Arrogance and Apathy

There is a reason why I am doing my best these days to protect my emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing. And it's because I've decided that white supremacy doesn't get to have the best of me. And it's the lesson that not only am I trying to embody in my own life, but I'm trying to share and impart with

all of you as well. Rage is important, Trust me, I am a big philosopher of the importance of getting that toxic anger heat out of ourselves and as a way to then be able to cool ourselves down to have clearer heads. And I don't mean to expel that energy in violent ways. I mean that it's okay to commune with other people, with friends, with family, around rage, around frustration, around anger at the state of our current society and politics. It's to say that it's a disappointment

where we are would be a euphemism. Beyond you famisms. It isn't just disappointing if you really sit down and unpack where we are as a country. It is unbelievable in so many ways. It is unbelievable. It would have been unbelievable to think, um five years ago that a member of Congress putting out a video depicting the murder

of one of his colleagues would ever happen. It is unbelievable to think that a member of Congress that had that is under FBI investigation and has been accused of sexual sex with a minor sex trafficking or is connected to sex traffickers would still be in Congress. It is would be a you know, impossible to think five years ago that an insurrection would have occurred, That we would have seen a yilloteen in real life being built on the steps of our capitol building and watch our capital

be ransacked by a violent white mob. All of these things have happened in the court in the shortest span of time. I bring it up constantly because I was brought back to a piece that was written by Larry Diamond in The Atlantic on October nineteenth. It was published October nineteenth, twenty sixteen, and the piece is entitled it could happen here. Democracy is facing setbacks around the world, but there hasn't been reason to doubt America's resilience until now.

And I remember reading the piece in October, right, and this is again go with me in the time machine. This is but a couple of weeks before the election that would alter our country's future, our democracy. And I'm rereading it today and I'm thinking to myself, Dear God, how do you stop a train that you know is certainly colliding with a wall that is running off the rails and has no breaks, has no conductor, and you know that it's headed towards certain destruction, but you can't

stop it. That's what it feels for me right now to be in media, coming off of the last four years of Donald Trump and moving into year two of the Biden administration. Now, I got to tell you that I want to highlight some parts of Larry Diamond's piece that I encourage everyone to reread if you or read for the first time if you did not read it back in twenty sixteen, because there are so many things that are so much more salient now given the things

that I have just outlined. And in a minute, I will also go over my feelings about what we should be paying attention to with regard to the outcome in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. But here are some pieces of Larry Diamonds. It could happen here he wrote, among the most dangerous, among the most dangerous things of democrats in this time is arrogance and apathy. I want to unpack that for a moment, that arrogance and apathy are two

of the things that democrats do really fucking well. Arrogance in the fact that we just believe that, you know, when people know better, that they'll do better. Right, that we believe fundamentally that if you provide people with information and facts, that they'll just do the right thing, right, that all people inherently want to do the right thing.

And then there is the apathy in feeling like you don't actually need to do the work, that the work for a majority of us was in twenty twenty was in voting in the midst of a global health pandemic, and then just sitting back and assuming that because Donald Trump was gone, that meant that our democracy was going to be back on track, that we could then go back to believe being political ostriges, putting our heads back in the sand, and only being concerned about our day

to day that the good guys, right, the good men and women and people would take it from there. That is the most dangerous thing. And when Larry Diamond wrote this piece back in twenty sixteen, he didn't know that Donald Trump was going to win in a couple of weeks using McCarthyism tactics that we had since said from fifty years prior were some of the darkest times in

America's history. That we were creating committees in the in the House of Representatives, that we're going to investigate people's patriotism, That we were setting up ways in which to blacklist people in Hollywood because of their perceived connection to our relationship with communism. And it just so happened that the people that McCarthy, of course wanted to go after were the intellectuals, were the artist were those people whose society

looked towards right as we were advancing. But if you silence those people, and you instill a certain level of fear in them, right, a fear of the other, right, a fear of their neighbor, then you can control them. And we knew that. That's why Joseph McCarthy's name is associated with the Red Scare, is associated with everything that

is wrong with the body politic. So you would think that, because we made such a case over the last five decades about this part of our history, that the rising of Donald Trump would never happen, because we would see it miles and miles away. So when Larry Diamond is writing this piece in twenty sixteen, he's saying, how is it possible that this man is this close to the presidency? How is it possible that America right, it could never

possibly happened. Here chorus is now applauding and celebrating this horrible, horrible, racist, misogynistic, islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic. I mean, you name what is wrong, Donald Trump embodies it. Man.

Larry Diamond didn't know that in writing this that Donald Trump was not only going to secure sixty five seventy million votes in twenty sixteen, but that he was going to extend his reach in twenty twenty, and that it was the assumption once again from Democrats that oh, you know, once the American people have more information than they will

do what's right. Well, what the fuck? If there was anything that anyone should have known and realized over the last several years, even just before Donald Trump in the Tea Party, as our politics began to disintegrate into some version of reality TV, that it was the media right and their power to sway people one way or the other that was one of the most dangerous apparatus and

threat to our democracy. That if you had a person that both embodied the outlandishness right but like what America craves around celebrity, and then you couple that with the foundation of America, which is racism and cruelty, that that would be a winning recipe for millions of so quote

unquote aggrieved white people. So when he says that among the most dangerous things that Democrats can do is this coupling of arrogance and apathy, I am seeing it now even after having lived through the last five fucking years, because you see democrats right now doing what they do, which is partially let me be clear, we need them to pass policy. We need infrastructure bills, we need human infrastructure, we need immigration reform, but most importantly, we fucking needed

voting rights. But that's a time for another day. Evidently we need these things to happen, but not outside of understanding the danger and the threat that we have yet to nullify. I would argue that we are in more trouble now then we were in twenty sixteen. You see, in twenty sixteen, we were just seeing what could happen. And even in twenty seventeen, after Donald Trump is inaugurated, you have the fucking march of the tiki torches in Charlottesville,

again signals to the decline of our democracy. You had the President of the United States hail these people. This was all the slow roles set up for where we are now, for the insurrection. And so another point that is made in this piece is this, democracies fail diamond rights when people lose faith in them and elites abandon their norms for pure political advantage. Let me say that again, democracies fail when people lose faith in them and elites

abandon their norms for pure political advantage. Again, this is written before Mitch McConnell force through over three hundred federal judges, many of whom the American Bar Association said, we're not qualified. This is before right we would have an attorney general turned the Department of Justice into an extension of the presidency and weaponize it against Donald Trump's political foes. This

is before all of that. And so when we arrive in this moment, it's not as if alarms have not been going often, people haven't been warning, writing, speaking, screaming, marching to alert people to where we are. But I keep going back to our fundamental understanding of history and the way that it is taught. We always use the same setup. If you don't understand your history, you'll be deemed to repeat it. But all America does is repeat

its history over and over and over again. I would make the joke about slavery coming back and how that's not out of the realm of possibility, except I don't think that it's funny, because I actually don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility. The only reason we don't have slavery in America right as a legal institution still is because of some laws that were passed. It's the same reason we currently are holding onto abortion in this country by our fingernails, because of laws that

were passed. But what we are seeing, and what cannot be understated or overstated enough, frankly, is that those laws are only as enforceable and powerful as the people that are willing to enforce those said laws. Right. We only abolish slavery because of a mass insurgence of people, right and a full on fucking war that ended it. But those things that we think are just our part of our political norms came blood soaked. It wasn't without sacrifice.

It wasn't without centuries of lost lives and brutality and torture and terrorism. That we arrive at this moment. When we are looking around it, we're like, fuck, even the free ish place that we have arrived in right now is up for fucking grabs. And if you don't, if you think that again, I'm being hyperbolic. I mean, just

look around. Let's take the Kyle Rittenhouse case as an example. Now, everybody knows because you've been listening to the show, that I have not been following this case day in and day out. Why Because, like I stated at the top of the show, I give a shit about my emotional and spiritual well being and I hope folks that you

care about yours as well. Because there was no need to follow this trial because from the outset with Judge Schroeder and his clear and present fucking bias against the prosecution,

you knew where this was headed. Right when we are not referring to people that were gunned down because they were they were exercising their First Amendment right to be able to assemble right in protests against an unjust criminal system, and who were gunned down by the likes of a seventeen year old that cross state lines with a fucking R fifteen and then was patted on the back by police.

Where the fuck did you think this was going? His bullshit performance on the stand of his crocodile tears, the embrace that he is receiving from Republicans who want to offer him positions of promotion like a congressional internship. Right, he has an entire fucking docuseries that's being hosted by Get This Tucker fucking Carlson. He will have a sit down interview this week in Prime Time with Tucker Carlson, who I'm certain will embrace him as a son and

as a patriot. This is the same motherfucker who referred to an unarmed teenager walking home from the fucking store as a thug and a threat. When you take these stories of America and you put them up against how democracies have fallen before, every single sign is pointing to where this is headed and where we are headed as a country. And the fact is is that we have democrats that are too busy with their bullshit in fighting.

You have democrats that are too busy saying we need political wins instead of recognizing the urgency of this moment to repair our democracy. So we have a future to discuss. Right, you realize that hope isn't on the horizon that we are going to be heading into. Not we are going to be We are headed in to some of the darkest time this country has seen since the nineteen sixties, since the Jim Crow era, since the consistent and unrelenting

terrorism of the KKK. With a not guilty verdict in the Written House case, where do you think the rest of the written Houses are going? You know, I did an interview earlier this week with The Daily Beast with the New Abnormal and Molly jung Fast and Jesse Cannon, and they were talking about the fact that some of their friends are very concerned with attending another political protest that they may not do so, And mind you, I have gone to countless protests. I mean I lived in Washington,

DC for damn near twenty years. I felt like I was at a protest every other week, right, But the thought of people being too scared to protest because of the likes of Kyle Rittenhouses, because that now we know that they have more rights to carry a gun and shoot and murder in called blood anyone that they want, and know that now they have precedent, recent precedent to get off would make me worry too. But the reality

is is that America has always been fucking violent. It's a violent, fucking nation founded on cruelty, founded on bloodshed. So this is not a shock. My response to Jesse and his friend was to say, look, motherfuckers are getting murdered and trampled and shot at concerts, but they don't seem to stop. People don't to stop attending them. So when it comes to fighting for our rights, and voicing our descent against a biased and unjust government. Should we

stop because of the potential of fatalities? And look, it's fucking serious. You know, we've been and seen these situations with these cops. I mean, we saw the elderly white man fucking knocked over, bloodpoiling pouring out of his goddamn head. They didn't give a shit. We saw police beat the

shit out of protesters right causing serious harm. Stories of people that we interviewed running from Lafayette Square where famously, right or infamously, Donald Trump cleared Lafayette Square with the help of Bill Barr and the help of the fucking Pentagon so that he could take a photo op with a book he don't read in front of a church he don't attend. Each and every one of these examples

that I'm laying out cannot be considered in isolation. They are what form the fundamental fall of our democracy, the erosion of civil liberties, the erosion of our faith in our institutions. I didn't watch the Written House trial because I knew where it was going. And I'm a person that still is trying so desperately to believe that we can reimagine America. But each and every day me, it's becoming harder and harder to assert that truth, to even

believe in it myself. And it's my job. And that's why I tell people like, look, you can be a responsible citizen, pay attention and understand what is going on, but then recognize that if you don't take care of your emotional and spiritual well being, understand that nobody else will. That nobody's going to walk into your apartment or your house and tell you to turn off the news, Go walk in nature, take some deep breath, go do an exercise, class, meditate, pray,

do an art project. Nobody's going to tell you to do those things. You're just going to have a breakdown and then shut it out completely. And that's why I'm saying take it, much like you know our indulgence in food, Take it in little bites, because the desire here is to wear you down. The desire is to accelebrate, accelerate our erosion of our trust in our faith in these institutions that we are watching fail us one major case

at a time. I had to turn off the news earlier because I refuse to listen to the closing arguments in the McDaniels trial, right, because once again they were referring to it as the Ahmad Arbory trial. It's not Ahmad is dead, right, he was fucking gunned down in cold fucking blood after going for a fucking jog. It's not his trial because he's not alive to stand trial. But once again, the media does what the media does.

But I can't watch every single instance of white vigilantes being able to walk go back home and pretend that nothing ever happened, but then be able to recant these stories to their friends, to their colleagues about their bravery and their fucking patriotism, because that's how it will be told. What did Cricketer Holden say? History is not written by the conquered, it's written by the conqueror. So what do you think the narrative is going to be for the

written houses of the world. Oh, white people already talk about the fact he didn't do anything wrong. He's a hero, a hero, he's a fucking murderer. But why should they think otherwise when you're driving on highways, in attending schools named after fucking Confederates and what nation do you do

that in? And we wonder how we arrive at this place because we are so disconnected from the fucking truth and so disconnected from facts and our real history that we are always going to be destined to repeat it. And I see no maneuvering into our future to make me believe that things are going to get better. How I'm still trying to convince you the sky is blue?

How would I ever convince you that you're doing damage to the environment When I got to spend my fucking time and energy telling you the sky is blue and water is wet, I have to move you from that fucking obvious place to the effects of climate change. Give

me a break. What is scary right now too, is that America for the first time by a organization IDEO no, I'm sorry, idea organization that has been tracking they've been tracking for the last decades democracies and the health of democracies in the world, and they've come out recently as if the news can't get any better that for the first time since they've been tracking democracies around the world, America is a backsliding democracy. One in four people, according

to this organization, live in a backsliding democracy. But what is and should be alarming to every fucking person. Is that again the things that we thought could never happen here are not only happening, but happening at breakneck pace. You can shrug off that organization and say, oh, you

know what, do they know? Well, they've been tracking this for the last fifty years and for the first time ever, and this coincides with it can happen here at the peace in the Atlantic from twenty sixteen is that for the first time in the world, we have less democracies

And so what does that mean? That this isn't just about what is happening in America, although incredibly important, but it is about what is happening around the world, and people having looked at countries, having looked at America as an example for as fucked up and imperfect as our country is, looked at our country as a symbol of democracy, no one believing that what is transpired in the last five years, that you would have ever thought in twenty fourteen,

twenty fifteen that this could happen. And that was our as he said, our arrogance and our apathy. And that's not just democrats, it's everyone believing that, Oh, it's those countries over there that are unstable, that have been war torn. Right, it's those people over there that are violent, being able to look and make assumptions and judgments about other parts of the world without truly examining and unpacking what has been happening here. Again, I think it's our desire to

shrug off. Right, Let's shrug off the Tea Party. Let's shrug off the calls for Obama's birth certificate. Let's shrug off Donald Trump calling Mexicans rapists and murders. Let's shrug off the fact that, you know, members of the Republican Party have been caught up in multiple scandals with sex traffickers, drug traffickers, murderers, all of these things. Let's just shrug

that off. Let's just say that, you know, Derek Chauvin is just a bad apple, but not a part of the poisonous orchard that America has been seeding since the beginning. And it's because we refuse to interrogate our history in any real way that we are here in this moment.

It's because of the fact that we would rather spend our energy and our resources upholding democracies around the world rather than safeguarding it here at home when we are watching it falter, you know, I said the other day when Biden was it overseas and he's speaking, you know, in front of the UN talking about democracy blah blah, and I'm like, if I were one of those nations sitting in the audience and he got applause, and I'm like, I would have been sitting there like, who are you

talking to fix your own house before you come out and step to me talking about how we need to clean up these international global streets. Your house is literally on fire, sir? The fuck you doing here? But that has always been America's bravado, right that we are somehow these these fucking cowboys that are out and I say cowboys and I mean that right, This idea of like you know, the horseback ride and wheeled in the whip, you know, like we saw with the fucking Haitians at

the border, that is the symbol of America. It has always been us up high looking down on whoever else, not paying attention to what is going on around us. Larry Diamond writes, this democracy is facing setbacks around the world, but there hasn't been reason to doubt America's resilience until now. And I keep wondering, folks, Honestly, we've seen, we got a preview in the Trump administration to what happens around

the world when America isn't stable. And that's not to say that I believe in America's paternalistic view of the rest of the world. No, not at all. But there is a vacuum that is created, and in that vacuum without intervention from the United States, you have those authoritarian

regimes that sees their opportunity. And so at a time when we're being told that democracies are backsliding and are at their lowest point globally, and we're struggling with even attempting to pass voting rights legislation without doing anything to protect the integrity of our own elections, what faith do we have in the next couple of years. If all of this has transpired in the last five, what does the next three look like until the twenty twenty four election.

You know, I I am so rubbled, as I know so many of you are, and it takes everything in me right And this is why I will offer this that we need to find mechanisms not to distract or distort the information that is coming in, but we need to create mechanisms so that we can hear it right, but not embody it, that we can understand the urgency of this moment and not be caught off guard, right, but at the same time create the parameters and the boundaries in our own life that allow for our health

and well being to matter more than anything else, because you see, we cannot fight exhausted and downtrodden, right, We can't. We can't fight if we are filled with anxiety and stress. Each of us have got to figure out the mechanisms, the support systems, the tribes that we need to surround ourselves with in order for us to be able to succeed.

And I'm talking about emotional, spiritual, and physical success and well being because we can no longer look outside of ourselves and think that there is somebody, right, whether it be the President of the United States, your governor state assembly person, your teacher, whomever, that is going to help balance us, because that couldn't be further from the fucking truth.

I mean, when I used to think about elected leaders, I almost want to go back to my younger self and shake the shit out of her and be like These are human beings, right. They are no better and no worse than you are. Right, They're only as good as the accountability that we hold them to and the responsibilities that we hold them too. But given the ability to run am up and grab power for power's sake,

that's exactly what the fuck they will do. But when I thought about elected officials, members of Congress, the administration's presidents, secretaries, and you know, I looked at them with such pride, me with such pride, believing that no one would enter into this work if they didn't believe in our founding principles, even as ridiculous as they are, created by a bunch of six gender, powerful, wealthy white men who own slaves.

Right like talking about liberty and justice. But I'm saying that you cannot look to these people and think that they alone are going to help you, because what we are seeing is that they're only in it, a lot of them to help their to help themselves, and to sell you out as quick as they've possibly fucking can, in order to fill their pockets, in order to fill their egos, in order to own the Libs. Switching gears, But staying on our declining democracy in the news. I

find this really, you know interesting. Anytime that there is news around Fox, the Fox Network, I'm always like, oh, who woke up today? Who came to the realization that they're working for a fucking media cult that is spreading misinformation and conspiracy and really really able to capitalize on white rage and anger no one other than Fox News, Right.

So anyway, two contributors this week have put in their resignations, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, and they quit, as they said in their resignation letter, because of Tucker Carlson and that piece of shit's new docu series. And I use that with real deep sarcasm and quotes because it is anything but anybody's docu anything, Right, called the Patriot Purge to three part three parter that was streaming on Fox's streaming site, but they were promoting it vigorously on the network.

This is what those two contributors said, as they've come to their own personal reckoning. Over the past five years, some of Fox's top opinion hosts amplified the false claims and bizarre narrative Trump offered or their own under this guy's the release of the Patriot Purge wasn't an isolated incident. It was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend. So they have come to the realization that you know, the rest of us had came to about Fox News

decades ago at this point, that they're in it. They're not changing. Course. Thought that following Donald Trump's loss, that everybody much in the same way that we all hoped that Republicans would come back to their senses, that the networks would, you know, stop running him, that you know, we could find this semblance of normal and get back

to rigorous debate about policy, blah blah. But what folks failed to remember is that the deterioration of like the Republican Party and Fox News didn't start with the election of Donald Trump. It started well before that, with Obama running for president, right, Like, that's when Fox News really ramped up their fucking anti blackness, their anti LGBT stances,

their anti woman like, their anti democratic ways. They went full force, right and then any other network who wanted to appear neutral then was putting up some of their fucking people right in these bullshit oh both sides debates. But anyway, these two people have since quit because Foxes double downing, Right, they're doubling down on Tucker Carlson. Right,

they are doubling down on their next meal ticket. Who is going to do a sit down with Kyle Rittenhouse who did his show over the summer for an entire week from the anti democratic country of Hungary, sat down with the prime minister talking about, Oh, this is how America should be, Like, this is who the fuck they are, and these two people, these two Fox News contributors, are waking up to the fact that they're never going back to normal, that this is who they have become, and

that them, in their own consciousness, can't continue to work for a network that is going to support and promote Tucker Carlson as if he's like a serious host and not an entertainer. That is actually dangerous because remember, Tucker Carlson has been sued just like Fox News has been sued multiple times over and what did they say in court, Well, nobody would take him seriously. He's an entertainer. But you don't see the FCC making it so that Fox News has to air right the fact that they are for

entertainment purposes only and not real news. You didn't see write any push in that direction to alert audiences to the fact that if you are looking for real news and not entertainment, this ain't it. There's no push here. So we're just watching the careening of our fucking body politic, and it's like no one, no one is driving the fucking train except for the Tucker Carlsons and the Murdocks.

And so, you know, I sit here, folks, and I'm like, yeah, I guess you can applaud these two people for quitting their jobs, I guess, But where the fuck were they over the whole five years from the time Donald Trump came down the escalator calling Mexicans rapists and murderers. Where were you the entire time that the network was celebrating

this as well as celebrating violence. You know, I keep saying that I don't think that things will change until somebody is killed, right, and I mean, like a prominent member of Congress or whatever. And then I realized the other day that's not gonna fucking matter. And that's what's really sad and scary. And that's what I want to ring the alarm about with regard to the Rittenhouse case,

is that this is just the beginning. So when I'm telling you to figure out the mechanisms for your wellness right and safeguarding yourself and creating boundaries, I am serious because this is just the beginning. Things are going to get worse, and they seem to be getting worse quicker and quicker and quicker. We will know by the end

of this week the verdict in the McDaniels case. We will determine once again if white vigilanteism isn't just the way of the past and the way of the future, right, And what does that mean for the rest of us who are not white, who are not straight, who are not sis maile like? What does that mean for the rest of us? Are we to live under threat right, threat of domestic terrorism, threat of fear of leaving our homes because that's what they want, and I fucking refuse.

I am choosing radical joy, I am choosing revolutionary self care. I am choosing to activate all other parts of my senses and emotions outside of rage, because they will not own me right, And the more that we invest in that singular emotion, the more they win. So again I say to you, be thoughtful daily about your self care, Be thoughtful daily about the way that you engage with the news, about the way that you engage in community,

and how you choose to create community. Because all we have at this moment is us and that is the truth. That is it for me to day. Dear friends on woke f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.