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A delightful conversation about our desolate political landscape and what we can do to make productive changes. Check out SwampWatch.Org.

Thank you Chris Resists, PJ Schuster, Ms.Yuse, Under the Golden Boot, Lynette, and many others for tuning into my live video with Cryn Johannsen and SwampWatch! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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From day one we’re indoctrinated to love the art of the grift. American history is designed to elevate lies instead of truth. We revere all the wrong people. We build statues to them and savagely attack anyone who points out the contradictions.

“That’s so disrespectful of you to say.”

We learn to self-censor at a young age. When we drive by a church and I call it an indoctrination center, my kids go, “Dad…” as if they’re afraid I might say more. I get where they’re coming from, they’re just trying to keep their head down and survive.

However, the only way to survive is to fight.

But why shouldn’t I be allowed to speak? Those damn churches protect child rapists and oppress women. It pisses me off frankly. It should piss you off.

Another thing that pisses me off is how Republicans are selling America for pennies on the dollar. Heck, they’re not even getting pennies. They’re getting memecoins, whatever that is. They’re trading our land and our infrastructure and our future for literally nothing.

The second you call them out on their b******t, they trot out JD Vance to scold you. “Dad…” he growls. I think his beard is fake.

Foreign nations have learned it’s really easy to purchase the United States. That’s because our conservative supreme court justices are completely corrupt and inept. They were so fixated on short term profit that they couldn’t predict the country would fall apart if they made bribery legal.

Screw these people.

At this point, everything is a joke. I want all the statues taken down. I’m so disgusted by the crimes of our corrupt, white ancestors that I think we should dress them up as clowns and beat them in effigy.

It’s a fire sale! Everything must go! We’re getting rid of the land, the roads, the schools, the hospitals and the military. Yee-haw! When the dust settles, the billionaires will be in their bunkers, and the rest of us will be shaking old beverage dispensers in the hope that a can got jammed in the mechanism the ravagers missed.

I’m referencing “The Road.” Do you know “The Road.” It’s a book. Remember when we read books instead of scrolling?

It was better. You looked up two hours later having learned something. These days you look up cross-eyed and blind. When you complain about it, JD Vance shows up at your house to mutter, “Dad…” and f**k your couch.

How do we shake off this indoctrination? In the conservative rural town where I grew up, the teachers raped kids. When I used to criticize that, people would point and say, “Dad…”

They don’t even tell you to stop. They just manifest this vague aura of disapproval. What do they disapprove of? Is it justice?

If you do manage to get out a criticism, they go on the attack.

“How dare you accuse me! How dare you! Don’t you know how awful it is to make a false accusation…”

“But it’s not false!”

“Don’t interrupt, show some respect!”

Our enemies are always on the attack, always. They lecture us even as they loot our house and our nation and our families and our lives. They talk and squeeze and talk and squeeze until every drop of vitality is extracted and we’re dead. Then they scrape the remains off their hands and attack our children because the abusers insist it was a crime that we left a mess behind.

We’ve got to rouse ourselves.

We’re led by liars and criminals and rapists and con artists and thieves. We build statues to them. We give them power. We’re never allowed to point out their blatant deceits.

The blue states are forced to subsidize the red states. Did you know that? Liberals are forced to subsidize MAGA.

Of course MAGA is worthless. They don’t believe in math or education or books or facts or truth or consequences. What could they possibly contribute to the world? The only thing they have to offer is grievance and intolerance. Yet whenever anyone points this out, somebody is there to utter, “Dad…”

I’m told to be silent even before I’ve begun to speak. Meanwhile the oppressors never face any headwinds.

When it comes to my objection, what is the complaint? What is the complaint?

Why should there be an expectation that I stand silently by as these monstrous people set the world on fire? If you want to criticize something, criticize them and their lack of humanity. Criticize their entitlement and destruction.

Don’t criticize the person who points it out. Doing nothing won’t make it go away. They’re going to burn us all down no matter what we do. We can’t get it worse if we call out that we want them to stop.

So call it out damn it!

Call it out!

The worthless, useless, inept, grifter president is selling the whole nation. He’s loading our possessions into boxes and giving them away. He’s laughing all the while. He’s pointing his finger and calling us “communists” even though he’s taken more taxpayer money than anyone.

They talk and they talk and they talk.

You never get a chance for a rebuttal. If you try to speak, they become hostile. “How dare you interrupt, I’m speaking.”

But they’re not just speaking, they’re thieving. They’re murdering and raping and stealing. Decorum be damned, this has to stop!

The Republicans are running a fire sale because they don’t care about the future. All they care about is the illusion of profit. But there is no profit if their actions mean that we’ll all die.

They want us all to die!

Absolutely everything they say and believe and stand for is a lie.

Somehow they managed to even indoctrinate my children to believe that this is something we should abide. There’s no space for reason, education, compassion, or humanity.

Conservatives destroy everything they touch. They always have and they always will. It’s a parasitic ideology. But I’m not even allowed to stand on a street corner and say so. If I do, I’ll be arrested and replaced with some unlicensed priests who bleats all about the most horrific parts of the Bible. He’ll discuss the child rapes and the slavery and then he’ll accuse you for intolerance if you try to oppose him from grooming and indoctrinating your babies.

He will be allowed to get away with it by people in your community. They’ll try to stop you instead of him.

That’s where the battle is. It’s further up the line.

We can’t be content to interrupt a rape, we have to stop the rape from ever happening. We can’t be content to halt the theft, we have to stop the thieves from becoming so emboldened.

Our challenge is psychological. We have to rewire our brains.

Encourage your friends and allies to call out injustice even when it grates against cultural decorum. Your action will become like sandpaper. We’ll reform our culture into something history will admire. We must.

Conservatives and Republicans are killing us. Stop enabling them.

Don’t be mad at me for calling Republicans child rapists.

Be mad at the Republicans for raping children.

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It has been too long since I talked with Zuri Stevens. I’ve known her for years. I’ve always admired her work on Medium, and she was one of the first person I reached out to for a live after the fascists took control of our country.

I reached out to a lot of people then. Anxiety gave me courage. My email went something like, “Zuri, you barely know me. I’ve read your articles. Would you like to talk? I’m so nervous about the future! What can we do?”

So we nursed each other through the first hard days. We were both counting down to the midterms and trying to find a strategy that might work in the face of hopelessness.

Zuri went through that strategy again in this talk. We have to build a community. We have to support each other. We have to shake off all the lies and indoctrination of the Republican party and conservative ideology.

Once she said that, I realized that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve come so far since 2024. There’s still a long way to go, but I feel better now. I feel more powerful. I’ve created strong bonds with people of integrity like Zuri Stevens and so many others.

The wind is at our back. We’ve got momentum and we’re not stopping. As always, I left this conversation feeling more powerful than when I started. What more can you ask from a conversation with a friend?

Please subscribe to Zuri and support her if you can. She’s a pillar of decency in a world that’s crumbling into ruin!

Thank you Dr. Yamicia Connor, Chris Resists, Mandy Ohman, PJ Schuster, Under the Golden Boot, and many others for tuning into my live video with Zuri Stevens! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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My senior year English teacher was a pedophile who preyed on my classmates, so was the teacher in my sophomore year. One was a man, the other was a woman, and they both engaged in acts of statutory rape.

This betrayal was not something I found myself equipped to manage.

High school years are confusing years anyway. Things go from bad to worse when you’re expected to navigate your confusing feelings about self-identity and sexuality while under the control of cruel and sadistic people.

This was a conservative town. Conservatives are committed to the idea of punishment. When you’ve done nothing wrong, they invent something. One of their favorite forms of punishment is rape.

How much did I know about life at age 17? In the 80s, it wasn’t unusual to be sexually active in high school. It’s an odd thing to reflect on how rural conservative areas view their daughters.

These are communities filled with men who have never gone beyond the city lines. The most accurate way to describe their worldview is one of fear. They’re terrified of everything because they’ve never had the courage to attempt anything new.

Part of that is a side effect of the conservative worldview. They consider themselves “superior.” They consider themselves “hyper-masculine.” But you can’t get better at anything unless you fail. These are men who long to achieve a life of significance, but they lack the support system to achieve any valuable skills.

They content themselves with fishing, hunting, and driving fast. They also spend their time leering at the daughters of their adult male friends.

The friends permit this, because it buys them license for their own transgressions. It’s a sick form of bartering, and children are treated like chattel.

I remember a classmate bragging about his conquest of the tenth grade English teacher. She was an attractive woman, but not exceptionally attractive. She wore short heels that she’d purchased at the local tackle shop. It wasn’t exactly fashion, but she lived in a town where grass grew through the cracks of the road and sidewalks. If she wanted the male attention of that town, she had to attract the men who had convinced themselves it was acceptable to leer at each other’s children.

I guess she decided to follow their lead.

Surviving that school felt like living in a fishbowl. We were surrounded by adult men and women with years of life experience and frustration. I got the sense that they viewed us all more as morsels than as people. The boy athletes were revered by the frustrated adult women of the town. The girls were pursued by the lecherous men.

There were stories that went around about how some of my classmates were dating both their girlfriend and the girlfriend’s mother. “Dating” is a generous term.

We had a newspaper. We had small talk. But gossip was the true mechanism of communication in that town. Fights would break out and it was often as if everybody knew exactly what the fight was about. Everybody knew who was hooking up with who. The people with the power to do something about it seemed to think it would be seen as an act of resentment if they fulfilled their obligations.

“You’re just mad because you want her for yourself.”

The senior year English teacher was the worst. He used to hand out books to his favorites, and in these books he’d “accidentally” leave a schedule revealing the days his wife wouldn’t be at home. At least half a dozen girls I knew have told me that they received one of his offerings.

One even told me that she felt “flattered.” Getting invited to the house of that teacher was like being anointed as conservative, rural, ignorant royalty.

I looked that teacher up a few years ago. His face has transformed. When I went to school he was still young and hesitant. I wonder what a few decades of no accountability had done to him? You could see it in his face. There’s a certain expression that sexual predators wear. Americans have been indoctrinated not to see it, but once it’s been seen it can’t be unseen.

In my opinion, just about every Republican politician wears that face. It’s the look of knowing you’re about to get away with a crime. It’s the look of knowing that you’re committing depraved acts openly and nobody has the guts to do anything about it.

This English teacher was the first to point the finger at others. He called me “morally bankrupt” more than once. Meanwhile, he went home and spent the night plotting new ways to assault my classmates.

These are the things you recognize later with the benefit of experience.

In the film “Pinnochio” there’s a scene where the innocent, titular character is led astray by two ne’er do-wells. The first time I watched that, I was as oblivious as Pinnochio. When I watched the same film with my infant daughters, that sequence evoked a sense of pain I can barely put into words.

Conservatives look at vulnerability as an opportunity to appease their most foul, animalistic urgings.

Decent people want only to protect. When I reflect on how many predators are enabled by our corrupt American culture, I get the taste of blood in my mouth.

The conservative men of my rural town thought of themselves as “conquerors.” They’d spent decades within the city limits of a community with only 2,000 people. We had a stale library with ancient books, and a video store that went out of business a few years ago.

It was like a place of stagnant water. Nothing was ever replenished, so the pool only became more and more putrid. That’s the heartland.

It was an open secret that the teachers in my conservative rural town raped the students. Everybody knew, but it just was something that nobody talked about. In fact, if you tried to talk about it, you’d be designated as a “troublemaker” and exiled never to return.

The hypocrisy grew so thick you could harvest it with a scythe.

The only time people like that are motivated out of their pool of fouled water is to impose their corrupt viewpoint on the rest of us. We know where the predators are, yet rape kits go untested, and child traffickers enjoy the protection of the highest office in the land.

We’re not supposed to talk about things like this.

Start talking.

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There’s an old saying that if you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room. Even that statement misrepresents what actually needs to be said. The issue at play isn’t intelligence but knowledge. No matter how brilliant anyone might be, there’s always a room where they can go to learn something.

Life learning needs to be our objective. It keeps you kind, humble, and effective.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of speaking to the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever met. After the 2024 election, I dedicated myself to elevating anti-establishment political candidates. I did this out of a sense that I had to do something. But I never could have anticipated what I’d learn from the experience.

I started to sit down with dozens of truly accomplished individuals. I’ve talked with doctors, lawyers, career educators and military experts. After a while, I started to ask the question, “Why do all these wonderful people want to waste their time talking to me?”

The answer was sobering. It was because nobody else wanted to listen.

The United States of America worships celebrity over achievement. Intelligence is met with distrust. I learned that growing up. Though I got good grades and I was called “gifted,” I discovered I was more often looked upon with suspicion rather than admiration.

As an adult, I’ve learned the answer to that too. It’s because the people who benefit from our abuse culture are wary of anyone they can’t manipulate. Oppressors see intelligent children as the future commanders of the resistance, and they’re right.

Two years ago I didn’t know that. I just went forward out of a need to participate and to act with integrity. Even prior to the election, I sought out brilliant people who I sensed had information I needed to absorb. I’ve had regular conversations about race with Will Fullwood. When you discuss challenging topics with brilliant people, there are moments of discomfort. You have to face the incorrect assumptions that have been fused with your identity. Sometimes you have to observe the toppling of ideological pillars. Even when you come to recognize that ideas are flawed, a sense of nostalgia makes you mourn the loss.

All of these feelings and beliefs have to be evaluated. It takes time and it’s not easy.

The number of tactics that have been leveraged to transform us into enablers of oppression is greater than you can imagine. Every knowledgeable person you meet knows one of them. They can all teach you how to strip away the lies and become a better version of yourself.

Our society coddles us and tells us that the benefit of growth isn’t worth the pain. That’s the biggest lie of all.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been having challenging conversations with Dr. Yamicia Connor. She’s been crunching the numbers on our healthcare system and what she’s found is highly concerning.

Her work hasn’t been motivated by any political or ideological viewpoint other than the essential pursuit of scientific fact. When you make measurements and record data, you achieve a perspective on reality. Often, that perspective is different than what we want to believe. Often that perspective is terrifying.

But truth doesn’t go away just because we don’t like it. If we allow ourselves to live within a pleasantly scented cloud of denial, we again become enablers of abuse. Sooner or later, the wind kicks up and blows the cloud away. Knowledge is the only thing that gives us the power to act when we have a rude awakening and find ourselves in a dystopian wasteland.

Our whole nation is on the precipice of waking up.

In talking with people like Will Fullwood and Dr. Yamicia Connor, I’ve found that I’ve become a more effective champion of justice. I have a background in Physics. It was my minor in college and I’m a licensed high school teacher. Math doesn’t scare me, but for most of my life, I’ve been surrounded by the talking heads of the celebrity media. These are people who have been paid to hypnotize us into thinking that they know more than we do. They want to tell us that every time a brilliant person issues a warning, it’s an exaggeration.

“Things aren’t really that bad.”

I may not have hundreds of millions of dollars in my bank account, but I know how to record data and crunch numbers. Celebrities don’t know how to do that better than I do. Their opinion doesn’t mean more than mine.

Americans are indoctrinated to believe their opinions don’t matter. Even educated people are vulnerable to this influence. This is why you have to seek out the rooms with the more knowledgeable people every day. Brilliant people keep you sharp.

If you’re not sharp, you get lulled into complacency and you do nothing even when we have the time and resources to make a change. Look around. That’s the kind of lackadaisical thinking that got us here.

For the last two years, I’ve made the deliberate choice to not be the smartest person in the room. Every day I have a chance to interact with somebody who is far more knowledgeable than I am. It causes your mind to stretch. It causes growing pains. It’s glorious.

Your thoughts tighten. You learn to shift your focus from the propaganda to the facts. You start to recognize distractions which are designed and deployed to steal your power. You gain confidence in your own ability to interpret data and discern the truth.

Math does not lie.

The consequence is that your self-doubt begins to dissipate. You become a more effective speaker. You disregard the social pressure that insists it’s “wrong” to engage certain topics. You find your voice and your strength because you understand that if you remain silent, innocent people will die by torture.

By sheer force of frustration and will, we’ve developed a whole community of activists who are pushing a knowledgeable perspective back into the mainstream. We’re cultivating a new respect for achievement and education instead of bluster and empty threats. We’ve witnessed the nation when it’s led by a cabinet of incompetence. Today, more and more people are demanding to be led by reason.

I’d always heard that you should never be content to be the smartest person in the room. I didn’t understand it before. In my ignorance, I thought that statement was an admission of inferiority. Today I know that the only way you become inferior is if you succumb to your fragile ego and never find the courage to seek out people who know more than you do.

The world is filled with people who know better. Anyone with an experience different than yours has something to teach you. Anyone of another gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or profession has knowledge it would take you a lifetime to acquire.

But all you have to do is ask and they will give it to you. All you have to do is listen and absorb.

Go find a room with people who are more knowledgeable. Don’t try to prove yourself by speaking. Prove yourself by asking questions and listening. In the first days, it will be a struggle. As time goes by you’ll find your mind begin to tighten and you’ll see your reality with greater clarity. At that point, you’ll inherit the power to make a productive change.

You’ll become exactly the type of person that the oppressors feared.

It feels good.

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Hey Everybody!

Well, the distraction media is at it again. They want us to disregard our power and get caught up in petty arguments rather than coordinated action. Yeah, the big creators know that they can steal huge follower counts by indulging in salacious material and gossip, but that doesn’t do any of us any good.

Frederic Poag and I had a lively discussion on this topic. We tried to throw a fair amount of humor in there, but this is serious business and we have serious challenges ahead.

I just want to ask that we all keep our focus on our mutual objective. We want everybody to have their basic needs met and their basic dignity respected. Anything that takes you away from this objective is a tactic of the enemy. Remember that!

Thank you This Will Hold, A. Eevie Bateman, Dr. Yamicia Connor, Rusty Shackleford, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈, and many others for tuning into my live video with Frederic Poag! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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