unharmed, her cry was heard by a store clerk, and it produced a quick cascade of events.
White mobs invaded the black district, torching businesses, homes, and churches and shooting men, women, and children in cold blood.
Rowland was arrested the next morning and remanded to the Tulsa County Jail. That same day, the Tulsa Tribune headlined its editorial, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” A menacing crowd of armed whites surrounded the jail on the evening of May 31 to demand that Rowland be turned over to them. The sheriff refused. Seeing a black man in the street with a pistol, a white civilian tried to take the firearm away. The black man refused to disarm, insisting on his right to bear a weapon in self-defense. In the subsequent scuffle, the pistol discharged. Then all hell broke loose. In short order, Tulsans shot fellow Tulsans, many hundreds in all. White mobs invaded the black district, torching businesses, homes, and churches and shooting men, women, and children in cold blood.
In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, almost all of Black Wall Street and nearby blocks of black residences became—well, just black. Black from the ash and soot of burned-out buildings. Gone were such popular landmarks as the Dreamland Theater, a 900-seat auditorium owned by respected black entrepreneurs John and Loula Williams. Even the new, impressive Mt. Zion Church, dedicated only weeks before, was reduced to embers by white mobs.
One story I’ll never be able to put out of my mind is that of a gentle and extraordinary physician, 40-year-old Dr. Andrew C. Jackson. The Mayo brothers (of Mayo Clinic fame) regarded him as “the most able Negro surgeon in America.” He tended to patients of all races. Some of the surgical tools he invented are, with modern modifications, still in use in hospitals today.
The mayhem of that terrible night was nearly finished when, according to a white neighbor friend, Dr. Jackson emerged from his smoldering home with his hands in the air. “That’s Dr. Jackson! Don’t shoot him!” shouted one of several young whites who were still roaming the streets. It didn’t matter. Two of them aimed and fired their pistols. Three bullets in him, Jackson crumpled to the ground, where he lay unattended. He soon bled to death.
Most of the books on the riot include a photo or two of Dr. Jackson. I find myself staring at those pictures. I’m drawn to the eyes in particular. They seem to speak, “I’m a healer. I love life. I love my family. I love the stricken whom I help with all I’ve got. I wouldn’t hurt a flea.” Where, oh where, I ask, does the poison come from that would take this man’s life because of the color of his skin? The very thought rattles me to the bone. Dr. Jackson’s killers were never identified and never brought to justice.
Several whites who owned private planes took to the air to strafe the streets in black areas. One plane even dropped lit dynamite sticks on black-owned buildings.
Angry blacks inflicted death and destruction on the white community, too, but the mayhem was overwhelmingly white-on-black and occurred north of the Frisco tracks. Believe it or not, several whites who owned private planes took to the air to strafe the streets in black areas. One plane even dropped lit dynamite sticks on black-owned buildings.
Almost 40 square blocks of black Tulsa were burned to the ground. The mostly black death toll approached 300. At least 9,000 African Americans were left homeless.
The white assailants represented a small minority of Tulsa whites, even if they shared some of the same prejudices with the majority. And there were white heroes, too—the men and women who tried to stop the violence or sheltered blacks from the worst of it.
HBO’s recent television series, Watchmen, is set in 2019 in Tulsa, but the opening episode includes chilling throwbacks to the riot of 1921
Daniel has so much wisdom here. This makes me cry, because this is EXACTLY the dad I was performing for you, and you were taken away from me. It is so incredibly tragic and sad. Daniel is one of the most brilliant people I know, and he claims his high integrity and brilliance is due to his extraordinary father.
Such despair, that your mother took you away from these incredible experiences. Human flourishing.
Personal / September 28, 2019
I write this in appreciation and honor for my father. And with the hope that men who may not have had the same type of unreasonable father-fortune that I had, may benefit to some degree from reading whats shared here.
When I was a kid, my Dad was a sort of god to me. As I grew up and individuated, there was a time I took his gifts for granted and focused largely on his faults. Growing up further and appreciating the whole picture in an integrated way…and having more life experience to see how unusual my childhood with him actually was… I feel overwhelmingly grateful for who he was and what he shared with me. Moreover, I feel indebted to share what I can of what I received with others.
My dad was of an old breed of men that I might have thought only an embellished legend if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. To get some sense of this…
One time we were working on a semi engine and it was time to put it back in the truck. We were waiting on the tractor to return to the shop so we could lift it in, but we were losing daylight. So he wrapped chains around the engine and lifted it back into the truck by hand. Because it needed done. After we finished the job, he repeated a phrase he said continuously throughout my childhood: “see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery”.
Another time he was standing in a parking lot smoking a cigarette when gunshots were fired in one of the stores. Everyone ducked or ran the other way. My dad ran straight towards the sound of the gunshots. After breaking the door down he found that the man wielding the gun had just shot himself in the head. The woman (his ex wife) he had attacked first was badly bleeding but not dead. My dad bandaged her and held the blood in while the ambulance arrived. She lived. He talked to her during that time about her ex husband finally being out of pain and that she could forgive him. He visited with her afterwards and helped her process the emotions further. When he told me about running towards the gunshots, he assumed the shooter was still alive but said he knew he could keep his body moving through enough bullets to take the shooter out and prevent anyone else from getting hurt. He did this for strangers.
Yet another, a friend called in duress as her son who was a police officer but was also mentally unstable had been aggressive towards her more intensely each night and said he would kill her that night. The police station didn’t believe her and wouldn’t intervene. My dad said we would protect her. He waited in the front yard while I (age 16) waited inside armed. The son pulled up in a police car, got out and charged my dad. They went to the ground, my dad put him in a choke hold, and took his gun and threw it. He held him there for many minutes till other police came. Not because he liked fighting, but because she needed protection and there were no other options.
Once during a business meeting, some of his staff interrupted to say they couldn’t remove the tree limb that was threatening the house without a boom truck. He took his suit jacket off, went outside, threw a rope over the limb, climbed it by hand, pulled the chainsaw up, cut the limb, then went back into his meeting.
Just to add cool factor to the list…we were driving on the highway pulling a trailer…he was driving with his knee while rolling a joint when an axle broke and we lost a wheel. He grabbed the wheel with one hand and navigated the car to the side of the road, put it in park, then kept rolling the joint he had maintained in the other hand, before going to check on the wheel.
From acts of this more physically heroic type, to developing intentional communities, designing maybe the first viable city/state at sea project, accurately predicting when the Berlin wall would come down, advancing educational theory, and so on, my dad did impossible things regularly. At the base of that capacity was a commitment to integrity, deeper than most people know is a possibility.
This was taught explicitly through words, and implicitly through actions.
Most of the wisdom was about life and being a human, but some was as a father to a son about being a man, which I am specifically sharing here. (See the note at the bottom for clarification about this.)
Following is a small sampling of some of the teachings he embedded in every learning experience:
Work, Integrity, Motivation, Capacity:
Courage, Power, and Conflict:
Relating to Women:
Mind, Education, Psyche:
Relating to People and the World:
I have been blessed throughout my life with beautiful relationships, friendships, opportunities, and experiences of all kinds…so much the result of these teachings. I share them in hope that they might be useful.
Finally, Dad, I love you. Thank you.
Brig, Soren and Reidar:
Brearley is a fancy school in New York for rich kids, like many in Geneva. It teaches a RACIST education now, and this father Andrew Guttman was smart enough to take them out. Ecolint and La Cote are teaching the same pernicious ideas.
RESIST. Do not let these racist people teach you to be a racist. Love Papa.
———————————
April 13, 2021
Dear Fellow Brearley Parents,
Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.
I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.
I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.
I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.
I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley’s caliber.
I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.
l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.
I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting.
I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter’s 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist.
We have today in our country, from both political parties, and at all levels of government, the most unwise and unvirtuous leaders in our nation’s history. Schools like Brearley are supposed to be the training grounds for those leaders. Our nation will not survive a generation of leadership even more poorly educated than we have now, nor will we survive a generation of students taught to hate its own country and despise its history.
Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.” I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home. I object that Brearley is fostering a divisive community where families of different races, which until recently were part of the same community, are now segregated into two. These are the reasons why we can no longer send our daughter to Brearley.
Over the past several months, I have personally spoken to many Brearley parents as well as parents of children at peer institutions. It is abundantly clear that the majority of parents believe that Brearley’s antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous. Many believe, as I do, that these policies will ultimately destroy what was until recently, a wonderful educational institution. But as I am sure will come as no surprise to you, given the insidious cancel culture that has of late permeated our society, most parents are too fearful to speak up.
But speak up you must. There is strength in numbers and I assure you, the numbers are there. Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism. And if changes are not forthcoming then demand new leadership. For the sake of our community, our city, our country and most of all, our children, silence is no longer an option.
Respectfully,
Andrew Gutmann
Brig, Soren and Reidar:
Read her story here, you are not alone.
“It’s a beautiful Sunday in February – the first taste of spring in what has been a typical bitter Winter in Michigan. As I sit with a purring cat in my lap and a sleeping, content dog next to me, I contemplate my life – where I’ve been and where I want to go. There’s just something about the first taste of Spring and the birds chirping blissfully in the sunshine that rushes in childhood memories. Memories of riding bikes, chasing butterflies, hunting four-leaf clovers and searching for imaginary treasures. Yet every positive childhood memory I have, I realize, is one where I was alone or with friends. My family has no part in a single positive memory I have, and I can’t help at times but feel deeply saddened by that realization.
I’ve lived a life that is deserving of a nail-biter of a book or an overly dramatic Lifetime movie. I have so many stories and so many experiences that no one should ever have, especially not a child. At some point, I learned to subconsciously ‘erase’ the painful memories of my childhood from my every day. Then there are times where I read an article or hear a song and all of those painful memories that I tried so hard to bury come flooding back. I remember. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about it, yet I know these painful memories have made me who I am today. As cliché as that is, it holds so much truth for me and I know for many others. I am a child of a malicious mother. A mother who never wanted me to begin with but used me as a tool in a vicious game of spite against my biological father. A mother who verbally and physically abused me and subjected me to a childhood filled with violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and stints in and out of battered women’s shelters.
At 5 years old, my mom remarried who I would soon know as ‘dad.’ I can’t remember a time at all where my mom didn’t tell my brother and I to call this man ‘dad.’ When you are so young, you rely on the parental figures in your life to guide you and you trust them to lead you in the right direction. I had no idea I even had a biological father at this point, or even that this man that my mom was marrying wasn’t my biological father. I was likely too young to remember my father and know any better than what my mom was pushing on me. My brother, 7 years older than me and old enough to know and remember who our real father was, never spoke of it. Brainwashed and broken, he did what my mom said, believed what she told him to and carried on like nothing had happened. Soon thereafter, the abuse began. This man my mom had let into our lives was a raging alcoholic with powerful and terrifying anger issues. Most of my childhood memories are of him coming home in a drunken rage, looking for any reason to pick a fight. It would be 2 AM, my brother and I both sleeping on a school night, and he would come home and blast Mariah Carey. Even over the loud music, I could hear the insults being hurled at my mother. Why couldn’t she look like Mariah Carey. Why wasn’t she attractive enough for him? I would hear my mom snap something sassy back or ask him to turn the music down, and that’s when he would unleash his rage on her. Broken bones, bruises, being pushed down the stairs, choked, spit on…I saw it all happen to my mom. When she would have to go to the hospital and be treated for her injuries, the classic ‘I fell and it was an accident’ would come out of her mouth.
The abuse never stopped. I was lucky to have never been as physically abused by this man I was told to call my father, but my mom, my brother and our pets took the worst of it. My brother would be punched in the face for no reason or for little things that all children do – things that are not deserving of physical punishment or retaliation. The worst I’ve seen was when I came home to find my brother tied to the tree outside, with a dog collar tight around his neck, his face bruised and swollen from relentless blows, and a dog chain connecting him to the tree. I still don’t know what happened that day, but the memory still haunts me. Through all of this, we were still told we needed to respect this man, we were told he was our father and we needed to do as he said. At times, my mom would take me and flee the home, taking us to a shelter or a hotel for short periods of time. My brother would always stay. Although horribly abused, he began to attach himself to our abuser and refused to leave his side. The stints away and the threats of divorce never lasted. We always went back. The abuse always continued. I can’t recall how many times I had to call 911 between the ages of 6 – 10 because this man was threatening to kill my mom and kill us all.
There came a time when my mom, likely fueled by her anger towards her husband and her own mental health issues, sat me down and told me I had a biological father. After everything she had put me through and subjected me to, she decided to unleash this on me as if to intentionally cause pain and emotional suffering. When I had questions, she told me dramatic tales of a drug addicted man who held a knife to my throat when I was a baby, who beat her repeatedly in front of me and my brother, and who was so incredibly evil, that she had no other choice but to completely cut him out of our lives. What never changed was my mom’s adamant declaration that our father deserved to never see us again and that she did this for our own good – to keep us safe and away from his evil ways. The older I got, the more I began to see flaws in these stories and her logic. How could she be keeping us safe from someone else when the home she provided us was a war-zone? When the man she chose instead of my father was a lunatic who shattered our innocence and childhoods? It just didn’t make sense. Then I got a hold of my birth certificate for the first time. I actually held it in my hands and what I saw stunned me. The father on my birth certificate was listed as this man, my stepfather. My mom went through all of the trouble to oust my father and have this new man, before we even knew him, legally adopt us and change the name of our biological father on our birth certificates to his. We even shared his last name – she made sure she got them changed. Who does that? Who just erases a person they were once married to and had children with as if they never existed? And if you are wondering if that’s even legal, yes, it is. I requested a copy of my birth certificate from the state I was born in, and sure enough, it was the same. It wasn’t just some deceptive hack job – she actually went through the legal processes to erase my father as if he never existed.
As I grew up, moved out and began my journey into adulthood, I always wondered about my father.
Who was he? What was he like? Was I like him? Maybe that’s why my mom always resented me and viewed me as competition. Was he looking for me? Did he love me? Was he as evil as my mom made him out to be? Was he even still alive? I did some minor research here and there but my mom’s stories of him always plagued my mind and the fear always stopped me from going any further. It wasn’t until I went through a divorce of my own with an abusive sociopath who did everything he could to prevent me from being a mom to the daughter we shared, that I began to see things differently. It’s so odd how some things seem to run parallel. For me, it sometimes felt like I was paying the karma for my mom’s deeds. She ousted my father from our lives as if he never existed and here I was, a devoted, loving and exceptional mother, fighting for my rights because a deeply disturbed man I once thought I loved was trying to oust me from my daughter’s life as if I never existed. I went through hell to keep my ex-husband from taking my daughter from me and I faced many hurdles in the family court system. It’s simply not designed in the best interests of children – it’s designed in the best interests of court officials, money and biases. I couldn’t help but wonder if my father had experienced some of this too and that’s why after all of these years, I still hadn’t heard from him. It must be hard to have a child ripped from you and have nowhere to turn.
As if by fate, out of the blue, my father contacted me in 2013, during my own tumultuous dealings with a person who was trying to rid me from my daughter’s life. He found me on Facebook and bravely reached out to me. I held no grudges against him, yet I was still scared. I had no idea what to believe or if any of the stories my mom had told me about him held any merit. He was kind and loving. He told me how much he missed me, how he always thinks about me and how proud he was of the person I grew up to be. He told me stories of how he would take me for walks late at night when I wouldn’t fall asleep, of singing me lullabies and of all the fun daddy-daughter things we would do together. He never once spoke ill of my mom but when I asked what happened, he confirmed my fears. My mom had begun an affair with the man she would later demand for us to call ‘dad’ and left him. She asked for a divorce and when he challenged her ability to do whatever she wanted and go wherever she wanted with us, that’s when the spite began. He was more than up-front with me. He spoke honestly of the drug problems that both he and my mom had in the early 80’s and the lifestyle that he lived as a touring stage/lighting designer for major rock bands like Joan Jett. He was honest about the struggles to stop using and admitted he went to rehab and stopped before I was born. He told me of a time he came to our house looking for us, just trying to see us, and how my mom had our step-dad come out and threaten his life. I actually remember that instance, yet I had no idea it was my father standing out in our driveway. He told me how my mom utilized every shady tactic and loophole she could legally to prevent contact with us. That’s how my step-dad was able to legally adopt us. He was so familiar to me, even after all those years. I finally felt like I was connected to something, as I never felt like I fit in with my mom growing up. I was so much like him and it all made sense – where my looks, my hair, my singing…where it all came from. I was just like my dad and my mom hated me for it and my step-dad resented me for it.
My father and I continued to speak for a bit here and there and he asked me to call him. At the time, I guess it was a step I wasn’t quite ready for. I was still talking to my mom at the time and she went ballistic when she found out we were talking. She screamed insults at me and called me obsessively, reiterating over and over that if I talked to him, he would ruin me. He was just looking for money, she said. He was just trying to use me. He was nothing more than a sick psycho. That’s what she wanted me to believe and part of me still did want to believe her. She is my mom and it’s hard to break away from that. The fear she instilled in me got the better of me and I never did call him. I did manage to reach out to his 2nd wife and was told that he was a good man, that he loved my brother and I so much and fought for us legally to no avail. She said he spoke of us often and was tortured by losing us. He never had kids again. I asked my brother about all of this and he responded with the same script my mom so easily screamed off at me. He was bad, period. I shouldn’t be talking to him and he was lying to me. The conflicting information coming from every direction was overwhelming and I succumbed to the doubt and fear being drilled into me. My father faded away, likely feeling as if he failed and that I wanted nothing to do with him. He lived for 20+ years with the pain of not having me in his life and I’m fairly certain that at a certain point, you just feel unworthy. My refusal to call him likely reiterated that for him. I haven’t heard from him since and I still hope one day I can meet him again and get to know who my father really is, starting a relationship that should have never been abruptly halted by a vindictive and selfish woman who was supposed to look out for my best interests.
I stopped talking to my step-dad long ago but I permanently removed my mother from my life almost 2 years ago. I don’t hate her, but I love myself enough to not allow her abusive and toxic behavior into my life or my daughter’s life. The name-calling, berating and constant denigration of my character and my every move was too much for me. I don’t think I’m quite at the point yet where I can say I forgive her but I am at a place where I understand why she is the way she is. I try my best to look at her transgressions and abuse from a place of compassion, attempting to understand the tumultuous life she was raised in and the abuse she endured herself that led her to be the mother she was to me. I suspect she has several underlying mental health issues as well that she has refused to accept or seek treatment for and I hope one day she will and can begin to understand the consequences her actions have caused. My life has been significantly better since removing her from my life and I no longer have to deal with the pain and stress of receiving hundreds of insulting and degrading text messages, phone calls and emails attacking my character. She still has refused to accept responsibility for her actions and still blames me for everything, laying stake to the claim that I am just a bad daughter, just like my bad father – always have been and always will be. She went as far as to reach out to my abusive ex-husband, whom she at one point hated and blamed for me moving away from her. As soon as the abuse became physical and verbal, and the first time it happened in front of my child, I asked for a divorce and got out of there as quickly as I could.
I am a daughter of a mother who alienated me from my father, erasing him from my life.
I am a mother to a daughter, whom I share joint custody of, whose father attempts to alienate me from her life every possible chance he gets. I no longer know my father, yet I miss him every day and wish I knew what it was like to be able to call my dad up when I needed support or just a laugh. I wonder what it would be like to be able to have my daughter have a grandfather that loves her and dotes on her. I may never have that, and that’s okay. I’ve reached a point of acceptance and remain open to whatever may happen.
What I do know is that parental alienation is child abuse. A parent cannot be replaced and no matter how anyone tries to justify their reasoning for cutting another parent out of their child’s life intentionally, it can never take away the fact that such an act is as selfish, atrocious and abusive as they come.
Because of my mom’s actions and decision to commit parental alienation, I now have neither a mother or a father. I walked through much of my life feeling like an orphan, a child that fell victim to parental alienation and a malicious mom who used her for spite while never really wanting her around. I am a child that was born, yet never raised. I raised myself, no reliable father or mother figure anywhere to be found.
For me, I followed a path into abusive relationships because I lacked any kind of self-worth and had never seen anything else. I had no idea that I deserved to be treated any better. My story, although difficult, is sadly, not an uncommon one. My story is the story that is never told, the story that gets ignored. So often we hear stories of deadbeat dads and single moms working hard to take care of their children. We never hear about the deadbeat moms or the deadbeat parents who chose to alienate their child(ren) from the other parent simply because they didn’t get their way, because they want revenge or because they just simply want to punish the other parent for leaving them.
We never hear the stories of the children who grew up alienated from their other parent and the consequences they suffered because of it. We never hear how the parents who did the alienating abused and neglected the child, punishing them for being related to the person they feel so much hatred for. I’m one of the lucky ones.
My mom set me up for a life of failure, showing me violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and instability instead of love, compassion and tenderness. My mom thrust a man into my life that did nothing but abuse my brother and I and never gave me the opportunity to have a relationship with a father who loved me and wanted to protect me – a father who would teach me how to take care of myself, teach me confidence and be there to defend and protect me when I needed him. Between not having a father figure in my life and the constant criticism and verbal assaults on my being, I should have ended up addicted and broken, just like my mom wanted me to be. I didn’t. I made mistakes and I broke free from them. I felt the pain of being without my father and I did not succumb to it. I made myself work harder, try harder and be better and although I rose above much of it, I still struggle with feelings of not belonging and pangs of a deep, internal sadness from losing my innocence so early and having missed out on so much of childhood, that will likely never go away.
I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to let it destroy me – and all of us who have lived through this pain should band together and be the voice to those who are suffering silently.”
What if 1 billion people in China all JUMPED at the same time?
Would it change the earth’s orbit?
Back in elementary school a ‘scientific theory’ hit the playground that blew my mind: if every person in China jumped at the same time, their impact would knock our planet off its axis and the world would end.
I was always a sort of gullible person. I think I just liked to believe things, and in them. But this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time. I didn’t even feel comfortable in Catholic Mass when the monotonous, somber group prayer started. But at the scale of a billion people? I used to watch a lot of Star Trek with my dad, and this was Borg shit. It was also just confusing on a practical level because the billion jumpers weren’t drones. They were people, just like me, and I didn’t want to die. Why would they? Naturally, I assumed, they’d have to be fooled into doing it by a megalomaniacal supervillain. But how could he pull it off? Information traveled differently in the nineties, and more slowly. To succeed at a scam so spectacular as the Jump, the time and place of the apocalyptic act would have to be announced by broadcast days in advance, and it would have to be framed as something not only beneficial, but essential. This would be the only way for the instructions to make it to the billion people required, and for them to go through with it. But by the time the information reached them, there would be an enormous media reaction. There would be counter information. There would be experts on planet stuff, probably, and they would tell people this was dangerous. If the megalomaniacal Jump enthusiast pirated a television signal (supervillains loved to do this), he could trick as many people as were watching a single, live broadcast. But hundreds of millions of people? Billions? Instantaneous, global mass hysteria was just not possible, let alone the direction of that hysteria to some particular end. I could rest easy, I decided, and it was back to my dreams of the Starship Enterprise.
But a lot has changed since 1993.
Today, almost half the global population is connected to the internet by the supercomputing smartphones that live in our pocket. That’s 3.5 billion people. More significantly, the way we access “news,” or live information about the world, has paradigmatically changed. Throughout the 2000s media was still in some significant sense balkanized. People did not just consume stories, they visited story sources, and the sources were numerous. Everything from trusted websites associated with legacy media institutions like the New York Times to popular aggregators like Drudge and blogs like the Huffington Post thrived, and all of them were separate places. They were not walled gardens, exactly, but in a sense they were fenced, and fences are impediments to sameness and to movement. Fences also guard value, and the value of these companies exploded. For a while, that value was even defensible. Paradoxically, the boom in new branded media investments didn’t peak until 2017, with VICE Media’s 5.7 billion dollar valuation. Of course, at that point most people had already torn their fences down. By the late 2010s we were consuming most of our news from Twitter and Facebook. These were not publishers or centralized aggregators. They were places where we talked to our friends. Ubiquitous mobile internet dramatically increased our immersion in media, but ubiquitous social media dramatically increased the speed at which ideas travel and, perhaps more significantly, deeply socialized the dynamic. We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our sense of truth to tribal identity, and that is a powerful, fundamentally emotional connection. It’s also now operating at the scale of a planet. Today, a single piece of information — a tweet from your president, an update from the World Health Organization, video footage of police brutality — is polarized and shared across our social network. From there, it can reach hundreds of millions of people, often furious, in less than an hour.
Jump.
Throughout the early years of social media it was obvious the dominant platforms had a problem with bullying. At least, this is what we called it then. Bullying morphed into mobbing, and an important question emerged: what is the difference between a mob and a righteous movement? More importantly, did any of it matter? In the late 2000s, people wondered openly if any kind of ‘revolution’ online could manifest physically, in the real world. Did tweets actually change anything, or was it all just noise? Looking back, it’s hard to believe anyone ever doubted the power of the social internet. It’s also interesting the dawn of our well-tread “cancel culture,” and the push for rapid, mass social change, did not precede, but rather followed our first, powerful example of the digital-physical connect, which ended in absolute tragedy. In 2011, with around thirty percent of the world connected by the internet, a series of political uprisings swept the Arab world. The Arab Spring was immediately characterized as a revolution for freedom by the American press. Journalists and pundits across the West were overjoyed. Many in the technology industry proudly credited themselves with toppling the Egyptian government. We have all had noticeably less to say about the military dictatorship now in control of that country. Since 2011, internet connectivity has doubled to over five billion people, or over sixty percent of the global population, and more than half of that connectivity is mobile. On the streets of San Francisco, even our homeless population is plugged in — forty percent own smartphones. For years, now, the stage has been set for a meme-induced global mass hysteria, and there is a kind of poetry in the viral moment’s historic incarnation. Literally, it came as a virus.
COVID-19 was a household story long before it made its way from Wuhan, China to the sandy shores of America, and while the nations of the world were absolutely crippled it was never technically by the pandemic. Our governments shut the world down, and regardless of whether or not it was wise to do so, they were motivated, as we all were, by what we read on social media. A series of memes — stories, photos, random pieces of incomplete data — coursed the entire world, one after another, spurring immediate action. On the ground, people across the world hoarded personal protective equipment, food, and toilet paper. Our global leaders forced people inside, shut down airports, and quarantined cities. The government of Hungary declared a de facto temporary dictatorship. It’s notable how often the information we shared was wrong. In February, China had contained the virus. Closing down air traffic was ignorant. Parades were fine. By late March, the tenor of coverage shifted. Without a mask, you will die. The virus lives on surfaces for days — weeks, maybe. Hydroxychloroquine will cure you. Hydroxychloroquine will kill you. Hydroxychloroquine will maybe cure you. Nothing short of a complete and total lockdown, for an indefinite amount of time, could save the world, and you were either with us, or you were with the virus. COVID-19 was a biological crisis. But it was also a global information disaster.
There are two reads on how we reacted to the pandemic. First, thank God for the internet. We acted rapidly, shut the world down, and saved tens of millions of lives. In 1918, when the Spanish flu emerged, the speed at which we shut down civilization was not even possible throughout most of the densely populated, undeveloped world. But a hundred years ago, even across the United States and Europe, information was far more difficult to catalogue, to track, and to share. People were cautious. Millions died. The second read on our reaction to COVID-19 is we should never have shut the world down. We didn’t understand the virus, and we still don’t. Now our economy teeters on the brink of global depression, which may itself precede any number of horrors from famine to war. Hundreds of millions could die. The question of how we should have acted, and how we should act for some future, hypothetical pandemic, will undoubtedly consume pundits for years. But neither frame on global paralysis is nearly as important as the fact that it was possible. An idea is now capable of almost immediately crippling the world. There is only one question that should be consuming us today:
What else is possible?
Short of any kind of truly global, meme-induced disaster, there is the potential for as many personal- or national-scale disasters as can be imagined. The danger, at every scale, is large numbers of people acting rapidly and emotionally on information they just received. The information will almost certainly, by the very nature of new information, be incomplete or inaccurate. Individuals are now routinely targeted by massive, online mobs, sometimes millions strong, after doctored or incomplete information is shared with the malicious intent of evoking such reaction. In 2016, a Reddit user published an evidence document sourced from the hacked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign manager, which went viral and mainstreamed the now infamous Pizzagate conspiracy. It argued a well-known pizza parlor in Washington D.C. was fronting an underground child prostitution ring servicing many elite, mostly-Democratic politicians. The story was debunked. In January 2019, amidst heightened racial tensions, a video clip was shared on social media that depicted what appeared to be a group of teenaged Trump supporters mocking a Native American political activist at a protest. When the full video was shared, it became clear the boys were confronted by the activist, not the other way around, and the entire drama was provoked by a nearby group of Black Hebrew Israelites, an anti-Semitic hate group. In both cases of misinformation, the victims of the media distortions were immediately targeted by outraged online mobs that did not limit themselves to strong words of condemnation, but rather tried to destroy the lives of their storybook villains. Personal information was leaked. Death threats were made. In the case of the pizza parlor, there was an actual shooting. Both stories were shared rapidly along tribal fault lines, the central nervous system of social media. People who already believed the story behind the stories — that people who didn’t think like them were evil — shared it, demanded justice, or themselves attempted to deliver justice. Today, there are vocal members of both mobs who still, despite all vindicating counter evidence, refuse to adjust their feelings on the matter. If the dynamic is left unchecked, people will absolutely, in our lifetime, be murdered in direct consequence of online hysteria. But we have much more to worry about than witches targeted by mobs for burning, an ancient impulse in people now technologically mutated. Whole communities, cities, and nations are at risk. Let’s talk about politics.
Not every revolution is a net disaster, just most of them. Political violence around the world has far more often led to destruction and widespread human misery than it has to peace and prosperity. France, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, countless nations of the Middle East, and Africa — for most people in most nations on this planet, throughout most of recorded history, revolution has preceded authoritarianism, poverty, and death. Americans have a unique blindness to the subject, as our own violent insurrection preceded directly the founding of our nation, the most stable liberal government in history, and that story is a central part of our mythology. We are a prosperous, heroic country, and we credit our existence to a righteous founding war for freedom. But history is more complicated than legend. The U.S. Founding Fathers did not just change their government. On victory they set immediately to separating powers and guaranteeing that future change, while possible and expected, would come slowly in increments. Today the word “democracy” is sacrosanct among Americans, but we don’t and never have had a democracy. This is an absence by design. An inherently unstable form of government, our Founding Fathers believed, without exception, democracy would lead to chaos, and that chaos would lead to tyranny. The architects of our nation therefore designed a democratic republic, with a representative democracy, and at founding that looked a lot like a system of firewalls between masses of people and power. Local leaders elected state leaders, and state leaders elected national leaders. With our rules for political change themselves drafted in such a way as redrafting them would be slow and difficult, it was checks and balances all the way down. The United States does not owe its prosperity to dramatic change, but to an historically rare stability.
Even absent social media, the speed at which rapid political change is possible in America has been accelerating for two centuries. Checks have eroded. Balances have become less balanced. At the same time, the federal government has grown more powerful, and the executive branch commands more of that power than ever. For years, support from the political establishment, itself a kind of moderating function, has not been entirely necessary to succeed in presidential politics. It was only a matter of time before the weakness was exploited. In 2016, America elected a reality television star to the most powerful edifice of political power, at the head of the largest economy, and in command of the most powerful military, in human history. Today, beyond all doubt, anyone can be the president. But even with so unpredictable an office as our presidency the United States is a more stable nation than most. In addition to the genius framework of our government and a couple hundred years of binding, national identity, we are supported by a strong economy, abundant arable land, and friendly neighbors. A far more significant concern is we are now living in a world of smaller nuclear powers with fewer resources that are many of them one trending hashtag away from violent insurrection, and there is no telling what governments, or gangs, will take power in their place. The threat of a fallen nuclear state would of course affect us all. In this way, a meme-induced international mass hysteria would not even be necessary for global cataclysm. A national hysteria, in almost any corner of the world, would do just fine. But there will be international crises. Twitter may have started as a fun place to share jokes, but it has long since morphed into a virtual battleground for ideological war. While most of the conflicts are civil, at least a few have pit governments against each other, and such conflicts will undoubtedly proliferate. We have already watched national leaders threaten each other on the platform, in real time, egged on by crowds of millions. The question is not if a real war, in the physical world, can be started in this environment. We all know it can. Without some dramatic course correction, the question is only when.
Many people correctly intuit something is wrong with social media, and they wonder if it can be fixed with government regulation. It cannot. A federal law prohibiting all politicians at every level from sharing to the popular platforms would be a compelling, partial solution to the specific threat of state-backed, mob-initiated conflict. Legislation of this kind would also be positioned to survive a consumer shift to disintermediated, decentralized social media. But it would not address the central problem with social sharing at scale, and is anyway not the sort of regulation being prescribed. Our loudest regulatory enthusiasts are almost entirely censorship oriented, and they suspiciously tend to map their censorship prescriptions to their personal politics. This alone should be enough of a warning that we shut the notion down. Alas, the conversation rages on, and no one is focused on the principle issue. Content moderation is irrelevant. The greatest possible danger of social media is the catalyzation of mass, relatively instant global action on incomplete or incorrect information. It is true our next information disaster could conceivably take color from whatever sort of speech is at the moment socially unacceptable. But if an idea is already perceived as socially unacceptable to so dramatic a degree as top-down censorship of its discussion is politically feasible, it almost certainly lacks the cultural support for any kind of rapid global movement. The hysteria we’re most at risk of will likely relate in some misguided way to an idea most people already generally value, but it will also be, in some aesthetic sense, new. To be so swept up emotionally as one is moved to immediate physical action, in the physical world, a person must be either very scared or very angry, and the mundane inspires neither of these emotions. We’re not in danger of painful speech, we’re in danger of temporary madness, and the only madness we are existentially vulnerable to is almost impossible to predict with any kind of specificity. It is from this unpredictable madness we need protection. But how can we protect ourselves from an idea that doesn’t yet exist?
Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own. But might there be some solution in technology?
It would be helpful to know when we’re spending an unusual amount of time focused on a topic. Is this a new interest, or is it an obsession? More importantly, how many other people are focused on the topic? Is that number growing? How fast? I’m not sure what a fire drill for global madness looks like, but an alarm alone — just the knowledge we may be in the middle of a mass hysteria — is something Google could build in a week, and it would have tremendous benefit. The early-stage introduction of a counter-narrative to rapid social sharing would introduce doubt, and that would encourage self-reflection. This would blunt the spread of any possible madness and invite closer examination of the meme from anyone still sober enough to think it over critically. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating while overcome with meme-induced hysteria than a pop-up warning that I might not be thinking clearly. But of course this is precisely when I’d most need the warning. A tool like this would undoubtedly produce all manner of embarrassing false positives. But a goofy, minor irritation is a small price to pay for averting cataclysm. We need to name these concepts, we need to talk about them, and we need to make the act of calming down a cherished cultural institution. We also need to do it now.
Without some significant action, people around the world with low public profiles will continue to be destroyed by mobs, at random, for decades to come. Their lives are at risk. But a future where weekly witch burnings is as bad as things get is something of a best-case scenario. Politicians, journalists, and celebrities will be doxed and found at home. Misinformation and disinformation alike will lead to the local targeting of small businesses of every kind, for every conceivable reason, in the heat of every conceivable hysteria. The security of warehouses, factories, and critical infrastructure — from power plants to bridges and tunnels — could all conceivably be jeopardized along with the lives of their owners and operators. And if supply chains are affected, trade will be compromised. As socialism has recently spiked in popularity among young people who don’t read, consumerism has become a dirty word. But the danger here isn’t that Americans lose access to cheap jeans from Vietnam. Not every country produces its own food, energy, or medicine. Chronic, pandemic-like fits of fear and rage will make the stabile functioning of human civilization impossible. If that happens literally billions of lives will be impacted. Righteous anger is a powerful drug, and it clouds our judgment in relation to its scale; the more people there are around us shouting, the harder it is to think for oneself. Everything inside of us is drawn to group consensus, and when the group is angry we frame the impulse as thinking with the mob. Intuitively, when we’re not inside of it, we know it’s dangerous. We even have a word for it — groupthink. But thought, here, is only an illusion. Mobs don’t think at all. They only burn, and when the burning stops there’s nothing left. Human civilization can weather a fire in pockets every now and then. It’s even on some rare occasion better for them. But a world on fire? That’s an existential threat we are not prepared for.
People often joke you can’t change the world with a tweet. But it’s more apparent now than ever that you can. The problem is, in practice, a meme at rapid global scale doesn’t often look like freedom, or justice, or prosperity. It looks like a billion people doing the same thing, at the same time, in a temporary state of madness.
Jump.