Still here? Okay, good.

Do you know how they measure the beginning of human civilization? Anthropologists look for signs of debilitating injuries, usually broken bones, and then that the person lived for years after that injury. Think about it for a second. The implication is that someone cared for that person even though they could no longer hunt and/or gather. We measure the transition of ape to man by the evidence of a social safety net.

I know it’s a day that ends in Y and by the time this piece is published Der Gropenfuhrer has probably already done some asinine new terrible thing, but I am still hung up on the House repeal of the ACA (reminder, that is STILL Obamacare). The American healthcare debate remains one of the silliest, yet terrible, things that has ever existed, and it boils down to a single, salient point. Is healthcare a right?

Of course it fucking is.

The argument against this seems to be based on the idea that those who provide services should not be compelled to provide them for free or against their will. And there is some merit to that idea, but orthodox adherence to this doctrine is nonsensical.

First, there is no “free” healthcare. None. Nada. Zip. Every doctor, nurse, and technician in this country is being paid by someone to perform their tasks. Those paychecks come from a combination of private insurance and public sources. None of them are slaves. Trust me; I’m married to a NICU nurse. If you are receiving care, no one is being forced to provide it against their will or for free. Heart surgeons in America make half a million dollars a year whether the patient has private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. So, please, let’s not pretend that this debate has anything to do with the drudgery of medical professionals.

The sticking point seems to be that the working class is somehow subsidizing healthcare for the parasites, and that’s true, but not in anyway that should be understood. For instance, my wife’s insurance funds parasites. We call them children. I’ve got one. Her best friend from nursing school is about to have another. None of them will so much as chip in a few bucks from a lemonade stand for their healthcare, and unless you think they should then the argument those with means should not help provide care for those without is meaningless. That is just not how insurance works.

There’s also this idea that Medicaid is somehow “free,” and that we dodged a bullet having the expansion here in Texas lest more lazy loafers suck the sweat from the teats on our brow (I’m not a life science guy). However, even those who receive Medicaid are paying for it. Payroll tax comes out of their paychecks the same as mine and the same as yours. As a percentage, it comes out exactly the same unless you’re self-employed, in which case you pay double. Most abled-bodied, non-elderly, adult people in this country receiving Medicaid work. The rest are people who can’t, not won’t, and in the hospital where my wife works some 400,000 children come through on the program annually.

I had someone quote to me the other day that the only real rights were the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on this issue. Life. LIFE! How can we possibly provide for the right to life for a 26-week old premature baby with developmental issues. At what point does that baby’s right to life end and the right to not ever have to pay a dime a tax begin?

Americans are vastly uninformed to the amount that they are feeding from the public trough. Every trip to the grocery store you take involves food made cheap by heavy farm and ranch subsidies (and most of it is tax free for the consumer to boot). That’s because the government, and until the age of libertarianism the public, understood that food is a right to be fulfilled by the social contract. Transportation is a right, as is water and the ability to communicate by mail and phone, which is why we have laws making sure you can’t build a housing development and not provide those things.

Does this count as compelling a service against the will of the provider? Possibly, but that is not an absolute negative. There’s a line in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, where all the mafia bosses are at a meeting. They accuse Don Corleone of hogging access to judges needed to ensure henchmen would get light sentences. Corleone defers that he does not have a monopoly, but another boss pushes back with this quote.

“Don Corleone controls all the apparatus. His refusal to let us use it is not the act of a friend. He takes bread out of the mouths of our families. Times have changed, it’s not like the old days when everyone can go his own way. If Corleone has all the judges in New York, then he must share them or let others use them. Certainly he can present a bill for such services, we’re not communists, after all. But he has to let us draw water from the well. It’s that simple.”

Asking someone making less than $20,000 a year to contribute 7 percent of his income from working for medical care for all seems, which no one can afford out of pocket in America any more (more on that in a minute), seems a reasonable fee. Asking someone making more than $125,000 to contribute maybe twice that also seems a reasonable fee. Because none of us “buy” healthcare. We are driven to it, and we have no control over the price. I can buy a nice shelf somewhere and a less nice shelf somewhere else, but I can’t do that to fix a broken arm. Healthcare must be a right because healthcare is already not a choice.

One final note. It may seem unfair that the man who makes $125,000 should be asked to pay more. Let me tell you about my uncle. My uncle was a millionaire, a man generous and kind to a fault, and also a man who battled cancer the whole time I knew him. He had the best insurance money could possibly buy (this was pre-ACA), and still, before he died, she spent millions of dollars on care. Far more than he ever put into the systems he paid into.

Healthcare is a right priced as a luxury, and we’ve mistakenly started to think of it like we’d think of a car. Even the rich, though, can, and on a long enough lifescale will, take more than they gave unless we are all compelled to make healthcare a universal obligation. The alternative is pain and death, and even money cannot save you. If you don’t start thinking about healthcare as a right, especially if you have enjoyed constant insurance and affordable doctors, you just might find out some day that your access to it will be revoked by others who don’t respect your right. Privilege can be fleeting, but chronic pain and misery?

Those things can last the rest of your life.

What lurid posters and leaflet campaigns were for 20th century propaganda, Twitter and Facebook posts are for 21st century. The internet’s viral capability as well as its tendency to continue delivering us what our page clicks imply we want to see more of, has made it a potent tool in the war to influence minds. It works, too, not the least because people on social media are consuming information in huge chunks with little time to taste or digest it, and it makes us feel so full of ideas we don’t always question whether that particular brain meal was wise. It’s the binge-drinking of data.

Earlier this year, it became inarguable that much of the mass information regarding the 2024 election originated from Russian intelligence agents. The bots and sock puppet accounts were capable of harnessing memes and trends to create huge waves of thought that would be quickly amplified by others. It was chemical warfare of the mind.

And it worked. Russian bots pretended to be Bernie Sanders supporters, helping to amplify to phenomenon known as the Bernie Bros and sending Hillary Clinton supporters fleeing to closed groups. Bots also infiltrated several pro-Sanders Facebook groups to disseminate memes and false news stories. Following the end of the Democratic primary, bots began to abandon Sanders supporters to focus on helping Donald Trump, though they largely used the same effective tactics.

Heck, I somehow still had one of these on my own friends list last week, which popped up when I mentioned Clinton in a Facebook post to begin spamming me with anti-Clinton propaganda (which matters now for some reason). Some of my friends, unaware they were not in fact arguing with a person in good faith, wondered how to tell it was a bot. So today, I’m going to present a brief guide on avoiding this mess in future elections.

Characteristics of Russian Bot

Before responding to an all-caps angry rant extolling Donald Trump, click on the person’s profile. Bots and sock puppeteers are not clever or industrious. They rarely take the time to create well-rounded personalities as they know they are essentially the internet equivalent of a burner phone. Their profile pics tend to be stock models, especially pretty women, and clicking on them will usually show they didn’t even bother to crop the watermarks out.

Their page usually has no indication this is a person who actually lives a life. No pictures of kids. Few friends (and almost exclusively male as men are quicker to accept friend requests from a random woman than vice versa). Often the profile is only few years old at most, and contains no lifestyle milestones or discussion except possibly links to dodgy political sites.

Also, beware of profiles of people who you know who begin to act uncharacteristic and strange. It’s a common practice for bots to copy other people’s profiles and resend friend requests. Beware if you see a familiar face you didn’t know unfriended you coming back. Odds are, your old friend is still there and this is a cheap imitation.

In communications, bots will usually start by yelling, and quickly move into responding entirely in memes. Memes are easier for foreign bots as they can provide a mass response that only needs a language and grammar check upon creation. They also spread well, and ultimately that is…

The Goal of a Bot

I need you to understand something and try to keep it close to your heart; not everyone on the internet is telling the truth or has your best intentions in mind. Bots arrived because Vladimir Putin wished to destabilize American elections and, if possible, prevent a powerful politician who had thwarted his ambitions in the past from attaining power. He and his psyops did not do this for our benefit.

They weren’t even trying to win an ideological war. Bots were not trying to convince Clinton supporters to switch sides. That wasn’t the goal. That’s not how modern mind control works.

The purpose of the bots was 1. To flood the internet with so much rage and media it felt suffocating. This would be helpful to dishearten Clinton voters. 2. To shift the rhetoric so far into the unreasonable that it made bad behavior seem reasonable by comparison. A person angry at the losing efforts of Sanders or the liberal agenda or whatever might not normally start screaming “lock her up” in the course of their rational life, but inundate them with enough pretend-people saying far worse and a wealth of unverified conspiracy theories and suddenly they assume they are the calm middle ground.

The campaigns work because when you put enough mass behind an ideological push, when it seems like “everyone is saying it,” real people can be counted on to boost the signal and fight the actual ground war.

The Effect of Bots

Bots are an infectious agent, but they are not the pandemic. Since they’re not real people that other real people actually care about, they make a poor vector for the virus to spread.

That’s where we come in. What a bot is hoping we’ll do is swallow some meme or story, regurgitate it, and that others will continue to do so. By the time someone steps in with a counter-opinion or a debunking, the infected population can reinforce itself through group-think and confirmation bias. Think of it like a mental zombie attack. One zombie, easily defeated. Ten zombies, all with the same target, much harder.

If these arguments take place on a friend’s page, then their friends become exposed, and they may quietly or not so quietly begin spreading the virus themselves. And to their friends. And so on. Before you know it, you are cut off in a sea of people all agreeing on a wrong thing.

Following the revelation of the bots and their effect on the election, I had a lot of Sanders supporters rationalizing that the harassment waves that came from that camp were all merely the work of bots, but that just isn’t true. What happened could only happen when real people allow what the bots say to guide their actions.

And Clinton supporters? Don’t get smug, either. If Sanders had come from behind and won the primary, the resentment felt from the bot operations would likely have prompted the bots to begin targeting the Clinton camp to help pull the same trick on Sanders after the fact. That’s the beauty of a bot attack. There is literally no scenario where the attacker can lose. But then…

How to Stop Bots

To keep with the virus analogy, vaccination is the only possible solution. Upon identifying a bot, report their profile and block them. If it happens on a comment thread, delete their comments and let everyone know that the person wasn’t real. Report any memes that you saw they were sharing as spam.

This isn’t about free speech. There is nothing to be gained by dealing with agents of a foreign power masquerading as concerned citizens, and if we aren’t to repeat the absolute carnage of 2024 we have to stop pretending weaponized information doesn’t influence or harm us.

Been a lot of doom and gloom since Donald Trump was elected president. I know because I have penned a bunch of it myself. The recent move towards kicking tens of millions off of their health insurance, and the continued investigation to his campaign’s ties to Russian cyberwar aren’t changing that. Thank god my copay for therapy is low.

Into this miasma of despair comes an unlikely hero, the three-panel web comic called Decent Don by the ironically named JP Downer. It is honestly the most strangely cathartic thing I have ever seen in my life, certainly since the election. Reading it is a weird peek into a world that feels like it should be here, but is in some terrible there instead.

It’s a comic about Trump, but not the one we now celebrate on President’s Day. Downer’s Trump is a decent guy. Not a great guy; just a good one. Here are a few of the more recent ones to give you the idea…

 
Illustrations by JP Downer

You know what I like the most about Decent Don? It’s a celebration of the bare minimum needed to keep society on an even keel. The character isn’t doing great deeds. He isn’t out there unsnarling peace in the Middle East or the opioid crisis. He’s just doing a collection of the very minor things it would take to make America a slightly less shitty place.

Considering the number of people I have seen recently absolutely gleeful that the fully half of children in Texas who are on Medicaid might suddenly be without healthcare, maybe a little reminder of the minor generosities that it requires to better Planet Texas is what some folks need. Certainly reading it makes me a tiny bit happier.

We decided to talk with Downer about his creation. Here’s that interview.

Free Press Houston: First, the basics. Can you give me a little background on your career and training as a cartoonist, and tell me any of the other work you’ve done?

JP Downer: I am actually a musician first and foremost. I recently started focusing a lot of energy on designing concert posters for myself and my friends in the Portland music scene, which has increased my proficiency with Photoshop and Illustrator. I have always been a doodler, drawing weird faces and little cartoons. So, when I didn’t have any posters to work on, I would work on illustrating cartoons. It’s actually pretty new for me.

FPH: What could have possibly inspired Decent Don?

JPD: During the election, my social media feeds were nothing but negativity. While I wanted to contribute to the conversation, I didn’t want to just bash Trump. It was already being done… and it also opens up the door for people to start fights in the comments, which I think is a bad look. So I decided to take “Love Trumps Hate” to heart and send some psychic love beams his way via the internet. Also, I thought it was funny to imagine him making those phony, smug, self-satisfied [faces] because he feels good about making the right decisions to be considerate to those around him.

FPH: How has the reaction been to Decent Don? This being the internet, I assume at least someone hates it for some reason.

JPD: It’s still pretty small, so I haven’t received much negative feedback besides a couple “hide all posts” on Facebook. I’m not really making a political statement, but I imagine people on both sides of the aisle might be disoriented at first, and then if it doesn’t vibe with them, they move on. I’m sure that can change as it reaches more and more people, but then they just get a “Have a great day. – Don”.

FPH: What does it say about the world that we have to imagine our president just being an okay guy instead of having real world examples?

JPD: It’s obviously a little troubling. If he weren’t naturally so arrogant, insecure, hateful, childish, self-centered, etcetera… the comic wouldn’t work. So, I am not taking any credit for it being funny. It’s all cognitive dissonance. If all I have to do is show him picking up a gum wrapper, and that is funny. That is saying something.

FPH: Boris the cat? I would’ve gone with Vladimir Puddin’ myself. Why a cat and why name him Boris?

JPD: Don having a cat with a vaguely Russian name is about as close to a reference to reality as I am willing to make.

FPH: Which comic you’ve drawn is your favorite and why?

JPD: I guess it would have to be “Cookie,” where Don breaks a cookie in half and offers to keep the smaller half. I like it because it’s simple, but symbolic of something bigger. “I cut, you choose” is a pretty basic protocol to combat greed and unfairness.

FPH: What is the future of Decent Don?

JPD: I am just going to continue putting out two comics per week, interacting with people on social media, and trying to grow my reach. I am also planning to release a print book this year.

Keep an eye on Decent Don at DecentDon.com.

There was a piece that came out in Vanity Fair just recently, written by T. A. Frank and titled, “Please, God, Stop Chelsea Clinton From Whatever She Is Doing.” You can go read it if you like, but it sums up well. Clinton is endangering the future of Democratic politics by being a rich white lady on the cover of Elle magazine. The fact that someone at Vanity Fair actually pitched an article about too much exposure of rich white celebrities and no one collapsed their own lung in a fit of laughter is in and of itself hilarious, but let’s move on.

I can’t tell how old Frank is from his hand-drawn byline pic, but here’s the perspective of someone who is old enough to remember when conservative relatives passed around VHS tapes of The Clinton Chronicles faux-documentary of the family’s imaginary legacy of murder as stocking stuffers. Clinton is exactly one year older than me, and as a teenage boy growing up I heard only one thing; she was hideous. People talked about Clinton like she was Belial from Basket Case. If the State Home for the Ugly had been real, popular media assured me Chelsea Clinton would be their star attraction.

But, she, and I, grew up. She survived being an awkward teenager in the White House, and I survived being an awkward teenager in the barrios of East Houston. She went on to be something of a fashion template, a semi-politician, a socialist, and activist, a mother, and one of the faces of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2024 presidential bid. Her life is remarkable and unique, but conventional of you start from the variables of her birth.

I understand that there is some profound bitterness from the Bernie Sanders “wing” of the Democratic Party, but none of this is some weird offense worthy of burning Clinton from our sight as some unclean spirit of failed policy. Chelsea Clinton is a person famous in a very unique way. There are not a lot of presidential daughters in the world, and almost none as famous as her. She is, ironically, a White Lodge version of her friend, Ivanka Trump. Being mad at her, as Frank apparently is, for her fame and use to deference in her life, is like being mad that a cat can’t breathe underwater. It’s more of a judgment on the compliant than the object of their complaint.

Look, Chelsea Clinton is not the face of progressive politics going forward, and literally no one aside from a few meme-makers working through their grief over the 2024 election believes she is. She’s a typical privileged rich white lady with typical privileged rich white lady thoughts. She’s better than most, but not the future.

You have to understand, or not if you’re Frank, that she has no good answer to the question of whether she will run for office in the future. Say no, and she’s a liar if she eventually does. Say yes, and she’s hounded day and night until she files the paperwork. As a young mother of two that just spent a year and a half helping her mom through a grueling election, it’s not unreasonable that she might just want to not be bothered for a bit rather than commit to future political action. Maybe she just wants to be the pretty lady on the cover of the magazine for a bit. That’s not a crime, and she owes nothing more to anyone. Contrary to popular belief, she is not actually a public servant. She’s a private citizen beholden to no one.

Which is, I suspect, the problem. After the 2024 election there seems to be this public ownership idea of Clinton that is simply not based in fact. As the heir-apparent of the name she’s expected to live up to perceptions, regardless if she as an actual woman who feels like doing that.

First of all… the Clinton “dynasty” idea was always stupid. Hillary is a Rodham, not a Clinton, and whether her daughter’s entirely speculative political career constitutes a continuation of either her father or her mother’s legacy is so situational a question it does not deserve the vapors it apparently gives Frank in his piece. Second of all, Frank’s admiration of George W. Bush’s daughter Barbara’s post philanthropic career because she does it “quietly” is a sexist assumption I would hope needs no explanation. I don’t take kindly to the idea women are better off when they’re not as loud.

If Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the general election Electoral College was some sort of mandate on the end of her family’s involvement, then Bernie Sanders’ much more definitive defeat in the Democratic primary should be a mandate that his particular brand has no more worth than Chelsea Clinton’s. I’ve personally been annoyed at the DNC’s desire to fellate Sanders day and night on fundraising tours, but I can certainly deal with that. On that note, perhaps we could stop pretending the existence of the Clintons is some sort of un-erasable spot on Democratic politics. Chelsea’s mum won the popular vote by a huge margin. Like it or not, the family is still in the game, and no one does the left any favors by pretending otherwise.

This past Easter was the third major holiday in a row since the election where my wife, daughter and I spent it alone in our apartment having a quiet family dinner instead of venturing out to larger family gatherings. Most of my extended family voted for Donald Trump, and because of that I see them less and less.

There’s this idea that blood is thicker than water, and that to reduce or end familial relationships based on mere “politics” is somehow childish. Before November I probably would have agreed. Certainly I never had more than a passing annoyance at my family who voted for Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush, even though the latter went on to start a war based on information he knew was complete bullshit. I thought anyone who would prefer Romney over Barack Obama was politically ridiculous, but I wasn’t going to skip Christmas over it.

Donald Trump is different, though. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that his election was a litmus test for a nation. A lot of people I love failed that litmus test, and to be honest, they failed it on purpose.

There is this tendency to talk about Trump as if he was this anomaly out of nowhere. As if he drew lines in the sand that no one was expecting, and that many people in fear or anger jumped into his camp like it was a quick-time event in a video game.

That’s not accurate. The election didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a large-scale shift in the national identity. Myself and others call it the Whitelash, referring back to Susan Faludi’s book Backlash about the counterattack to feminism in the 1980s. What happened after the election of Barack Obama was very similar and also very different.

Under Obama we saw an unprecedented intersectional movement forward on the rights of marginalized people. His own ascendency as the country’s first black president alone was a shattering achievement, but the establishment of marriage equality and other LGBT rights factors in as well. I’m not saying Obama was this perfect champion of progressivism. God knows he was the Deporter in Chief of many of our undocumented immigrants as well as the man who made Middle Eastern children fear the bloody sky with his murder plane campaign, but when you look at his impact as a whole here in America, what you see is a dramatic shift from patriarchy and white supremacy to something more egalitarian. Not an end to those paradigms, mind you. Just a significant shift.

That shift unnerved a lot of people. Think pieces talk about the economic anxiety that plagued Trump voters and boosted him to the White House, but scratch the surface on any of those think piece subjects and what you inevitably come to is a paralyzing fear and anger that someone “underserving” was receiving more than the due the subject felt was rightfully theirs. Keep on scratching, and the source of the itch is clearly bigoted in nature, focused on welfare queens or coastal elites or the rights of Others with a capital O. It was this environment that prompted Hillary Clinton to make diversity and the protection of children against bigotry’s reach a capstone of her campaign.

Into this vague miasma of soft bigotries comes Donald Trump, who is the dark mirror of modern hate with a lowercase H. He is ignorant to a fault, a perfect avatar for the unqualified reaching higher than the Dilbert Effect should allow, openly misogynistic and racist, and gleefully violent in rhetoric. He is the walking id of a lot of people being dragged forward kicking and screaming against their will.

But because he is that, he was also our One Ring moment, our time to have the devil take us up to the hill and show us the kingdoms of the world if we would just bow down and worship him. He was an obvious, almost cartoonishly evil choice. He was so unabashedly awful that a lot of people I knew thought it was a performance piece meant to get him to actually lose.

He didn’t lose, though. He won, and tens of millions of people were perfectly happy to cast a vote for him. Some of them are related to me, people who think of themselves as good. When it came time decide if they were going to face the future or cower in the darkness hoping one last terrible roll of the dice would keep the unfair power structure in place and benefitting them, they chose to roll.

It was a game of chicken. It was a fundamental question of how far was someone willing to fight progress out of sheer bloody-mindedness and irritation that a liberal somewhere pointed out that FEMA camps weren’t actually a thing. It was the ultimate retreat into a safe space and the burning of bridges to keep it that way. Donald Trump was the political equivalent of a completely unwarranted mic drop.

And… you don’t get to be that way and see my kid. Sorry. I can’t trust that sort of person with her sponge-like mind. It’s hard enough keeping the more annoying aspects of Nickelodeon teen dramas out of her head, let alone some weird hang-up on trans people or Muslims. You can’t say you voted for Trump and that you’re a good person. You’re not. You’re just someone that has warped their view like a fish in a bowl until you have forgotten what goodness actually looks like. Here’s a hint; it ain’t dropping the Mother of All Bombs because it makes Brian Williams suck your dick on the air for five minutes.

Politics is life. It is the institutional expression of our values. Voting for some bullshit bathroom bill or to have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting defunded is not an opinion akin to Paul McGann is a better Doctor Who than David Tennant. It’s an indicator of who you are and what you value. Also, of what you know.

Many of the people that we love are… astray. They’re not rotten per se, but they are in error. That’s fine. We all make errors. But an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

Trump might as well have stood in an 8-bit house saying, “I am Error.” To side with him in any way is the sort of flaw in character that you would assign to a cousin with a criminal record that you don’t invite to Thanksgiving. I’m not going to pretend that voting is not an action worthy of deciding a person’s morality, or whether that morality is something I need to expose my family to. Part of growing up is learning what parts of your education in the first 20 years of life were garbage. And, which people in your life never learn that. Family is awesome, but it is no excuse to condone what is wrong.

I’m late to the party on this hot take, but this weekend I finally upgraded my two-year-old phone as a birthday present to myself. I thought I’d try and enlighten the gentleman from the Beehive State on this amazing luxury he thinks people are blowing would-be premiums on.

First things first, I’ve never paid full-price for a smart phone at one time. Ever. Know what my brand new iPhone 7 cost me out-of-pocket this weekend? $3. Yes, you read that right, and no, I didn’t buy it out of the back of a van or something. I got it at an AT&T store.

I’ve been with AT&T for cell phone coverage for as long as I have had one, which is at least a decade. They sign you up for a contract, and you pay for your phone in installments of somewhere between $15 and $35 depending on the model, length of the contract and whether you get any insurance. When the contract is up, you get an upgrade where you only pay the tax due on the phone at the store ($61.87 in my case). Factor in the $59 they are crediting me on the account for my old phone on trade-in, and my new phone was, again, $3, with a payment plan less than my renter’s insurance.

All that is slightly beside the point, though. I mean, if the Republicans can make me a health insurance plan that costs me less than $50 a month, sure, Chaffetz’s argument would hold water like a Star Wars fan’s bladder the last twenty-minutes of Rogue One. And if monkeys could get law degrees they’d run for congress, but that seems just about as plausible.

Instead, let’s stare this head on. Dear Republicans; a smart phone is no longer a luxury item. It is not the early ‘00s. Access to the online world is quickly becoming a right as much as landline access has been in the past, and pretty soon existing in most population centers without a smart phone will be more or less impossible.

Know what you can do with an iPhone. Well, you can check your eligibility for Medicaid and CHIPS on HealthCare.gov without owning a computer for starts. You know, until the Republicans kill it, but for now smartphones are already the gateway to the health insurance programs provided by the state. You could also shop for conventional health insurance on them, as well as find a doctor, or the nearest CVS clinic. Barring that, you can use one to do what I did two weeks ago, and save yourself a $40 trip to the pediatrician by Googling symptoms. My iPhone literally paid for itself that month simply by being in my hand and ready to access information when my baby was sick.

You can apply for a job with a smartphone (and receive a call back as well!). Most large businesses these days have apps, and they actively prefer you to apply online rather than come in and do it with pen and paper. Plus, you save yourself the costly driving around process looking for work. Want to work at Kroger? There’s an optimized mobile site for that. Ditto Starbucks. Ditto pretty much any corporation of significant size. You can even use an app to summon an Uber driver to take you there for the interview.

Know what I did with my phone a lot during the election? Made sure all my information was in order so I could vote, not to mention text numerous friends who asked me what they needed to do to vote as many of them were doing it for the first time (or the first time in the primaries). The state lags behind private enterprise in mobile website construction, but they work well enough to get the job done. I’m certain the iPhone map app is what led me to my early voting location both times. Not that Republicans are trying to suppress voters or anything… except when they totally are. The fact that minorities (who tend to vote Democrat) use their mobile devices proportionately more than whites is telling in this regard. Surely everyone remember the racist specter of the Obamaphone “scandal.”

My favorite iPhone feature is that it allows me to record moments, and while that allows for a lot of precious family memories it also comes in handy with the cops. Even my whiter-than-rice self gets a little nervous getting pulled over these days, and when I do I quietly flip on the voice memo feature on my iPhone. I try to keep it low key, even though it is perfectly legal to film cops in this state. You never know when you’re going to need the objective truth of a recording to back up your word against authority, and having a smart phone could literally save your life.

I could go on and on, and hopefully someday someone will, at length, to Chaffetz’s face. No one is giving up their iPhone for health insurance. What it costs me to have one is less than a tenth of the vision rider my wife gets our family through her insurance at a major hospital, and I know for a fact it’s even less for someone who got their insurance on the exchange. Republicans have got to stop pretending that the poor are wasting their money on frivolities instead of necessities. Smartphones open a gate into the world and it’s opportunities, and for the most part they cost so little in regards to healthcare you wouldn’t even notice the difference in your paycheck if they were deducted the same way. Pretending anything else is just admitting they don’t actually care. Please vote accordingly in 2024.

Note: The author is whiter than a They Might Be Giants concert.

Like all good beta cucks, I like to open my morning with a trip to David Futrelle’s We Hunted the Mammoth, just to make sure my marching orders to eliminate America are all correct. If cultural Marxism is to succeed, it must be meticulous, after all.

That was all sarcasm, by the by.

I did read one of Futrelle’s fun explorations of the ickier sides of the manosphere last week, though. In a piece called “White people! Save your race by becoming ‘loud, fertile xenophobes,’ loud xenophobe urges,” he chronicles the Twitter rantings of prominent Nazi Paul Hominid. Hominid, like a lot of white supremacist, urges all white women in the world to immediately get pregnant as often as possible if the white race is to be preserved against the “raw power of POC birth rates.”

Birth is a weird fixation for a lot of bigots. You ever hear of the quiverful movement? People like the Duggar family who believe a woman should basically keep having children until her uterus turns inside-out like you’re sewing a sleeve? Explore the foundation of that movement and you will find out it has nothing to do with babies being the glory of God’s creation and everything to do with “WE MUST OUTBREED THE MOOSLEMS OR THEY WILL CONSUME US ALL!”

It’s weaponized reproduction with two aims. The first is to keep women perpetually pregnant, and therefore out of power. We’ll discuss that another day. The second is the preservation of the white race and the Western way of life, as these dinguses understand it at any rate.

I really don’t care if the white race goes extinct.

No, seriously. The idea of humanity descending into that vaguely brown race from that South Park episode fills me with an enormous “meh.” A future without white people or where they are an ethnic minority doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Whiteness is only an identity for one kind of people: racists. Our entire culture is set up to portray whiteness as the default, so white people don’t generally identify as white like other races do except when asked about it on a form. There’s no need to have someone look at the world through a white lens because white people control nearly all the lenses already.

So when someone becomes fixated on whiteness as a thing in need of preservation, they are doing that in response to a fear of encroachment. I made that cuck joke in the opening paragraph for a reason. People obsessed with the ideas of alphas, betas, and cucks are generally freaking out over the idea of black men putting their peeners in white women. It’s an old racist idea going back well into the early 20th century. The image of black men as animalistic fuck machines who could satisfy the wanton cravings of white women is an ancient dog whistle. It speaks to racism, women as possessions, white fragility, fear of emasculation, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

I’ve got no use for that nonsense.

The recurring theme in this brand of far-right conservatism is a mindless fear of the Other. Blacks as animalistic. Muslims as barbaric. Whatever. Other races are seen as a pollutant in the gene pool.

Know what my daughter thinks of when she considers miscegenation? The 44th president of the United States. Barack Obama is what happens when a white lady from Kansas reproduces with a dude from Kenya and their kid gets partially raised in Indonesia. In other words, an incredibly intelligent and well-read man who also happened to ascend to the highest office in his mother’s country.

It’s really hard to feel fear of the erasure of whiteness when that’s your prime example. Look, white people have done great things. I can celebrate the brilliance of Columbus, the navigator, and decry Columbus, the native people eradicator, at the same time. It’s called nuanced, y’all.

But my daughter’s whiteness is literally the least important thing about her I hope to pass on. I hope she inherits a knowledge of inequality, and what we must do to combat it. I hope she gets the concept of fairness. I hope she realizes that people should be judge not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. None of that requires my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren or my great-great-grandchildren to be mostly or even partially white.

There’s just nothing about being white particularly worth preserving. Ideas and morals are what matters, and those have no color.

There are few terms that get misused more than censorship, except perhaps free speech. To hear some people talk these days, you’d think there was an actual PC Police storming through the streets trying to shut down the very concept of expressing thought, usually because they think liberals are fragile snowflakes unable to handle bad words.

But these folks never seem to question their own unending attempts at censorship that they dub free speech. To return to the GamerGate example, members of that group have literally spent years targeting people like critic Anita Sarkeesian, sending her highly-specific death threats nearly every day of her life, all for the crime of examining tropes in videogames through a feminist lens.

The goal was never to rebut her, though her harassment and the harassment of many others was often framed that way to make it palatable to the army of useful idiots whose numbers turn a standard image board raid into a national story. The goal was to silence her and make her go away. The fact that Sarkeesian disables comments on her videos and routinely blocks her attackers on social media, was all the proof those people needed that she was an enemy of free speech and artistic integrity.

The real motivation, though, was the weak-kneed fragility of speech that they puff out their chests and pretend to be fighting. There’s no censorship if a critic chooses to highlight expressions of misogyny in a piece of media. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of that, creating more content centered around the medium everyone claimed to love.

The doomsday scenario was that publishers and developers would fear dread at angry liberal gamers, and would proceed to pepper their games with content they considered “political.” Often this reached truly ridiculous heights, such as when they began screaming that Virginia was yet another example of this ominous specter simply because the main character is a black woman. That’s the level of cultish outrage that obsesses the absolutist free speech crowd; anything that even hints at diversity, no matter how banal, is treated like a culture war. God knows what nonsense is being spouted in response to three Triple A games this year having trans characters.

Discussing things like problematic language or lack of diversity in gamecasts does not promote censorship, even if developers decide to alter future content based on those discussions. Not every artistic idea, especially in something as large and complex as a video game, deserves to be expressed and applauded as beyond reproach. It’s not self-censorship if an artist decides to respond positively to criticism. It’s just another form of free speech. Assigning the label of “politics” to that evolution of the work is silly. There’s nothing inherently more political about wondering why a game doesn’t have more women than there is wondering about its resource management system.

We have to be free to criticize things, but that doesn’t include large-scale harassment, especially of marginalized people. I’m a lot less worried about whether the next shooter gets a gender or race change because the makers think it’ll get them diversity points than seeing another Jennifer Hepler get driven out of the industry because a bunch of entitled brats thought she should fear for her life because they didn’t like Dragon Age.

God knows I stir the pot myself in my various publications, and the harassment and ease with which it can be done takes a significant toll on my ability to create. When they turn up the volume, it turns mine down, and that is exactly their aim.

The problem with most people who have made free speech their raison d’etre is that their conception of it is stuck in the ‘90s, when we had panics that blamed violent media for school shootings. The enduring narrative that stuck around was that any discussion of the effect of media was the purview of the crazed moralists who simply couldn’t handle blood and tits in a video game. It’s a very “you’ll never stop rock and roll” sort of mindset, even though no official censorship of gaming ever came to pass or even really came close. Still, the message was clear; it was cool to be brutal and crass.

No, Grand Theft Auto didn’t turn people into spree killers, but the whole reason that the movement ever had any momentum is because there is a science behind it. Cultivation theory is a well-respected part of social science that covers everything from advertising to war propaganda, and whether or not playing a sexist or violent video makes you actively sexist or violent, denying that the media we consume affects our worldview is just silly. There’s been a lot of study on the subject, though people for whom their idea of censorship is Capcom deciding not to show R. Mika’s buttslap animation probably haven’t been keeping up.

Those people are predominantly white cishet men, a group accustomed to having their voices heard as a matter of course. They don’t think of their voices as being censorship for others because they don’t get shouted down, and virtually always have a forum to speak. Now they’re finding a lot more empowered groups who want a say in how things are in the world, and they don’t find your insistence on slurs and Nazi jokes to be the daring stab against the man like you thought it was back when JNCOs were a thing.

Free speech absolutists worry only about whether they can say something with as little consequence as possible. Calling Leslie Jones a gorilla on Twitter is their proof they are advocates for a cause. And they are; just not the one they think. What they’re advocating for is the silence of any idea that questions their unexamined worldview, and any indication that the ideas they might have about art and themselves might just not be worth much. They’re not worried people will stop making video games because a woman said mildly unkind things about a dead sex worker in Hitman. They’re worried because less and less people find dead sex workers in Hitman to be a desirable feature. Diversity and avoidance of misogyny is simply getting more popular with people, largely because of stellar critical work being done on the art form. In the marketplace of ideas (and I assume the creative minds of game makers wanting to expand their toolbox), the dreaded censorship so many accuse of trying to shut down creation is actually making more of it.

Criticism is crucial to the evolution of thought and art, and so are critics. It’s unfortunate that so many have used the wonder of the internet to attack critics, and that popular Twitter users amuse themselves with the forum to try and silence other voices. Often those voices end up muffled out of fear, and the assailant justifies himself by pretending free speech is at stake if he can’t say cunt whenever he pleases. The more vulnerable a person is, the less likely they will have the resources to fight back against an avalanche. Fear for your life should not be the price of speaking up, and the only reason these people don’t understand that is because it almost never comes home to roost for them. If your free speech is only free for you, it’s not actually that free.