A very good, thoughtful piece here by a Biden supporter and long-time pro-Democrat left writer who... "took a conscious effort on my part to reprogram my brain to be able to see both sides clearly and fairly. Once I did that, I was horrified by what I saw on the Left. The hypocrisy, the inhumanity. Worse than all, I could suddenly see what was true and what wasn’t true and how much the media and politicians lie daily. They tell themselves what they want to be true, not what is true."
She was horrified by Biden's recent speech telling "MAGA Republicans" that they are a threat to democracy by participating in democracy.
<<Why did Joe Biden give that speech? Who thought that was a good idea? Obviously, Joe Biden and his administration know that the “MAGA Republicans” are not a dangerous threat to the country. Otherwise, the Democrats would not have meddled in primary elections, spending upwards of $46 million pushing those very same MAGA candidates towards a win, blocking the more moderate GOP picks.>> How Joe Biden Lost My Vote, Sasha Stone
And there she puts her finger on the exact problem: the people pushing this rhetoric prove by their own actions that what they are actually after is something very different, that proponents of Democracy are being used for anti-democratic ends. We (Republicans) are no stranger to that: we regrettably watched the Bush-Cheney wing of our own party push us down rather contorted, non-republican roads, justifiably criticized by Democrats, 3rd parties, and independents for the hypocrisy in that. Now that same Cheney faction is behind the DNC and Biden instead.
But, as she says, people get caught up in the feedback loop until the hyper-partisanship is all they know, until the partisan narrative becomes the end in itself:
<<It’s nearly impossible to escape it. It’s everywhere and in everything. What motivated me to climb out of it was the dust-up between Twitter and Tom Cotton’s essay at the New York Times. They wanted the Times to be on point, not to tell any objective truth. They bullied them for days until they offered some withering correction and fired editors. That is how Bari Weiss ended up revolutionizing alternative media here on Substack.>>
It's also how Glenn Greenwald, liberal crusader, civil rights attorney, ended up on Substack after being blocked from doing investigative journalism +for his own masthead+, the Intercept, investigative journalism since proving to have been entirely accurate. That is the reason I seek out a variety of Substack authors and the tattered remnant of the independent writers left outside it. News, actual news, simply doesn't come to us these days: we have to hunt it down, club it, drag it back to our lairs, and dissect it, messy bits and all. Sometimes the answers are not readily apparent, but, like this author does, we can figure out what the answers may NOT be because they are self-conflicting and make no sense.
But then we still need to try to find real answers-- and better questions. What is wrong becomes apparent, but we still need to find the best right path that we messy squishy fallible humans are able to find. That's harder, and sometimes it often takes more than one try:
<<How did we ever get here? And is there any way out?
There is a line in Citizen Kane where the character of Gettys says to Kane, “you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re to get more than one lesson.”>>
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