letters from a weirdo

Thank you Mar, Sandra, flightlessblrbs, mums, Gretta, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

“wish” — by flightlessblrbs

what if, on the other side of you “not showing up” for your maga-family get-together is a whole other version of yourself that you actually like better?

I’m a community college writing professor. What is so striking to me, in reading all of this talented writing, is also grasping a sense of our underlying “story of us.” I think this story could use more of our attention and tender care.

What we focus on grows and, right now, the story we’re still telling about “us” is that change can’t happen because rich political abusers throw roadblocks in our way. The thing is, neighbor, that’s just not true. You and I have an incredible amount of our own power— but fascists have spent billions of dollars (and bought a gaggle of politicians, to boot) in order to weave stories designed to crush your spirit, induce feelings of powerless, and turn you against your neighbors, instead of organizing together against them.

Political abusers want to take away your first amendment rights, because they know how dangerous a story of our collective power can be. They want you to “stop doing the work” of shaping feelings into words and sentences, because they want you to give up on laboring toward your own story. Why? They know the power of wading through words to arrive at story— and they don’t want you to have it. It’s too dangerous, because what if you start telling a different story of power? No. They want to have ownership of The Story. It is the story of the market, the story of disposability, the story of betrayal, the story of annihilation, the story of brutality, the story of greed.

When you give your mind to a machine to “improve your writing,” it launders your thoughts. It promises you “solutions,” not reading the fine print that what it’s robbing you of is actual innovation— which always always always comes from a stuck place. You’re being conned. Coming to story is supposed to be effortful, precisely because it is powerful. The malignantly rich don’t know that, because they’ve only ever plagiarized to get to where they are. Full offense.

I think one of the ways they try to sell you on all this AI slop is by being perfection-mongerers. Spoiler alert. Perfection is a red herring meant to keep you stuck in a loop of “not good enough.” What if I told you, after decades of teaching writing, that it’s your weirdness, your emotion, your tenderness, and your curiosity that makes your words sing? Perfection is white supremacy— it tells you to be a copy of a copy of a copy, and to never step out of line because difference is suspect. What a curious story.

Do not give up your own ability to come to story— to arrive, however gloriously imperfect— at your own words. At the same time, ask yourself: “what conduct does my writing inspire?” Let the answer be agency. Let the answer lead to connection, courage, creativity, compassion, and our collective liberation.

Stories are emotion, given shape and form. We tell stories to shape belief and inspire action.

Case in Point: If you’re feeling numb, believe nothing you do matters, and stay isolated and powerless— that’s not an accident. There’s a been a decades-long campaign to tell you regular people can’t win for trying, that our voices don’t matter, and even if we had a thing to say we’d probably say it wrong. This, my friend, is a story. It is a story someone else is telling about us. You need to ask yourselves: what do they get out of encouraging us to believe that we’re stuck and there’s nothing to do about it? What conduct does it inspire? What kind of world does it get us?

So if you want to see an empowered populace rise up against coordinated political abuse, it’s time to embrace, in as many ways as possible, our collective power and start telling a new story of us.

are you outraged by the latest “epstein slow-drip” and want to accelerate actual accountability for people who sexually assault children? this video is for you. watch it. there IS something you can do, and it starts now.

on a disappointing side-note: i’m more than a bit grossed out today to see the commentariat interviewing creepy men in trump’s orbit about the epstein files. pretty sure you’d get more insight from people who are survivor-advocates and/or survivors of childhood sexual abuse. but do go on asking grifters, who likely turned a blind eye to trump’s child-raping, questions about what THEY think is afoot.

this is like the worst goddamn scooby-doo episode. you can take talking heads out of msm, but you can’t make them think. they’re still protecting power, even now.

it’s important for you to realize billionaires are trying to kill you so they don’t have to share what remains of the ecosystem they collapsed. they promised to keep trump out of jail so they could use him to wreck the constitution and use christian nationalists as their useful idiots. if they need to, the billionaire puppeteers will also drone the christian nationalists before it’s all said and done.

is this terrifying? sure is.

but it only goes down like this if we let them trap our agency in “policy loopholes.”

we need to divest ourselves of this “economy” and its intentionally weaponized “institutions” and, instead, take care of each other. stop chasing success in this world— stop believing such a version of “success” exists. it doesn’t. this is a bipartisan effort to cull the population.

fascist elites want you focused on “rigged elections” so you don’t focus on how they’ve always bought the politicians.

they’re willing to let us die. it’s a handshake across the isle.

trust and verify: when people don’t have enough for healthcare, food, and shelter, and, when FEMA is gutted, millions of us will die. that’s the policy. and, as political abusers like to convince us, you can’t change the policy. no, no. “procedures must be followed,” even as norms are broken in our faces.

consider that some senatorial democrats keep fumbling the ball, ever the lucy to charlie brown, because they’ve been paid to throw the fight. get it now? no one can be this stupid. this s**t is intentional.

there are no more red and blue teams.

there’s you and me and everyone we know— and then there are parasitic billionaires, buying politicians to “cull the poors” so they don’t have to experience scarcity on a dying planet they continue to murder without consequence.

i mean this with no smugness when i say: it is my genuine hope this clarifies things.

white supremacist techno-fascist billionaires are waging civil wars and world wars to cull the population. it’s like they’ve moved from evil tech-bro d&d to a real-world game of battleship— and now they’re using drones to do it (with our stolen tax dollars). remember, remember: the military budget had never passed an audit.

now do you understand the tech-bro bunkers?

these men are liquidating the united states treasury, because their plan, once we’re gone, is to create their own feudal states.

we can continue to get played by them— tied to a political system designed to disempower us— or we can work together to care for one another, right now, and build a new government that works for everyday people. we don’t need the permission of a single billionaire or power-broker to do this work.

these people have the guns and the money and the spyware. they do. but that’s weak power. why?

because power is always a story.

no one “has power” inherently. we loan it to them by believing they have it.

you and i vest our power in titles and institutions.

you and i vest our power in money— currency is literal fiction.

the rich know this already, which is why they confabulate and obfuscate to continue hoarding communal resources.

if you want this to change, begin by refusing to believe these people and these institutions are eternal, impenetrable, unstoppable, or even popular.

the way that we’ve been living has been killing all of us. it’s too damn much. all the time. so what if we start by slow-quitting?

what if: we stop buying anything but groceries and start to relearn to hunt and grow and forage. we learn how to can food, mend, and repair. we teach young people how to practice medicine outside expensive medical schools. we invest the “currency” of our collective time, talents, and resources to create parallel systems of support.

you may think: “this is absurd and will never work.”

that assessment makes sense:

a lot of propaganda has been spent to make you think fascism and government crackdowns have goliath’s power. just out of that cinematic frame is david and his slingshot.

remember: there’s 1 trillionaire and about 400 billionaires. focus on their numbers— the size of their group, not the size of their greed.

there are only four hundred greedy political abusers and their enablers, and there are 8 billion of US regular people. right now, these billionaires are manipulating fools into acting as death squads, masking as “security forces.” but these people’s families will also suffer under this regime. con-men never “pay the help” for long. it’s too costly, and what if they get ideas? everyone is disposable to billionaires, even their alliances with the extremists who keep them in power. christian nationalists aren’t safe from the threshing floor— they were groomed for destruction, including theirs.

that’s why fascist elites are escalating quicker than they can consolidate power: to get the extremists to do the killing for them fast enough that they can’t see the leopards are also coming to eat their faces.

this is what’s afoot behind the theater of government and war. the question is: are we brave enough to work together to stop them?

This is my ode to Senator Angus King and every capitulating politician currently allowing us to descend into fascism because standing up to a bully is “too hard.” Give me a gd break. Standing up to Nazis is hard; dying under Nazi oppression is harder. Choose. Your. Hard. FFS.

This is also for every adult who is sitting on their hands right now, instead of standing up for our kids, sibkids, grandkids, and students.

We owe it to young people to stand up and risk our security for the sake of their future. Anything less is complicity.

Thank you Ellen Sue Stern, Sarah, flightlessblrbs, Dana, and many others for tuning into my live video with Evan Stern! Join me for my next live video in the app.

the tomato, the worm, and the wasp: a fable for electoral politics

breaking: fed up americans, done with craven politicians, are taking over every single political party and running on the same bernie sanders economic platform. the message from the people is clear— we own this system and we’re taking it ALL back. no democrat, republican, libertarian, green, or independent is safe from the swarm. y’all done fucked up. you about to find out.

Why is Weirdo doing Substack lives all the sudden?

Because I’m sick of the professional commentariat simping for Democrats and/or never-Trumpers moving the Overton window closer toward fascism. I’m pissed that, even now, even off mainstream media and out of politics, many of these voices just say the same damn things they did when billionaires paid them.

There’s no vision, there’s no agency, no strategy, no passion for their neighbors. They’re running point for the elites, and I’m f*****g done with it. These people are asleep. They’re making money trying to tell you bedtime stories while the world burns.

We need wartime correspondents and unapologetic visionary voices from every single crevice and culture of this country.

It is time to stop looking for ourselves in stories of the nation that erase us and start telling our own stories— and those stories, rooted in community and actual lived experience, has unimaginable and unstoppable power.

When you change the story of us, and what we tell our neighbors we’re capable of, we change the world.

If you’re with me, let’s go!