A few years ago, I decided to move my writing endeavors over to Medium. That didn't really last, however. Now, I've decided to try out Substack.
So from now on, I will be posting my articles there instead of here. If you're interested in continuing to read my stuff, you can subscribe there for free. Click here for the page. You'll have to set up a free Substack account, I think. But you can get new posts emailed to you whenever I publish them.
I read part of an article – just a long paragraph, really – from a recent edition of The Atlantic. It was about the rise of what the author called the “New Obscurantism,” referencing the Enlightenment notion of intellectual darkness and irrationality. He made the argument that across Europe "health quacks and influencers," together with spiritualists and political charlatans, are creating this new era of irrationality and magical thinking. He noted rising interest in everything from runes and crystals to the anti-vax craze. He used the example of Tucker Carlson, a right-wing mouthpiece who was even too crazy for Fox News, claiming that a demon attacked him and left visible claw marks.
The author was talking specifically about Europe, but of course all this is true here, too. I always like to imagine Europe as this bulwark of democratic socialism and post-Christian rationality, but then I read stuff like this. It makes me feel like maybe we really are entering a new dark age. But one in which we have the population and technology of the 21st century. A terrifying combination. I would give anything to know how this will all be viewed a hundred years from now, or 500 years from now. Will there even be anyone around then to do the analyzing?
A lot of people seem to be wondering how they can balance being informed with remaining sane for the next four years. For me, it means giving up the need to be informed at all. Yesterday I read some news about Trump's first few days in office. I found myself so angry and helpless that I wanted to send nasty messages to the family and friends who I know voted for him. That's obviously not healthy.
It just reminds me that I have to return to what I've been saying for a while now: I need to focus on what's in front of me. My family, my friends, my job, my hobbies. Live life to the fullest. Spend my money. Enjoy myself. Do what makes me happy. Those are the things I can control.
But this sure is not the world I imagined entering my 50s in. When I was a kid, I sometimes thought ahead to my future self (who doesn't?). Being born in 1975, it was always easy to know when I'd be 25 and 50 and 75 years old. So 2025 is a year I used to think about, knowing it would be the year I turned 50. I definitely didn't imagine it being like this. I never dreamed I'd be writing about fears of the world entering another dark age. It's crazy.
To understand the new vision for America that Trump and the Republican Party are establishing in 2025, it's important to realize that it's nothing new. It's not groundbreaking, or innovative, or forward-looking.
It's basically just the Confederacy 2.0.
Of course Trump isn't trying to preserve a slave empire, but slavery isn't the only thing that the Confederate States of America was about. It was also about states' rights and distrust of centralized authority, and it was deeply committed to fundamentalist Christianity and toxic notions of freedom and individualism.
These ideas have been around a long time, and they represent a deep sickness in this country. This sickness has been passed from generation to generation through pulpit and parents, occasionally clearing up in some lines, but always finding new hosts to prey upon. It's been around since the very beginning, clear back to the colonial days.
It reared its head during the 1780s when this country's first government was weakly organized under the Articles of Confederation. It was the central issue that caused the long struggle of the constitutional convention in 1787. The calling card was "states' rights." Of course, states' rights has always meant the right to discriminate indiscriminately. It meant that in 1787 and it means that today.
This American sickness was at the forefront of countless political fights and struggles throughout the 1790s. Even when those fights began to fade and the country entered the period of history known as the Era of Good Feelings, the sickness was still there incubating, particularly in the South.
The secession of the South and its formation of the Confederacy was nothing more than an attempt to revert back to the 1780s and the Articles of Confederation - a collection of mostly autonomous states with a weak central government and endless protections for the wealthy and powerful.
And that's what the South of the Civil War era was. It was a land where the majority lived at subsistence, and a select few, with money and land, had all the advantages. They didn't even have to go fight in the war - for every 20 slaves on a farm, one man was exempt from the draft. A large plantation with dozens of slaves could earn exemptions for every son and foreman.
This is the America that Trump is taking us back to. This is what your friends and family and neighbors voted for. They voted to make America the Confederacy again. Plantation owners have been replaced with billionaires, and dirt farmers have been replaced by a coalition of blue collar workers and their upper middle class bosses. But the growing gap between the haves and the have nots is the same as in the 1860s. The sick fundamentalist Christian beliefs are identical, too, and so is the toxic notion of freedom and individuality - a notion that says my freedoms are more important than your freedoms. In the 1860s, the fear-mongering was about an intrusive federal government that was bound and determined to upend the southern way of life. Today, it's about immigrants and trans people killing your wives and eating your dogs. In the Confederacy, there were even those that wanted to expand across all of central and South America. Today, it's Canada and Greenland.
The America that is being established is nothing new. In fact, it's as old as America itself. It's a new flare up of an old disease. The question is whether it will finally kill the country for good.
I started using TikTok in 2020 as a way to promote my music. It's become one of my favorite ways to pass time during slow periods at work. So I've been following the drama this week about it being banned. In fact, I've been following it since 2020 when the banning was first proposed -- by Trump.
Yes, Trump was the first to propose banning TikTok, back in 2020. The popular theory on TikTok at the time was that it was because TikTokers supposedly bought out all the seats to one of his campaign events and then intentionally didn't show up. The result was that the event was very poorly attended. I don't know if that's really why he suddenly wanted to ban TikTok in the waning days of his first presidency, but that's what people were saying at the time.
He's apparently flip-flopped on this issue now. Why would that be? Clearly because he's seen an opportunity for political points.
I've found it very strange, in the last week, how the CEO of TikTok has suddenly appeared out of the woodwork. I'd never seen him or heard of him before this week. Now he's testifying before Congress and posting videos on TikTok, which TikTok undoubtedly promoted to every possible American user.
And in those videos, he was talking about how they were working with "President Trump" to solve the problem.*
Despite that, the app was shuttered and taken offline for Americans at 10:30 pm Saturday night, much sooner than anyone expected. Biden had already said he wasn't going to enforce the ban, and Trump had already publicly stated that he would "probably" delay the ban.
So why did they shutter the app, especially given that the ban didn't even require that to begin with? It only required the app stores to stop allowing new downloads and updates.
The app only remained shuttered for about 12 hours. Today, this was the message on my Android version of TikTok:
It's pretty clear to me what has taken place. Trump's team has obviously been in talks with TikTok. TikTok clearly agreed to shutter the app for 12 hours, then bring it back up and give credit to Trump, to make him look like a hero. They did this in exchange for his promise to delay the ban (he can delay it up to 90 days) and then get the Republican-led Congress to overturn it. He controls the GOP, so he can force them to all change their votes (this ban was passed originally with broad Republican support).
That's the only explanation that makes any sense for the events of the last 12 hours. There is no logical reason, otherwise, why TikTok would shutter the app when they didn't have to, or why they have so openly and and shamelessly namedropped Trump in their relaunch message.
This is a perfect example of the kind of manipulation and gaslighting that is going to become the norm for the next four years, as the media and corporate America all fall in line to the new reality of an American oligarchy led by a virtual dictator. America as we know it is pretty much finished, I think.
*The TikTok CEO, who is a Singaporean, had the nerve in his TikTok updates to wield the old "Freedom of Speech" line. Dude, you're a Southeast Asian who is the CEO of a Chinese company. The First Amendment does not apply to you or your company, and has no bearing whatsoever on this case! In fact, his manipulating, propagandistic messages were EXACTLY the sort of thing that caused Congress to ban the app in the first place! His messages were basically Chinese propaganda, using specious arguments about our own constitution! But that's beyond the grasp of 90% of the teenagers and 20-somethings who use TikTok. His videos had millions of likes.
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| I Googled "profound" for an image search, and most of the results were like this. Apparently Profound is the name of a skin tightening treatment? Somehow, it seems apropos. |
...[T]he writing is so amateurish that I began to wonder about the accuracy of the facts the author presents. His attempt to explain socialism is so riddled with errors that it is laughable, and his attempt to explain the difference between capitalism and socialism reads as though it had been lifted from a children's book.
It's kind of funny because I spent a lot of time writing that chapter on the Socialist Party, and since I knew I wasn't an expert on the topic, I actually had an acquaintance of mine - a retired Social Studies teacher - read over my explanation of socialism and give me pointers. I thought, at the end, I'd done a pretty decent job of providing an easy-to-understand overview. Oh well, can't please everyone!
