Please Get This To Glenn Greenwald. It’s the Year 2000. Facebook® and Twitter® do not exist, and I Have No Other Way of Contacting His Office.
In this Wednesday Friday Freeflow I remark on 21st century dangers of libertarian sociopathism. It’s a good read for anyone who has ever gotten angry over sitting in traffic behind a Ford F150 dangling chrome truck nuts (made in China).
I publish this now in gooey anticipation of the rapid demise of an authoritarian. Please watch your inboxes on Friday for Art Critic, Part II. (Politics should be reserved for mid-week enthusiasts).
Vroom vroom, here we go!
I have been following the work of Glenn Greenwald for over a decade. I stumbled upon him online in 2007 debating with a writer of the New York Times. He was in his home office and dogs were climbing all over him while he made excellent mincemeat out of the corporate marketing-journalist justifying Bush and Cheney crimes of the day. He was an instant hit in my developing political mind. I was suffering shell shock of U.S. war crimes, and every word Glenn said about them rang true. He was such a refreshing presence of foreign policy opinion. A righteous lawyer-cosmopolite articulating the internalized anger of a self-righteous rural line cook, trapped with solitude in Sterling, N.Y.
Was I a socialist, a libertarian? I couldn’t tell. I knew that taxes were being collected from the citizenry, and the money was spent on U.S. army boots and assault rifles butting open doors in Iraqi home kitchens to shoot off the faces of frightened children. I went to Glenn because, like me, he thought the U.S. government was violently criminal and said so with words I needed to hear in order to keep sane. I lived in rural America, working class, among economic equals—corn and soy farmers, welders, corrections officers, disability pensioners, military veterans, car mechanics, masons (cement block builders), Market America get rich schemers, etc. The majority were registered Republicans and religiously voted every November in a nearby evangelical church with portraits of military sons and daughters cluttering the lobby walls. A scant professional class was made up of K-12 teachers and administrators and commuting nuclear power plant engineers—some registered democrats, but not many. Once in a while, I’d stumble upon a SUNY Oswego professor in the restaurant where I cooked during the summer tourist season. He or she would have nothing to say about atrocity.
In fact, not one Sterling hero of America whom I met over several years gave a verbal shit about the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just citizens of complacency carrying on with self-interest, flower-drape taste and septic tank vacuumings in the springtime. Their consciences no different from the mass majority of Americans, whether Saturday brunching in Brooklyn delis or cowboying at Walmart in their Mexico-built tough pick up trucks. To me they were one in the same. Deplorable in ignorance and unforgivable for their spindly moral foundation.
Glenn Greenwald was a learned radical like I wanted to be. He got to the bottom of an issue, descending with moral compass, and began his criticisms from there. So did I. Can soldiers commit murder? Are generals masterminds and accessories to murder? If George Bush orders a military to break into another country to violently mutilate its occupants, does that make a macrocosmic President a microcosmic Charlie Manson? I thought (think) so. I never use a partisan definition of war crime—both Bill Clinton and George Bush should be in Leavenworth, as well as any Congresspeople or Senators who voted for the Iraq invasion. And those who did not, yet did not resign and radicalize, they too must face the music. War is obsolete. War is terror. And yes, I wish to dissolve the U.S. military because it is the top present human threat to the end of the world. I believe there can be no protection in annihilation.
Even if Glenn didn’t interpret the Golden Rule similarly, at least he was working off it. It was comforting to know a fellow dissident was nearing Establishment Summit. Monotone Chomsky was acting as old man scholarly witness to atrocities, while making his dime on the lecture circuit and Barnes and Noble bookstores. Greenwald, however, was speaking for a new generation and pointing the finger with rancor and disgust. Conditions were ripe for popular response. Millions of millennials, Pearl Jam and Nirvana trained in self-satisfaction, took their cynicism online. Arm chair foreign policy experts got blogging. Clever anti-government gibes became the norm on every other iPhone notification beep heard at beard trimming and beer-making parties.
Then Greenwald got jobs at Salon.com and The Guardian, but it was born again Edward Snowden’s trust in articulate righteousness that brought him international fame and good fortune. The scoop of the century landed in the lap of Glenn Greenwald. And today he is an established journalist, which comes with all the ups and downs of political celebrity—death threats and free lunches offered by lesser men and women.
A fellow writer at a 1970s Iowa writer’s workshop asked Kurt Vonnegut how he felt about being an outsider author agitating against the establishment, to which Vonnegut replied, (I paraphrase) “Brother, we ARE the establishment!”
Since his rise into the immovable established media, I have revised my opinion of Glenn Greenwald. He got a following, then a huge following, then armies of enemies and supporters, and finally a leveling off and working in the system, with claimed intents and purposes of changing the system. Profiles in Noam Chomsky-like virtue signalling and hiding behind an elite intellectual barrier of “above-it-allness”. Basically, he began to protect his territory in order to remain relevant (and get paid). Careerism may be the death of truth, but it is the soul of sanity in a modern world. I don’t blame Greenwald or any person a needful adjustment to the pressures of celebrity. I would not want to stand in his shoes. On my cruise through mid-life, bravery takes a back seat and courage is gagged and tied up in the trunk. To hell with pissing scary people off. I’m going to visit the grandchildren!
With that said, I feel he has honed his reactions to national politics that have become predictable like presidential handshakes with weapons dealers at Boeing, Inc. Like me, he has gotten too preachy. Unlike me, he has lost his radical spirit and hope. So it goes.
Over the years I have followed his Twitter® and read his articles on The Intercept® and elsewhere. I read him now because I feel he is a political opinion writer for the people, and not just a clever Twitterer of distinction like the bulk of his popular contemporaries. He has broken government malfeasance stories in the U.S. and Brazil to shame corporate media franchises that aren’t only in bed with governments, but cleaning the sheets with candor. He has a yen for calling out the hypocrisy of the major establishment players, and proves the popular collusion of big government and big business to the detriment of civil liberties.
Unfortunately, as careerist, he is becoming parts of the monster he was/is master at exposing. His philosophy is human-centered and ideology based, and he religiously adheres to it. He’ll publicly defend the Congressman who gets caught having sex with a consenting poodle (as long as it’s legal on the books), yet ignore writing about the same legislator who votes every year to maintain a nuclear arsenal. Said Congressman has privacy rights to screw a dog (says an arbitrary human-made law document) and Glenn will be there to protect his codified mandate. He’s a very good libertarian spokesperson for protecting the perversions of our nation’s hired help, but very bad at putting a figurative dagger through the brain of any person who would give a penny toward the cause of nuclear annihilation.
There’s just no money in anti-nuke diatribes and tweets. Believe me, I’ve tried.
So Glenn has a predictable reaction to popular political news feeds. Everyone knows it will be the opposite (partisan like Fox News) opinion of liberal outrage. Most times it works, from a radical perspective. Other times (less often) it reeks of the elitism and authoritarianism he postures to condemn. Agree with Glenn and all is well. Disagree and you’re just a Brooklyn dodger of reality living in an elite college-educated paradise of privilege. His well known critique of corporate media (of which he floats in and out of each day), is that it’s made up of middle and upper class graduates from elite colleges who cannot possibly understand the American mindset outside the beltway or any big city. How could they know what a $2,000 market stimulus check means to the truck driver listening to Rush Limbaugh, who, by the way, also mocks stuck up professionals from “elite” colleges while puffing on a $2000 cigar?
During Black Lives Matter protests Greenwald called out hypocritical liberals and leftists who looked the other way as unmasked protesters, marching and rioting against police brutality, super-spread a killer virus throughout their communities. Weeks before, many on the left condemned church-goers and Trump rally revelers for their close-knit large gatherings. Glenn was right, and he spent a lot of writing energy proving pandemic hypocrisy, but not so much written over the years about the actual terror experienced by black people ALL THE TIME. That investigative reporting doesn’t get the Star Wars Brooklyn clicks that arouse credit card information to be exchanged over compromised Internet connections. Take a look at these mask wearers getting shot with paint canisters on their front porch by a National Guard that Trump denied Congresspeople last week in their time of need, lying down on the Capitol floor, terrified for their lives.
On Twitter® Glenn would retort that one can’t compare apples to oranges, and he’d be right, as he so lawyerly often is. He and several other top tier media professionals daily trade “I’m less hypocritical than you” barbs to engorge the bubble they float around in. “I went to an elite college!” “So what? I went to Hong Kong with Edward Snowden!” Take that with your martini at the White House party Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd!
And that noble truck driver Glenn understands so well, like John McCain his Joe the Plumber, delivers his toilet paper and potato chips in real world time, with or without the $2,000 market stimulus bribe.
Greenwald’s Twitter® response to last Wednesday’s insurrection was outside of mainstream, which means typical Glenn Greenwald. Usually I’m ready for it because wrong or right, he gets me thinking, and that leads to a rise in blood pressure and Descartes feelings of existence, which I feel energize me for the long haul.
Basically he’s trying to warn Americans of an added bonus to the U.S. War on Terror. That is, The New and Improved Domestic War on Terror. The nefarious brain child of the elderly (and possibly stone drunk) Nancy Pelosi eating gourmet ice cream and her CIA army of elite university college grads. Maybe he saw something I didn’t see on TV last Wednesday.
Here is what I saw with my own eyes from video captured by Facebook® Live and several of those elite college educated journalists who got close enough to smell the Brut® aftershave of pretend revolutionaries.
An insurrection, but a timid one, a little one. Nearly a funny one. Yes, people died, as people who storm government buildings often do die in unstable countries all around the world. It’s something I always expected would happen to me if I acted upon my urges to break down a door and come howling into the Rotunda on any given Wednesday afternoon.
Worse than the terror of 9/11? In actual body bags, of course not. In the manner which our country perceives its security from this day forward? Well, we’ll have to see. After 9/11, it was easy for neocons, neoliberals, and Pentagon pencil-pushers to incite a xenophobic nation-state to inflict a grossly disproportionate retribution to innocent civilians overseas. And to the mass majority of rural Sterling and urban Brooklynites, it made moral sense to slaughter Afghan and Iraqi children for a crime committed by citizens of Saudi Arabia (15), United Arab Emirates (2), Lebanon (1), and Egypt (1). Heck, America got attacked and those black Muslim beards were scareeee! Nuke the Middle East!
Just imagine if this nation could deliver the full might of the U.S. military upon a virus currently cutting us down at 9/11 fatality numbers each day. It would probably bunker bust some oozing bacteria taking over our earwax instead. Why stop a real threat when there’s a gob of money to be made in earwax?
Anyway, the President had a rally in Washington on Wednesday, January 6, after weeks of tweeting conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated voter fraud accusations. Many sufferers from Glenn Greenwald’s “silent majority” were there to join the protest. The ones who could afford the trip, anyway—not the impoverished hordes back home, penniless with a Twitter® account. If only that $2000 was available, their freedoms could be guaranteed, while unemployed and evicted.
After the rally some supporters walked to the Capitol building and violently broke in during legislative session. Donald Trump did not summon the National Guard, knowing that the Capitol had already been breached by a mob of Americans, one or two waving Confederate flags, and all dressed up in the bad taste of red, white, and blue bigotry. To compare impeachable offenses, Nixon covered up a break-in and got caught with his pants down, and then resigned before he could be impeached. Nasty man he was for sure, a killer like all Presidents are, but humbled as a defeated man of the clan. Classic human response to public shame and embarrassment. Trump gave his enemies a mortal scare, a few people died, and he just doesn’t care if he’s impeached or not. But how dare that Twitter®, Glenn! Now he can’t tweet. Oh woe, free speech is dead!
[A side note about Jack Dorsey’s social website. The first time I saw Twitter® was in 2008. It was a tweet from a neighbor who told me she was “on Twitter®”. I paraphrase her free speech: “My fifth glass of orange juice today. I have a cold.”]
Now it appears the legislative branch doesn’t really care if he’s impeached or not, either. Just another day at the job. Although Congress has legal power to rid the country of an authoritarian, the majority will wait for their fundraising committees to give the order how to proceed. Bad news for the Republic. Maybe impeachment action would move quicker if some Congress people actually got twist-tied by that play-pretend G.I. Joe hopping over chairs in the gallery. G.I. Joe thought it a fair and measured response for taking away a powerful man’s right to tweet out anger, lies and innuendo like an unhinged chickadee.
And all this time, steadfast Glenn Greenwald is worried about civil liberties as they pertain to middle class white people who don’t want to be spied on in their toilet more than necessary. (He’s never been much of a champion celebrity for black men and women getting rubber or real-bulleted on the streets, in their cars, in their houses, in parking lots, gas stations, or shopping malls.) With billions invested in nefarious surveillance power, which he has reported on over the years, a hundred yahoos were free to bust into our Capitol taking selfies and congratulating each other for success Stonewall Jackson could only dream of. Billions and billions of dollars spent to spy on Americans, but when actual push came to shove, the shovers didn’t need more than their legs to assassinate a United States branch of government (if they got to them). Box cutters were the weapon of choice for 9/11. Our legislators could have been murdered last Wednesday by deep paper cuts with “Stop the Steal” flyers, tasers, stabbings, and bullets from an assault rifle or two.
But God please protect our speech on Twitter® and Facebook®!
That was the reality I interpret of events on Wednesday. And Glenn is right. They’re gonna try to enact more controls, some nefarious, some not. Some CIA promoted, some proposed by Chuck Schumer to prevent future terrified diaper soilings on the Senate floor. And just like post 9/11, the majority of Americans will cheer it on while their privacy is being violated on Twitter® and Facebook®. It’s the way of fear and self-loathing. It’s the American way. Who cares if those Yemeni kids are starving to death for Saudi hate and U.S. corporate enrichment. We want to Tweet! Wah-wah-wah!
I could be wrong. And Glenn Greenwald, as he reminds us all too often, has his established journalism awards to prove his political correctness. Who am I to challenge a Twitter® celebrity?
It was a tiny insurrection. Some very disgruntled open and closeted white supremacists (and some curious onlooking white supremacists) broke through security at the Capitol and caused some death and much mayhem. What punishment will be meted out to those who can be identified by Greenwald’s exposéd U.S. spying apparatus? If and when arrested, will some rioters face the threat of a 20 year federal prison sentence (already on the books) for their “bad boy/girl” behaviors? How many will actually get jail time? And when is it ever an accepted free speech for Presidents to allow violent rioters extra time to ransack a building? (I don’t mean buildings like children’s hospitals and Sumerian museums destroyed in foreign lands. That’s normal like peanut butter to Americans. I mean our own United States houses of the three branches of government.)
At present, there are approximately 40,000 Americans in prison for marijuana related “offenses”. Cannabis is legal in 11 states and medically prescribed in 34. I wonder, in which states is it not a felony to storm a government building?
And what’s the statute scoop on Capitol invasion? I guess it doesn’t matter as much as Twitter® free speech right now. Let’s sit back with cooler heads and have the debate if we should overreact about a breach in security that no “enemy” group or nation has been able to do since the War of 1812. Gotta watch out for that creeping totalitarianism on our smartphones, though. Facebook® has seen my pee-pee and Twitter® knows what color my eyes are in the dark.
For all the respect I have for Glenn Greenwald, he has become more of an influencer than a journalist. He could turn off Twitter® and have more time for investigative journalism. But he chooses not to. Celebrity is addictive, and quest for relevance a private poison. Twitter® and Facebook® are websites where two billionaires allow the world in to be advertised to. If they don’t want some grouchy old man Donald Trump with nuclear annihilation capabilities to troll their platforms, then so be it. The world hasn’t always had an Internet, Glenn, but all revolutionaries from time out of mind could build a fire when fire was needed. Let’s break out of 2013. We don’t care if they see us. We know where they live.
In 1919, the United States outlawed the sale of beer. A couple months later it tried Eugene Debs under the Espionage Act and found him guilty for a speech rejecting the draft of WWI. In prison Debs was nominated for President and got a million votes in the 1920 election.
People still couldn’t order draft beer.
A million stone cold sober votes (proportionately 3 million today) went to a federal prisoner running for President. And all Debs wanted was for young men to keep their intestines on the right side of their skin. Speech was free, but it would cost you. Home brew and country wines got thinking Americans through some difficult times dancing the Charleston and fleeing to Europe where it was easier to find a realist French girl not brainwashed by the Red Scare and Klu Klux Klan.
During this rocky moment in American history there is no account of enraged alcoholic socialist mobs smashing in Capitol windows and doors waving Confederate flags of deplorable stupidity. Television wasn’t invented and airplanes looked like this:
And the Security State looked like this (in its entirety):
Today we have uninteresting billionaires making play time launching smart people’s rockets, 4,000 active nuclear warheads stuffed into holes the world over, and white supremacist mobs reacting to a Facebook® call to arms waving flabby, Burger King® arms in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.
If Glenn Greenwald thinks the U.S. government and big business is holding back free speech, perhaps he should read mine and Jeff Bezo’s latest publication off the vanity press. Complete with bar code and ISBN. It’s a whopper (Burger King® pun intended). Unlike tweet shaming hypocrites who went to college, it drives home the point that political free speech against the government is alive and thriving within these borders.
If Eugene Debs wrote then what I wrote and published this year, our government would have chopped him up and donated individual parts to the burgeoning social sciences.
So what if my freedom of speech won’t make money nor move the moral pointer a micron towards “acceptable”. It came from me. Jeff Bezos printed it. And the U.S. Postal service disseminates it (for a fee of course).
Here is what I think the real scoop is. Hopefully some award winning investigative journalist (Glenn Greenwald) will see if it’s got legs:
President Trump and crime family are instigating and encouraging an ongoing coup. Did D.C. police stay home expecting violence to transpire? Was their police chief going by the book, or was the book Trump-cooked for the day? We have a yahoo police chief in my county in upstate NY who flies the Trump flag while on boat patrol. Was he involved? Did any person or group in the Pentagon purposely hold back forces to quell the riot? Why didn’t Donald Trump send in the National Guard? Why isn’t any person brought up on charges of sedition? How high up (if at all) does this go?
Dear Glenn Greenwald, please set aside your hard-earned laurels if you wish to continue a career as a relevant journalist. An opinion piece can be authored by anyone any time from anywhere (look at me for instance, making judgement from the land of the forgotten). Wasting valuable time criticizing the state of journalism is not journalism. Step out of your undisclosed location in Brazil and get busy with the groundwork necessary to break stories that break down the arrogance of government. At this moment do you truly believe anyone gives a crap about overreaching monopolies? Where have you been your whole adult life? What is our government and corporate oligarchy but an enormous octopus of terror monopoly all over the world? Quick, how is that Houthi boy going to use his free speech today? Even if he had the full rights as I do, what might be his fate today, right now, this minute waving a flag on some rooftop in Aden? Do Twitter® and Facebook® rights matter for anything at all if nothing can be done this second to stop the U.S. Saudi bullet sniping through his skull? Should not a world of less fortunate people see Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Donald Trump and even you, Glenn Greenwald, as a posse of white cop hypocrites vying for power in a 1919 Klu Klux Klan church basement meeting? What you personally think is vile in a world does not insulate you from the moral blasphemy of profiting on the suffering of the world. To me all critical vanities accepting terror inflicted by this government (by taxing into it) are accomplice to the terror wrought by this government.
(Full disclosure: I make zero dollars with my art and writing. I have begged my wife for several years to reduce our income to poverty level. I love her more than I hate my government. When she drinks soy milk, I drink water. When she eats ice cream, I drink water.)
But think about the awesome power of Twitter® and Facebook®, and the control it has over populations. One born from cyberspace with innocent tweets about orange juice, and the other a creepy college guy’s sexual harassment intranet service. These guys have come a long way exponentially making intellectual babies all over the planet.
You know who got close to killing the Octopus Monster On Wednesday, January 6? It wasn’t Jack Dorsey and his snarky social club of professional gossips. Nor was it Mark Zuckerburg riding his little sea weasel along the Hawaiian surf organizing the takeover of government by West Virginian car mechanics and start-up CEOs of “who gives a shit” companies. No. It was a couple hundred white supremacists and gun rights bigots about as sophisticated as the toilet paper dispensers at the N.S.A.
That’s the story. I don’t know the ending, but I’m near certain that social media platforms of free speech are to blame for Wednesday’s start-up insurrection. I don’t even condemn it as much as I wish it were for a better cause, like ending prohibition or freeing a good man for the anti-crime of protesting a war to kill people. In 1919 liquor was outlawed in the halls of Congress. Popular socialist Eugene Debs was put in prison for the crime of talking. Today in America we butter toast before unknown bullets go through unknown eyes in unknown countries like Yemen. Likewise our elected leaders snarl on Twitter® and Facebook® about who’s good and who’s bad, when all are rioters breaking into Hell and holding earth hostage with nuclear aggression.
At times you seem to share the white people problem of a Donald Trump Jr.—a paranoid fear of totalitarian takeover by liberal overlords. (The same overlords who couldn’t stop a car mechanic from stealing a name plate out of a Capitol office.) Donald Trump has spent the last two months telling lies about our election. It’s our election. The people’s election. We own Donald Trump’s seat in government. Like if I owned a restaurant I would have the right to kick out diners who stood up on chairs telling lies about my chef, and giving directions to the closest McDonalds®. Twitter® and Facebook® are not free speech. Get off their platforms if you don’t like them censoring Presidents or pedophiles. Our 1st amendment doesn’t pertain here. When you become a big boy with lots of followers, you can garner a fan base with or without Mark Zuckerburg’s overlording pout.
These are rich people problems, and have very little to do with protections of free speech.
The rioters on Wednesday were laughable, and yet nearly successful in achieving what millions (perhaps billions) on earth would love to see happen (and what may have already transpired). The rapid weakening and dislocation of a superpower. The Trump revelers in the Rotunda were too greedy for their own selfish ends (like a Senator or Congressperson) to organize a coup that might save life on earth. I don’t think the freest free speech on Facebook® in Trump’s groupthink would achieve much more than several years of nose picking in federal prisons. Because bigotry is a selfish philosophy, like libertarianism. But it doesn’t matter. Facebook® is a Fortune 500 company on the New York Stock exchange. It’s not a piece of paper and a pencil, or a telephone call from Istanbul, or a meeting of communists in a community room. Either continue to work to break it (and Twitter®) up as a monopoly, or leave it alone to let dumb customers choose if they wish to shop in Prejudice Store.
As popular influencer and, unlike President Trump, current celebrity tweeter, perhaps it’s time for you to earn another journalism award. Ask questions to get answers. Maybe you can help those 1.5 million Twitter® followers and the rest of the country understand how it is that a few hundred bored, brainwashed yahoos from my hometown, America, broke through the United States security apparatus and terrorized a branch of our government, when reasonably angry sufferers of the world seeking retributive justice wouldn’t even dare go “snap” with a firecracker in Georgetown.
If you ask the questions, does that leave enough time for you to go on Tucker Carlson, or chat with Amy Goodman, or re-read letters from Lulu thanking you for saving democracy in Brazil? Come on Glenn, throw us a bone. We’re just dumb yokels and elite college educated Americans who need to understand why free speech on Twitter® is even a thing with you.
Hate doesn’t wait. It comes rapid fire. All your debate of free speech and civil liberties didn’t stop Jan 6. Nor would it have curtailed a Final Solution when Nazi Germans gathered at Zuckerburg Stadium in 1938.
Please don’t become an opinionated grump (like me) in a Weimar Republic. Why cheer the right of free speech to a demagogue? My friend had a novel idea about giving Donald Trump a platform to repeat conspiracy theories. Why not put aside a special room in the White House and invite the world’s press in to question what he has to say? Television can air it every night, and people could hear and see for themselves how these elite college educated reporters can make a dumb ass mafia man look like a dumb ass mafia man.
My temporary solution? A citizen’s arrest of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerburg for the crime of insatiable greed. And then a slow razing of superpower with wave after wave of every disgruntled group ever to poke the bear on World Facebook. Americans are homicidal/suicidal sociopaths out of self-control. Contrary to what you might believe Glenn, there is a right and wrong action whenever the preservation of life is necessary. And who gets to decide between the two?
The $64,000 question. An interrogative made popular during the McCarthy years, when just playing a minor part in a Broadway play labeled some poor thespian a communist insurrectionist.
But at least we survived McCarthyism and arrived to 2021, with nuclear stockpiling and all. If celebrity lawyers like you keep enabling a madman his base… Well, as Kenneth Patchen warned over 50 years ago:
Be a good journalist and prove me wrong.
Here are some prompts to lead you out of the opinionated political philosopher funk you’re in now:
King worship
Cult of personality
Nation states
Winners and losers
Nuclear annihilation
One more thing before I free my readers from another wordy rant.
I have two daughters Glenn. One went to college and obtained a Masters Degree. She is Arts Administrator at a charter school for city kids desiring a way around metal detectors and dead end education. Her profession has kept her from opening a Twitter® account to gossip about politics. She is more hands on with human beings in need than any one I know personally. My other daughter is presently attending college at an actual “elite university”. Our family has lived check to check our entire lives. Your public disdain for colleagues who attended college to better themselves and make their mark upon the world is offensive to me, and many others who believe in the promise of the next generation. It’s snarky and Trump-ish to label detractors in your field as graduates of “elite colleges and universities”, implying their dislocation from “real America” and their eyes closed to its economic pressures. I come from that place you assume you know something about. And I can tell you with practical certainty (from gleaning your public record) that you know nothing about it.
In the future, please refrain from the he-said she-said of media gossip. In small part, it’s this professional descent into middle school popularity wars that has me fearing for our country and world. You wanna point the finger? Then go poke Donald Trump’s eyeball out. It’s his speech, never yours or mine, that’s gonna get us all wiped out.
Thanks for the brave effort over the last decade.
Ron Throop