Vlad Tepes of Wallachia
I’m going to start with a little story pulled from my own life.
Like so many kids from my background, I joined the US military without finishing high school – on my 17th birthday, in fact.
I spent three years stationed with an artillery unit situated along what was then called “The Iron Curtain”, a border dividing the “Free West” from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
The Warsaw Pact countries were essentially all of the nations which, at the end of WWII, had ended-up as satellites or outright puppet states of what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
All of the Warsaw Pact countries behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) had governments/regimes situated politically on a spectrum between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Put simply, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism rests on how many of the following aspects of governance are out of the hands of the wider “demos” or people, and controlled by the few.
It doesn’t matter if these “few” are communist party officials, monarchs, dictators, corporations and oligarchs, or elected officials who flout the laws and norms of democracy.
If any government, administration, or regime includes more than one of the following indicators, they are authoritarian at the very least:
1) an elaborate ideology (Project 2025/White Christian Nationalism/MAGA)
2) a single mass party (some would say that a two-party system is little better)
3) terror (ICE patrols and raids, anti-immigrant and LGBT hate speech)
4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication (the Broligarchy of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al)
5) a monopoly of weapons
6) a centrally controlled economy (hybrid system coming into being now via DOGE and privately-owned AI)
I had a German girlfriend when I got out of the army in the mid-80s, so I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey to out-process, and flew back to Germany to be with her.
One of the many jobs I held down at the time included working as a framemaker for a small town art gallery in Upper Franconia, a very provincial and conservative part of the state of Bavaria.
After a few months at this gallery, the owner (who will remain unnamed), approached me and asked if I would consider doing an extra “job” for her and her partner.
Over the course of a couple of hours, “T” tried to explain to me the history of the Siebenbürger people, a German-speaking minority who lived in the mountains of Transylvania, in central Romania.
The Siebenbürger are descendants of medieval Saxon mercenaries invited by King Andrew II of Hungary to take up land grants and fortify the eastern borders of what was the Kingdom of Hungary at the time.
The region in Romania known as Wallachia is where Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler or “Dracula” – played the Hungarians off against the Ottoman Turks to build his own kingdom. Most of the enemies he viciously impaled on stakes were in fact Siebenbürger soldiers.
Between 1965-1989, Romania was ruled by the brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is widely considered to have run the most repressive regime among all the Warsaw Pact nations.
As part of his “make Romania great again” program, he embraced isolationism and shunned international trade, seeking to make Romania self-sufficient in every respect – food, energy, manufactured goods, everything.
By the time Ceaușescu came to power, Romania’s effective overlord, the Soviet Union, had already transported at least 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to labor camps in the Ukrainian Donbas region between 1944-1965. Many of these and their children are the people referred-to as “Nazis” by Putin today.
Ceaușescu‘s cultural program involved the attempted elimination of all ethnic minority groups.
Initially, this ethnic-cleansing took the form of shutting-down all newspapers, publishing houses, schools, and theaters in which anything other than the Romanian language was spoken.
Roma (Gypsy) communities were dismantled wholesale. It is not common knowledge in the west that the Roma (who are a separate ethnic group to “Romanians”) were held as slaves for centuries in the kingdoms which would eventually become Romania. Speaking their own languages, the enslaved Roma of regions like Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia were only emancipated during the 1850s and 1860s.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many members of both the Roma and Siebenbürger communities began to be “disappeared” by Ceaușescu‘s much-feared secret police, the Securitate.
*****
It is against this background that “T”, who had actor and painter friends among the Siebenbürger behind the Iron Curtain, asked me if I would would drive her into Romania.
A Romanian theater troupe had been touring what was called “West Germany” at the time. Three of its number were Siebenbürger who had defected and were claiming asylum in Germany.
There was one small problem, however.
None of them had been allowed to travel while holding their own identity documents. Those were being held by a member of the Securitate who travelled with all such touring companies.
Without some form of ID, any claim for asylum was likely to be rejected. Any defector handed-back over to the Romanian embassy and secret police was a dead man walking.
“T” was going to Romania to retrieve some form of ID for these people. She also hoped to smuggle out a couple of paintings which could be auctioned in the west, with the cash being funnelled back in order to help the desperate families left behind. They could use western cash on the Romanian black market to survive, and maybe even use it to bribe a border official to look the other way if they attempted to cross into the west to join their loved ones.
“Why on earth do you want ME to drive?” I asked.
“Because you hold a US passport”, she replied. “The border police and Securitate are unlikely to risk an international incident by detaining or harming an American.”
This all sounded extremely risky, and to my eternal shame, instead of a simple “yes” or “no”, I found myself asking “Am I going to get paid for this?”
I was still only 20 years old, but fully deserved her reaction.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Have you never done anything solely for others? Just for the damn sake of GOODNESS?”
Long story short, I agreed to go.
We went shopping for cartons of Kent cigarettes (prime currency in Romania at the time), as well as tiny luxuries like condoms, pantyhose, and music cassette tapes – contraception and the trappings of “decadent” Western culture were outlawed by Ceaușescu in his twisted dream of an ethnically and culturally pure “Motherland”.
Driving in stages, our first stop was in Vienna, where I was advised to eat well, as we wouldn’t be eating well again for a few days.
From there, it was on to our first stop behind the Iron Curtain – Budapest – where we took a brief rest before pushing on.
We drove across the Hungarian plains in white-out blizzard conditions on unplowed, unilluminated highways, giant Soviet-era sculptures of proletariat workers looming suddenly out of the snow-blasted darkness along the roadsides like silent titan gods.
Austro-Hungary, pre-WWI
The actual crossing of the border from Hungary into Romania was terrifying.
I had never had a gun pointed directly at me; never mind a dozen or so Kalashnikovs. The casual laughter and staring eyes of mostly unshaven soldiers – all with only one hand on their weapon as the other held a cigarette – had placed a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, I turned and said to “T” “Geez, I hope they don’t search the car and take all the stuff meant for your friends”.
She slapped me as hard as I’ve ever been slapped. Leaning near, she whispered angrily through clenched teeth “Shut up you idiot! There are bugs everywhere. They can hear every word you say.”
When one of the soldiers made clear his intention to search the car, “T” handed me a carton of cigarettes and my passport, and told me to play the dumb American.
It wasn’t hard.
Getting out of the car, I turned warily toward the soldier who seemed to be in charge, holding out my passport while keeping the carton of cigarettes tucked under my arm. He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the checkpoint booth.
I made a “You first, I’ll follow” sort of gesture, but he nudged me with his rifle barrel, indicating that I was to walk ahead. That 20 yards with a rifle at my back was the longest 20 yards of my life.
Once inside his booth/office, he took the carton of cigarettes from under my arm and laid it on a small table, before taking a pack of state manufactured cigarettes – “Carpațis” – from his own pocket and offering me one.
My cigarette lit, he began pointing at the carton of Kents, and pointing back at the old BMW. It became obvious that he wanted to know what else was on the menu, but wished the bribe to remain between the two of us, out of sight of his underlings.
I went back to the car and gathered a small selection of items, tucking them inside my coat and hurrying back to the checkpoint.
Nothing I offered seemed to satisfy him, and my increasing anxiety and fear must have been obvious. Finally, a smile, an exclamation, and a slap on my back.
A Michael Jackson cassette had done it. The soldier smiled and pointed to a small photo pinned to the wall beside the table. A gift for his wife or girlfriend.
He put the cassette into a drawer under the table, and walked me back to the car, waving the others aside.
I got back into the car and crossed into Romania, looking neither left nor right in case someone might try to get my attention and stop us again.
*****
We arrived in Sibiu under cover of darkness on the second night after a journey of around 900 miles, the shadowy black mass of the Transylvanian Mountains hulking in the mid-distance.
Even in a small city like Sibiu (about the size of Reno, Nevada), electricity was only available a couple of hours every day, and it was strictly rationed.
We were met at the end of a long, wide boulevard by a dark-complexioned man standing outside a heavy, ancient oak door set back along a row of large sooty terraced townhouses which betrayed hints of former glory from the century before.
He led us down some stairs and pushed open another door, where a family sat huddled around a simple table under a single bare lightbulb in the kitchen of a freezing basement apartment, all rising with cries and smiles and hugs and warm handshakes to greet us.
The generosity of these people upon our arrival has stayed with me to this day.
They had almost nothing. Nothing in the way of decent clothing, and nothing in the way of wholesome, nourishing food.
Most of their winter sustenance was comprised of hard, stale bread and homemade sauerkraut fermented in barrels in the cellar.
Yet within the hour they had triumphantly produced a small cut of bacon wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which they cooked in a skillet before insisting that we, and we alone, should eat.
They later pulled a bottle of vodka from a hiding place behind a cupboard, and filled our glasses again and again.
I later learned they had hoarded these things for months in anticipation of our arrival.
The next morning, as “T” discussed business with our hosts, I went to the door, turning to ask if anyone would like me to fetch them something from the center of town.
I had hoped to get a brief glimpse of the city once known as “Hermannstadt” when it was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.
Everyone burst out laughing.
“And what will you bring us back from town?” they asked in the most curious German accent I had ever heard.
“I don’t know. A bar of chocolate, maybe?”
This reply led to near pandemonium, with hoots and guffaws and more gales of laughter.
Another bottle of vodka was taken from the secret place behind the cupboard, and placed in the center of the kitchen table.
Thomas pointed to the bottle.
“Bring us back a bar of chocolate, and the bottle is yours.”
After many hours wandering the streets, I returned.
Empty-handed.
I will save for another time the story of our exit from Romania, which made our entry seem like the red carpet treatment.
Things very nearly turned very, very bad indeed.
But I’m here now, aged 60, writing of a world which, until last month, seemed many lifetimes distant.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was not a totalitarian dictator on his first day in office. He wasn’t even an authoritarian, really.
Power without checks and balances makes a monster of most humans, though…
After a quarter century of his hellish tyranny, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Romanian national television on Christmas Day in 1989, five years after my unlikely escapade there.
*****
I have travelled, and I have seen the workings of many people in many places.
I will say it here and now. The Republic is momentarily lost.
Dictatorship has crept up softly on the American people, and struck.
I sit here as an ex-pat US citizen with a son born in Ireland, and realize I will probably never see the place of my birth again. I have no family there anymore.
I have pondered long and hard about the rightness of criticizing events in the USA from a distance.
Yet the sociopath currently in office owns golf courses and much more here in Ireland. The Irish economy is symbiotically entwined with American Big Tech companies.
The abandonment of NATO, the embrace of Putin, the betrayal of Ukraine, and interference in European elections makes USA politics very much European politics.
The world has suddenly grown much smaller and more dangerous.
Besides, I am beginning to think that having my writing on a European server might not be a bad situation in the days to come. Freedom of speech and a free press have never seemed in as much danger in the USA.
Modern Americans have had too much, for too long, and most have never wondered how or why this could or should be.
They foolishly believed that consumerist affluence and cheap gasoline were somehow a measure of American “greatness”.
Others, of course, believe in “God’s blessings”.
Most Americans never thought to ask why gasoline in the USA has always cost a quarter or a tenth the amount it costs in other developed countries.
I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans know that the US, in cahoots with the UK, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran during the 1950s in order to maintain control of petroleum reserves.
Hell, I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans could point to Iran on a map.
Modern Americans treated comfort as a birthright, wilfully turning a blind eye to, or remaining entirely ignorant of, the suffering and cheap labor furnished by the “white” underclasses and the downtrodden Black and Hispanic communities.
In recent days, some of my readers have suggested that there is a case for optimism, because only 1 in 3 voters actually voted for a fascist.
Nonsense. The current president enjoys a 45-55% approval rating, while his minions continue to tear down the very last structures upholding democracy – right this minute, while you read this essay.
The American populace is as thoroughly propagandized as any of those who ever lived in any authoritarian state.
*****
This week I shared a very short post on various media calling for boycotts, civil disobedience, and strikes as a possible way to head-off a full-blown techno-fascist autocracy.
The list was primarily interested in those who have either made public declarations of support for Trump or Project 2025, or given direct financial aid to Trump, the GOP, or Project 2025 through endorsements, individual donations, and various PACS.
I now find myself writing in anger. If what I’m about to say causes some of my readers to bale-out, so be it.
Old people, unlike “influencers”, don’t need to give a shit.
The current president, with the help of his technocrats, has taken over the levers of government and dismantled almost all oversight bodies.
Big Tech is this very minute illegally harvesting every single shred of data concerning you and your loved ones.
AI and autocracy have never in history been combined. This is going to make the old surveillance states of the Warsaw Pact look bumbling and amateurish.
Everyone from George Orwell to Frank Zappa warned this was coming, but neither could have imagined the power of AI.
Half of Congress is acquiescent. Half of the courts are acquiescent. FAR MORE THAN HALF OF US ARE ACQUIESCENT.
Brownshirt thugs roam the streets of our towns and cities, waiting for their master to release them from their leashes.
YET MANY READERS SPENT TIME THIS WEEK POINTING-OUT MINOR DISCREPANCIES IN A LIST INTENDED ONLY AS A GENERAL GUIDE TO KNOWING WHO IS AIDING AND ABETTING A FASCIST.
This is like bickering over whose turn it is to cook while a tornado approaches.
If one or two of the names gathered by various organizations over the past few years are out of date, or under new ownership, fine.
Let others know, and move on to the next.
Truth is, there is almost never such a thing as a “moral” corporation, anyway. Where shareholders are getting rich, someone, somewhere, is invariably being hurt.
For a so-called majority Christian nation, it is astonishing how few Americans pause to consider the reported words of the man who gave rise to a world religious movement:
“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Moving swiftly on…
Complete strangers demanding footnotes, citations, annotations and sources is fine when a piece is based on my own research, or when I share something utterly new, contentious, or difficult to verify.
In such cases I am happy to supply sources and further reading lists, even to non-paying subscribers, when it is a matter of proper public interest.
But there are not enough hours in the day to be a full-time private, unpaid investigative reporter and verification service for those things which can be easily checked by readers themselves.
The internet is still open as of today. Use it.
*****
If anyone has doubts about any of the non-original information shared here, or if they feel there is a question mark about a boycott list supplied in good faith, feel free to do some of your own digging.
And please, absolutely do come back with your new or better information, and share it.
I’m not a social activism guru. I’m just a writer with something resembling a social conscience.
I also find it unfathomable hearing people say things like “Oh, I couldn’t boycott that place, my friend works there”.
IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM WHEN IT DOESN’T HURT, WE DO NOT DESERVE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.
Go look up The Battle of Blair Mountain. Go watch the film “Matewan“.
When our boycotts and strikes must hurt our own, we take them to our bosom and look after them.
It’s called solidarity.
It’s what good people do.
It’s why I shared the Cold War story of trying to help people who might have been killed without the help of others.
I’m no hero. I just got put in a spot where I was given the chance to make a decision.
I’m glad I made the right one.
And if loads of us don’t make some hard choices, right here, right now, people are going to die.
Keep Your MAGA Hands Off My Music
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinTom T. Hall, country music legend
After reading some of the less savoury comments under a recent post, it became clear to me just how many MAGA cultists seem to believe that country music “belongs” to them, and them alone.
This old lefty ain’t conceding the music I was raised-on to any Christo-fascists.
They’re welcome to their Toby Keiths and Jason Aldeans, young pups whose public personas are just cosplay in search of the dickweed dollar.
American folk, Old Time, country, country blues, western swing – you name it – has always been performed by folks from across the political spectrum.
Country music spoke to the trials, pain, and troubles of decent working people who were still smart enough to recognize and call-out hypocrites (who were often preachers and politicians).
The stock in trade of most country music was empathy for the heartbroken and downtrodden, and it was still widely understood that corporations and rich people are almost always the enemy of simple folks.
Back in the day, even when a performer DID hold conservative political views, 9 times out of 10 that meant conservative with a small “c” – not the rabid, spittle-flecked hatred seen everywhere today.
The propagandizing of the American poor and working classes took-off under Reagan in 1980, and received a rocket boost from the Australian-born, utterly reptilian Rupert Murdoch with his founding of Fox “News” in the 90’s.
I’m going to start regularly sharing the words of some old legends of country music, to put some of the MAGA lies and propaganda to bed.
*****
Tom T. Hall
Born 1936 in Tick Ridge, Carter County, Kentucky to a guitar-playing preacher, Hall tragically committed suicide in 2021 aged 85.
Wrote songs for Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, and Waylon Jennings, among many others.
Nicknamed “The Storyteller”, Hall recorded a slew of hits during a long career including “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine” and “The Year Clayton Delaney Died”.
Like most rural people of his generation, Hall believed that patriotism demanded support for US wars, including Vietnam.
After Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, Hall’s views evolved, becoming much more liberal in tone.
In an interview with Jason Gross, Hall looked back on his life and times:
“Well, I’m obviously kind of a liberal. Most of the folks around here are Republican. I’ve always been a liberal. My father never preached against jewelry. He never preached against tobacco. He never preached against short skirts or haircuts. None of that stuff is in the Bible.
“He never preached against polish on nails or nothing. They just think it makes them look better. With that attitude, he was a real rebel because about 90% of all the sermons you heard back then were about haircuts, smoking tobacco, wearing short skirts. That’s what they spent half the time preaching about. I just grew up with that.
“Politics with me is sort of like football. In the beginning, it’s a dangerous and vicious and mean game. Not for cowards.”
“…everybody is on such a great mission to be sane. Sanity is over-rated. You don’t want to be too sane, you know what I mean? I have always thought the best life would be a manageable mad thing. If you could somehow, you know, be weird and wonderful and strange and still kind of not get in anybody’s way, hurt anybody’s feelings, or cause anybody any economic disadvantage. But if you could get through life like that, that’s your best shot. Don’t try to be too sane. And if you could get there, then you could be honest. That’s the first virtue. Humility is a good virtue.”
An ability to evolve and change one’s moral compass seems to have run in the family.
Tom T. Hall‘s third great-grandfather on his father’s side, the aptly named John Justice, was a large slaveholder in the mountains of Western Virginia.
In his last will and testament written in 1850, John Justice freed all of the slaves he had held, and divided his land among them in an attempt to ensure they had at least some chance at a livelihood.
Many lines of Tom T. Hall‘s family appear to belong the mixed-ethnic mountain people sometimes called “Melungeons” which I have come to call “Old Mix Americans“.
Taking Stock: A Reminder of the BWWW Mission
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinSouthern Appalachian mountain family
4 years, 20 episodes, and 163 essays
In which we reintroduce ourselves…
In such challenging, and yes, scary times, all of us look for voices of sanity.
Not ranting, not polemics, just good old-fashioned sober analysis of what is going down.
Investigative journalism is being gutted by the takeover of mainstream media by a coterie of billionaires.
The people behind Project 2025 would like to push an agenda in which our children are only allowed to learn and read things aligning with a White Christian Nationalist outlook.
People interested in learning the truth about anything – current affairs, history, science, corruption – are now forced to fight through a daily firehose of bots, misinformation, disinformation, lies, and AI-generated slop and propaganda.
Who can we trust?
For a start, we should deal with verifiably real people who are up front about their education and the source of their claimed expertise.
Here is a mini-bio so you know a bit about the person behind Before We Were White – Podcast.
My name is Brian Halpin. I was born 60+ years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.
I left home and school at 15 but managed to work my way through college, eventually picking-up a degree in archeology (specializing in the prehistory of the British Isles and underwater archeology).
Completing a degree meant less to me than the effort it took to become a competent ironworker/blacksmith somewhat later.
Far more than my work or education, I am most proud of managing to raise (along with my partner) a good kid who understands right and wrong.
My personal passions have always been nature, music, history, art, science, writing, and handmade things – both artistic and practical – which speak of human creativity reaching for something more than mere profit.
A couple of decades ago, a restless mind (probably sprinkled with the dust of obsessiveness) caused me to wonder why my deceased grandfather had looked so…brown.
Genealogical investigations soon morphed into general historical investigations, and within a few years, I had compiled a database with well over a million records.
This database very possibly represents one of the most comprehensive examinations and collations of information about the ethnic background of frontier-era Americans in existence.
This database is the foundation of my “expertise”, and the basis upon which I feel qualified to offer certain opinions.
So when I write an essay saying that the earliest settling and colonizing of the American frontier was done by mixed-ethnic people, it is because I have viewed the 1820 census form showing that Daniel Boone‘s daughter married into a family including free people of color from Maryland, for example.
When I critique religion in the USA, I can draw on innumerable papers and historical records showing the high levels of illiteracy among frontier era preachers, or the numbers of preachers who came from a partly non-European background.
When my opinions run counter to received wisdom – such as the widespread belief that only wealthy southern planters were slaveholders – I can point to thousands upon thousands of historical records telling a different story.
This sort of in-depth research and investigation soon leads one to the realization that the average American’s perception of American history is deeply flawed and often downright wrong.
This is often not through any fault of their own, but is due to centuries of historical teaching being curated by people with an agenda.
*****
I eventually felt compelled to share this information in the face of ever-increasing right-wing ideological attacks on people teaching real history – that is to say, people who prize truth over mythology and propaganda.
And so was born the Before We Were White podcast during the Covid-19 lockdown days of 2020.
My primary goal was the deconstruction of the American belief in, and obsession with “race”, and in particular, the concept of “racial superiority”.
Why “race”?
Because the USA is founded on a combination of myths concerning “race” and “American exceptionalism”.
Without the myth of “racial differences” and “racial superiority” being invented by the greedy in order to justify the enslavement of others, our entire history and present would look completely different.
There would have been no Andrew Jackson, no Andrew Johnson. No Civil War. There would have been no KKK. No “Mississippi Goddamn“, no Rosa Parks, no Central Park Five, no George Floyd, no BLM.
There would be no Donald Trump, no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no J. D. Vance.
Why? Because all of the above coup instigators are themselves racists of one stripe or another, and the sooner we say it constantly and out loud, the better.
They were only able to give their long-planned power grab an air of legitimacy by directing the outcome of an election with shocking amounts of money and laser-focussed propaganda emanating from the newspapers, TV channels, and social media platforms owned by these selfsame billionaires and unscrupulous technocrats.
Most of the propaganda involved not-so-subtle forms of racist messaging directed at the post-Reagan, Fox News-viewing GOP base of “White Christian Evangelicals”.
Remember those dog and cat-eating Haitians? Mexican rapists? Venezuelan gangs taking-over entire towns?
And while quite literally weaponizing hatred in order to gain office, these same people endlessly claim that the USA is more virtuous, fair, moral, and democratic than other countries.
This tactic is as old as civilization itself. People will always vote for the person confirming their “specialness”.
After 400 years of living under tyrannical emperors (after Julius Caesar trashed the Roman Republic), most Roman citizens still lived in a virtuous republic in their heads, where just being born Roman was enough to satisfy their need to feel “special”.
Roman emperors and senators and patricians understood that for the mob, “freedom” is a state of mind, disconnected from reality.
J. D. Vance has already stated as much, explicitly. He has said that it is time for the USA to move into a “post-Republic” era.
All hail the new, improved, all-American Caesars!
The Romans could be cruel, chauvinistic and prejudiced. But at least they weren’t so stupid as to be racists.
Now do your best Roman/Nazi salute…
*****
If a nation is to remain cohesive primarily through a belief in its own exceptional virtue, then anything suggesting otherwise must be suppressed, stamped-out.
“White” America, like Pontius Pilate, wants to wash its hands of all responsibility for the trans-generational social, emotional, mental, and economic damage caused by 300+ years of “white” supremacy and rapacious capitalism.
“White” America and corporate America do want to hear or talk about the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the theft of indigenous homes and lands, slavery, slave rape, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, school segregation, red-lining – or how the current president of the USA and his father made a fortune in real estate through racist rental practices.
Even worse, “white” America wants to cast all worthy American achievements as “white achievements”, even though everything which is both good and quintessentially “American” ALWAYS has people of all ethnic backgrounds at its root.
Before We Were White decided to go straight for the jugular in this respect.
The history of colonial America and the early USA is not an exclusively “white story”, however hard Hollywood, TV, and politicians haved tried for decades to make it appear so.
When we say that the history of colonial America and the early USA is not just a “white story”, do not take this to mean we simply replace the “white story” with a “tri-racial” story shared between “white”, “Black”, and “indigenous” peoples.
We are going much further, and saying that in an American context, the very concept of “white people” in a profoundly mixed-ethnic population is a ridiculous and arbitrary construction.
Humans are not able to be categorized into three or four distinct “colors” or “races”. Especially not in the USA.
AMERICANS WITH DEEP ROOTS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TIMES ARE ALL RELATED, WHATEVER THEIR PERCEIVED “RACE”.
Don’t get me wrong. If a person is SEEN as being a certain “race”, TREATED as being a certain “race”, IDENTIFIES as a certain “race”, then “race” is all too real in a certain respect.
It would be just the same if there were no such thing as God, but millions of people still acted as if God existed.
This would mean that religion, just like racism, would affect how everyone experiences life – especially non-believers.
Before We Were White digs at the foundations of the deep-seated American belief in “whiteness”, and the belief in certain quarters that this “whiteness” is under attack, and in need of protection.
MOST OF THE UNDERCLASSES WHO SETTLED THE AMERICAN FRONTIER(S) WERE OF MIXED-ETHNICITY. EVEN THE ONES CALLING THEMSELVES “WHITE”.
And the historical record – census records, slave records, marriage records, wills, land transfers, letters – backs-up this contention.
To be a racist in America, more often than not, means to despise many of one’s own ancestors.
Fact.
*****
As I said at the beginning of this screed, current events – an ongoing fascist coup – have caused decent people everywhere to seek out reliable sources of information.
It is no coincidence that the current triumvirate tearing-down US democracy – Trump, Musk, Vance – are racists and white supremacists.
This is not a thing I say flippantly. The evidence is overwhelming.
Before We Were White finds itself in a place where its subject matter meets the current moment.
This has led to an embarrassing backlog of emails on my website as I write.
Good people. Worried people. Generous people who have donated money to the Before We Were White project.
Everything has come so fast this year that I find myself caught between two stools, as the saying goes.
With thousands of “legacy” readers and listeners on other platforms, and new readers and listeners now arriving via Substack, a demand for more blogs and podcasts clearly exists, but there is more work and more correspondence than can be managed by one person still needing to do other work to keep food on the table.
A small number of deeply generous and loyal subscribers and patrons have kept this boat afloat up to now, but we’ll definitely need to grow this subscriber and patron list in order to kick-on and hire more crew to make this boat sail more quickly and smoothly.
Which is a long-winded way to say “sorry” for the correspondence backlog, but until we can afford to take on the extra hands which would allow us to answer all emails in a timely fashion while also writing and producing regular blogs and podcasts, “we are where we are”.
Meanwhile, away from the writing desk, life’s other realities eat up the hours.
Photo: Working outdoors this week, still clearing storm damage from January with helper named Layla. We are definitely not an AI-generated presence.
Thank you to everyone who supports this project in any way. I’ve no doubt we’ll get there eventually.
And yes, the truth WILL set us free.
Before We Were White is a reader-supported publication.
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Schuldgefühl
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinAmerican authorities insisted in the aftermath of the Second World War that Japanese and German schoolchildren be forced to face into the facts of what their governments had done in their name.
A people who do not accept the wrong of their actions cannot move forward and beyond their crimes.
Germans still debate to this day whether it is right and proper that later generations should also carry a “National Schuldgefühl” – a sense of collective shame.
Perhaps trans-generational shame is a bridge too far, but at least these nations have some sort of trans-generational awareness of historical truth.
In a classic case of “Do as I say, not as I do”, the USA made post-war moral demands on Japan and Germany, while indoctrinating its own children back home with “patriotic”, hyper-selective, jingoistic, theocratic, wilfully blind, self-righteous, white-washed, self-aggrandising, historical bullshit.
Consider just one aspect of USA history.
What were the ten longest wars fought by the USA?
The list below does not include the ceaseless wars against indigenous peoples between 1609 and 1890, such as the ten-year-long Northwest Indian War (a US war against an indigenous confederation in Ohio and Illinois territories).
1) War in Afghanistan – 19 years, 10 months
2) Vietnam War – 19 years, 5 months
3) US Occupation of Haiti – 19 years
4) Somali Civil War (USA intervention) – 18 years, 1 month, still ongoing
5) Yemen Intervention – 15 years, 1 month, still ongoing
6) Philippine or Moro War – 14 years
7) War in Northwest Pakistan (USA intervention) – 13 years
8) Jihadist Insurgency in Niger (USA intervention) – 11 years, 6 months
9) War Against Islamic State [ISIL] – 10 years, 8 months , still ongoing (Iraq, Syria, Libya)
10) Iraq War – 8 years, 9 months
How many of these military interventions were really about “protecting our freedoms and liberty”?
How many enemies of the US would have never existed in the first place but for USA and European colonialism and resource theft?
How many readers here have heard of the Les Cayes Massacre of 1929 in Haiti?
Be honest.
You haven’t heard of US Marines murdering peasants in order to protect US business interests?
Of course not. In 1929 the stock market crashed. “Show Boat” was a massive hit in US movie theaters. Al Capone was murdering rivals in Chicago. The US Supreme Court had decided that pacifists could legally be denied US citizenship.
What are a few thousand dead Black farmers in Haiti?
What about the Moro War which had ended 16 years earlier? Not heard of the Bud Dajo Massacre of 1906?
Of course you’ll have never heard about the 900 Tausug villagers – men, women, and children – who were mowed down and butchered by machine gun fire as they cowered in a crater with nothing but swords and knives to defend themselves.
President Theodore Roosevelt sent his congratulations to these “brave” Marines…
All that’s left in American culture of these times and atrocities are phrases like “down in the boondocks” – a phrase used by many, with no idea whatsoever of its source.
We could share a new essay every day detailing similar events, and remain busy writing for years.
*****
Is it any wonder that our society is so dysfunctional, in a nation where history and much self-identity (“whiteness”, “Scots-Irishness”, “military greatness”, etc.) is often based on an utterly fabricated, conjured reality?
Where reality itself has always been twisted to suit a preferred narrative, making everything and nothing real or true?
A nation where, if our collective conjuring of a fake reality fails, we simply choose amnesia?
Donald Trump is simply the final destination, the ultimate expression of a centuries-long denial of facts, truth, and reality.
Only in the USA was it possible for people to live a life of light entertainment and consumerism for decades, able to say words like “I’m not really interested in politics”.
Because most of the consequences of US politics happened to “other people”. Black people. Indigenous people. Southern Appalachians. Mexicans. Filipinos. Arabs.
Only in such an environment can someone like former presidential candidate Mitt Romney appear to be a “voice of reason” when placed as a counterpoint to the current incumbent.-
A recently retired Republican senator who made a dubious fortune in management consultancy and private equity investment.
A lifelong buddy of the criminal and murderous thug Benjamin Netanyahu.
A multi-millionaire who follows a religious cult invented by a man in the 1800s claiming to have received “golden plates” from “the angel Moroni“, and believed the ancient Garden of Eden mentioned in Hebrew texts was actually located in Daviess County, Missouri…
*****
They say laws are for people who need laws.
And humans need very little legislation, if some basic things within the heart of every human child are encouraged and respected:
Truth. Knowledge. Fairness. Love.
Yet how can we raise our children to recognize truth, real knowledge, fairness, and love, when half or more of the adult population of the USA are unable to recognize such things?
When sociopathic billionaires control social media, communications companies, arms companies, satellite networks, data farming systems, streaming and broadcast networks, search engines, and news outlets?
These same sociopathic billionaires are now gutting the education system, and dictating what constitutes history in our schools.
They are waging a war on “wokeness” precisely because “woke”, in its original sense, meant being aware of the real story, the real dangers to our very humanity which emanate from corrupt power systems.
The current fascist regime, while oafish and vulgar and stupid in many ways, are backed and supported by billionaires smart enough to understand one thing:
The population they exploit will never rise up, if they are too ill-informed to even realize that something better is possible.
This is the origin of the wonderful aphorism “You never know you’re in a prison until you try the door”.
This is why J. D. Vance, Musk, and others are abandoning NATO, Europe, and Ukraine – hoping to collapse the EU in the process.
Having between 450 and 750 million people still living in relative freedom would be a shining beacon to beleaguered Russians and Americans, and a constant reproach to authoritarians.
*****
Anyone who begins to study and understand real history will invariably become less tribalistic, and more thoughtful and empathetic – unless they are a sociopath.
Sociopaths land regularly on my social media pages and website, claiming that my writing is attempting to make “white people” ashamed of themselves.
Deep down they know this is not true. As a lover of history, I do not believe that anyone should be punished for the sins of their fathers and mothers.
History is for helping us understand how we got here, and how we can plot a better course forward.
The truth is, many MAGA sociopaths do not want to hear real history, because it would force them to confront the truth, which is this:
White Christian Americans are not inherently “smarter” or “better” than any other people in the world.
The USA is not wealthy or “great” because of White Christian American values.
The USA empire had a Golden Age, in which land and labor theft created a long economic boom making it possible for even uneducated “white” people to do very well for themselves.
The end of slavery, and the gradual accumulation and concentration of land, resources, and wealth in the hands of the few, spelled the end of the “white” working class Golden Age.
There is no longer any free land to buy the loyalty of “white” male citizens, and highly-paid, skilled manufacturing jobs have been moved abroad.
On the other hand, “non-white” minorities have made great strides in access to education and employment.
The “white” working class is now being treated just like everyone else in US history, and indeed, being treated like most underclasses throughout much of world history – as serfs for feudal lords, the corporatocracy, and now, the new Broligarchy.
Most of the current MAGA types will never read real history, so they will never have to confront “Schuldgefühl“.
The authoritarian state unfolding before our eyes will be a nasty hybrid called White-Christo-Fascist-Technocracy.
And MAGA cult followers, however put upon, abused, and impoverished by this system, will still support it.
Because they aspire to its ethos of greed and power.
So they’ll settle for some low level participation in violence and subjugation.
They will supply law enforcement. They will supply soldiers. They will join militias.
They will create a God and a Jesus in their own image, and they will gleefully force its odious theology on others.
They will settle for “owning the libs”, or abusing minority groups. No shame, no guilt.
Admitting they are just the same as other exploited underclasses would be simply too much to bear.
Feminine Daintiness
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinEarly Lysol ads
Ah, go on.
Admit it. Wouldn’t you love to go back to the time when America was great?
The post-war golden age?
Sunday School. Davy Crockett hats. Coleslaw and “Gee whiz!”.
When men were men, and women were women?
And the men in charge were so generous with their advice and “firm guidance”?
There was once a perfect and magical duopoly of patriarchy and capitalism.
Where wives fretted, and their husbands – with the help of the chemical and marketing industries – made everything better.
Before 1952, a toxic and carcinogenic petroleum industry chemical similar to carbolic acid known as “cresol” (3-methyl phenol) was sold in liquid solution and aggressively marketed to women under the brand name “Lysol” as a way to cleanse supposedly “unpleasant” vaginal smells.
In a time before The Pill and other safer or more reliable contraceptives, many women in fact turned to such aggressive and dangerous chemical douches as spermicides or abortifacients, even though the efficacy of such “treatments” was poor.
It’s all coming back, you know.
J. D. Vance and Project 2025 know what’s good for society.
They especially know what’s good for women.
If Fighting Authoritarianism Doesn’t Hurt, You’re Probably Doing It Wrong
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinVlad Tepes of Wallachia
I’m going to start with a little story pulled from my own life.
Like so many kids from my background, I joined the US military without finishing high school – on my 17th birthday, in fact.
I spent three years stationed with an artillery unit situated along what was then called “The Iron Curtain”, a border dividing the “Free West” from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
The Warsaw Pact countries were essentially all of the nations which, at the end of WWII, had ended-up as satellites or outright puppet states of what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
All of the Warsaw Pact countries behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) had governments/regimes situated politically on a spectrum between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Put simply, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism rests on how many of the following aspects of governance are out of the hands of the wider “demos” or people, and controlled by the few.
It doesn’t matter if these “few” are communist party officials, monarchs, dictators, corporations and oligarchs, or elected officials who flout the laws and norms of democracy.
If any government, administration, or regime includes more than one of the following indicators, they are authoritarian at the very least:
1) an elaborate ideology (Project 2025/White Christian Nationalism/MAGA)
2) a single mass party (some would say that a two-party system is little better)
3) terror (ICE patrols and raids, anti-immigrant and LGBT hate speech)
4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication (the Broligarchy of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al)
5) a monopoly of weapons
6) a centrally controlled economy (hybrid system coming into being now via DOGE and privately-owned AI)
I had a German girlfriend when I got out of the army in the mid-80s, so I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey to out-process, and flew back to Germany to be with her.
One of the many jobs I held down at the time included working as a framemaker for a small town art gallery in Upper Franconia, a very provincial and conservative part of the state of Bavaria.
After a few months at this gallery, the owner (who will remain unnamed), approached me and asked if I would consider doing an extra “job” for her and her partner.
Over the course of a couple of hours, “T” tried to explain to me the history of the Siebenbürger people, a German-speaking minority who lived in the mountains of Transylvania, in central Romania.
The Siebenbürger are descendants of medieval Saxon mercenaries invited by King Andrew II of Hungary to take up land grants and fortify the eastern borders of what was the Kingdom of Hungary at the time.
The region in Romania known as Wallachia is where Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler or “Dracula” – played the Hungarians off against the Ottoman Turks to build his own kingdom. Most of the enemies he viciously impaled on stakes were in fact Siebenbürger soldiers.
Between 1965-1989, Romania was ruled by the brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is widely considered to have run the most repressive regime among all the Warsaw Pact nations.
As part of his “make Romania great again” program, he embraced isolationism and shunned international trade, seeking to make Romania self-sufficient in every respect – food, energy, manufactured goods, everything.
By the time Ceaușescu came to power, Romania’s effective overlord, the Soviet Union, had already transported at least 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to labor camps in the Ukrainian Donbas region between 1944-1965. Many of these and their children are the people referred-to as “Nazis” by Putin today.
Ceaușescu‘s cultural program involved the attempted elimination of all ethnic minority groups.
Initially, this ethnic-cleansing took the form of shutting-down all newspapers, publishing houses, schools, and theaters in which anything other than the Romanian language was spoken.
Roma (Gypsy) communities were dismantled wholesale. It is not common knowledge in the west that the Roma (who are a separate ethnic group to “Romanians”) were held as slaves for centuries in the kingdoms which would eventually become Romania. Speaking their own languages, the enslaved Roma of regions like Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia were only emancipated during the 1850s and 1860s.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many members of both the Roma and Siebenbürger communities began to be “disappeared” by Ceaușescu‘s much-feared secret police, the Securitate.
*****
It is against this background that “T”, who had actor and painter friends among the Siebenbürger behind the Iron Curtain, asked me if I would would drive her into Romania.
A Romanian theater troupe had been touring what was called “West Germany” at the time. Three of its number were Siebenbürger who had defected and were claiming asylum in Germany.
There was one small problem, however.
None of them had been allowed to travel while holding their own identity documents. Those were being held by a member of the Securitate who travelled with all such touring companies.
Without some form of ID, any claim for asylum was likely to be rejected. Any defector handed-back over to the Romanian embassy and secret police was a dead man walking.
“T” was going to Romania to retrieve some form of ID for these people. She also hoped to smuggle out a couple of paintings which could be auctioned in the west, with the cash being funnelled back in order to help the desperate families left behind. They could use western cash on the Romanian black market to survive, and maybe even use it to bribe a border official to look the other way if they attempted to cross into the west to join their loved ones.
“Why on earth do you want ME to drive?” I asked.
“Because you hold a US passport”, she replied. “The border police and Securitate are unlikely to risk an international incident by detaining or harming an American.”
This all sounded extremely risky, and to my eternal shame, instead of a simple “yes” or “no”, I found myself asking “Am I going to get paid for this?”
I was still only 20 years old, but fully deserved her reaction.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Have you never done anything solely for others? Just for the damn sake of GOODNESS?”
Long story short, I agreed to go.
We went shopping for cartons of Kent cigarettes (prime currency in Romania at the time), as well as tiny luxuries like condoms, pantyhose, and music cassette tapes – contraception and the trappings of “decadent” Western culture were outlawed by Ceaușescu in his twisted dream of an ethnically and culturally pure “Motherland”.
Driving in stages, our first stop was in Vienna, where I was advised to eat well, as we wouldn’t be eating well again for a few days.
From there, it was on to our first stop behind the Iron Curtain – Budapest – where we took a brief rest before pushing on.
We drove across the Hungarian plains in white-out blizzard conditions on unplowed, unilluminated highways, giant Soviet-era sculptures of proletariat workers looming suddenly out of the snow-blasted darkness along the roadsides like silent titan gods.
Austro-Hungary, pre-WWI
The actual crossing of the border from Hungary into Romania was terrifying.
I had never had a gun pointed directly at me; never mind a dozen or so Kalashnikovs. The casual laughter and staring eyes of mostly unshaven soldiers – all with only one hand on their weapon as the other held a cigarette – had placed a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, I turned and said to “T” “Geez, I hope they don’t search the car and take all the stuff meant for your friends”.
She slapped me as hard as I’ve ever been slapped. Leaning near, she whispered angrily through clenched teeth “Shut up you idiot! There are bugs everywhere. They can hear every word you say.”
When one of the soldiers made clear his intention to search the car, “T” handed me a carton of cigarettes and my passport, and told me to play the dumb American.
It wasn’t hard.
Getting out of the car, I turned warily toward the soldier who seemed to be in charge, holding out my passport while keeping the carton of cigarettes tucked under my arm. He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the checkpoint booth.
I made a “You first, I’ll follow” sort of gesture, but he nudged me with his rifle barrel, indicating that I was to walk ahead. That 20 yards with a rifle at my back was the longest 20 yards of my life.
Once inside his booth/office, he took the carton of cigarettes from under my arm and laid it on a small table, before taking a pack of state manufactured cigarettes – “Carpațis” – from his own pocket and offering me one.
My cigarette lit, he began pointing at the carton of Kents, and pointing back at the old BMW. It became obvious that he wanted to know what else was on the menu, but wished the bribe to remain between the two of us, out of sight of his underlings.
I went back to the car and gathered a small selection of items, tucking them inside my coat and hurrying back to the checkpoint.
Nothing I offered seemed to satisfy him, and my increasing anxiety and fear must have been obvious. Finally, a smile, an exclamation, and a slap on my back.
A Michael Jackson cassette had done it. The soldier smiled and pointed to a small photo pinned to the wall beside the table. A gift for his wife or girlfriend.
He put the cassette into a drawer under the table, and walked me back to the car, waving the others aside.
I got back into the car and crossed into Romania, looking neither left nor right in case someone might try to get my attention and stop us again.
*****
We arrived in Sibiu under cover of darkness on the second night after a journey of around 900 miles, the shadowy black mass of the Transylvanian Mountains hulking in the mid-distance.
Even in a small city like Sibiu (about the size of Reno, Nevada), electricity was only available a couple of hours every day, and it was strictly rationed.
We were met at the end of a long, wide boulevard by a dark-complexioned man standing outside a heavy, ancient oak door set back along a row of large sooty terraced townhouses which betrayed hints of former glory from the century before.
He led us down some stairs and pushed open another door, where a family sat huddled around a simple table under a single bare lightbulb in the kitchen of a freezing basement apartment, all rising with cries and smiles and hugs and warm handshakes to greet us.
The generosity of these people upon our arrival has stayed with me to this day.
They had almost nothing. Nothing in the way of decent clothing, and nothing in the way of wholesome, nourishing food.
Most of their winter sustenance was comprised of hard, stale bread and homemade sauerkraut fermented in barrels in the cellar.
Yet within the hour they had triumphantly produced a small cut of bacon wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which they cooked in a skillet before insisting that we, and we alone, should eat.
They later pulled a bottle of vodka from a hiding place behind a cupboard, and filled our glasses again and again.
I later learned they had hoarded these things for months in anticipation of our arrival.
The next morning, as “T” discussed business with our hosts, I went to the door, turning to ask if anyone would like me to fetch them something from the center of town.
I had hoped to get a brief glimpse of the city once known as “Hermannstadt” when it was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.
Everyone burst out laughing.
“And what will you bring us back from town?” they asked in the most curious German accent I had ever heard.
“I don’t know. A bar of chocolate, maybe?”
This reply led to near pandemonium, with hoots and guffaws and more gales of laughter.
Another bottle of vodka was taken from the secret place behind the cupboard, and placed in the center of the kitchen table.
Thomas pointed to the bottle.
“Bring us back a bar of chocolate, and the bottle is yours.”
After many hours wandering the streets, I returned.
Empty-handed.
I will save for another time the story of our exit from Romania, which made our entry seem like the red carpet treatment.
Things very nearly turned very, very bad indeed.
But I’m here now, aged 60, writing of a world which, until last month, seemed many lifetimes distant.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was not a totalitarian dictator on his first day in office. He wasn’t even an authoritarian, really.
Power without checks and balances makes a monster of most humans, though…
After a quarter century of his hellish tyranny, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Romanian national television on Christmas Day in 1989, five years after my unlikely escapade there.
*****
I have travelled, and I have seen the workings of many people in many places.
I will say it here and now. The Republic is momentarily lost.
Dictatorship has crept up softly on the American people, and struck.
I sit here as an ex-pat US citizen with a son born in Ireland, and realize I will probably never see the place of my birth again. I have no family there anymore.
I have pondered long and hard about the rightness of criticizing events in the USA from a distance.
Yet the sociopath currently in office owns golf courses and much more here in Ireland. The Irish economy is symbiotically entwined with American Big Tech companies.
The abandonment of NATO, the embrace of Putin, the betrayal of Ukraine, and interference in European elections makes USA politics very much European politics.
The world has suddenly grown much smaller and more dangerous.
Besides, I am beginning to think that having my writing on a European server might not be a bad situation in the days to come. Freedom of speech and a free press have never seemed in as much danger in the USA.
Modern Americans have had too much, for too long, and most have never wondered how or why this could or should be.
They foolishly believed that consumerist affluence and cheap gasoline were somehow a measure of American “greatness”.
Others, of course, believe in “God’s blessings”.
Most Americans never thought to ask why gasoline in the USA has always cost a quarter or a tenth the amount it costs in other developed countries.
I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans know that the US, in cahoots with the UK, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran during the 1950s in order to maintain control of petroleum reserves.
Hell, I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans could point to Iran on a map.
Modern Americans treated comfort as a birthright, wilfully turning a blind eye to, or remaining entirely ignorant of, the suffering and cheap labor furnished by the “white” underclasses and the downtrodden Black and Hispanic communities.
In recent days, some of my readers have suggested that there is a case for optimism, because only 1 in 3 voters actually voted for a fascist.
Nonsense. The current president enjoys a 45-55% approval rating, while his minions continue to tear down the very last structures upholding democracy – right this minute, while you read this essay.
The American populace is as thoroughly propagandized as any of those who ever lived in any authoritarian state.
*****
This week I shared a very short post on various media calling for boycotts, civil disobedience, and strikes as a possible way to head-off a full-blown techno-fascist autocracy.
The list was primarily interested in those who have either made public declarations of support for Trump or Project 2025, or given direct financial aid to Trump, the GOP, or Project 2025 through endorsements, individual donations, and various PACS.
I now find myself writing in anger. If what I’m about to say causes some of my readers to bale-out, so be it.
Old people, unlike “influencers”, don’t need to give a shit.
The current president, with the help of his technocrats, has taken over the levers of government and dismantled almost all oversight bodies.
Big Tech is this very minute illegally harvesting every single shred of data concerning you and your loved ones.
AI and autocracy have never in history been combined. This is going to make the old surveillance states of the Warsaw Pact look bumbling and amateurish.
Everyone from George Orwell to Frank Zappa warned this was coming, but neither could have imagined the power of AI.
Half of Congress is acquiescent. Half of the courts are acquiescent. FAR MORE THAN HALF OF US ARE ACQUIESCENT.
Brownshirt thugs roam the streets of our towns and cities, waiting for their master to release them from their leashes.
YET MANY READERS SPENT TIME THIS WEEK POINTING-OUT MINOR DISCREPANCIES IN A LIST INTENDED ONLY AS A GENERAL GUIDE TO KNOWING WHO IS AIDING AND ABETTING A FASCIST.
This is like bickering over whose turn it is to cook while a tornado approaches.
If one or two of the names gathered by various organizations over the past few years are out of date, or under new ownership, fine.
Let others know, and move on to the next.
Truth is, there is almost never such a thing as a “moral” corporation, anyway. Where shareholders are getting rich, someone, somewhere, is invariably being hurt.
For a so-called majority Christian nation, it is astonishing how few Americans pause to consider the reported words of the man who gave rise to a world religious movement:
“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Moving swiftly on…
Complete strangers demanding footnotes, citations, annotations and sources is fine when a piece is based on my own research, or when I share something utterly new, contentious, or difficult to verify.
In such cases I am happy to supply sources and further reading lists, even to non-paying subscribers, when it is a matter of proper public interest.
But there are not enough hours in the day to be a full-time private, unpaid investigative reporter and verification service for those things which can be easily checked by readers themselves.
The internet is still open as of today. Use it.
*****
If anyone has doubts about any of the non-original information shared here, or if they feel there is a question mark about a boycott list supplied in good faith, feel free to do some of your own digging.
And please, absolutely do come back with your new or better information, and share it.
I’m not a social activism guru. I’m just a writer with something resembling a social conscience.
I also find it unfathomable hearing people say things like “Oh, I couldn’t boycott that place, my friend works there”.
IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM WHEN IT DOESN’T HURT, WE DO NOT DESERVE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.
Go look up The Battle of Blair Mountain. Go watch the film “Matewan“.
When our boycotts and strikes must hurt our own, we take them to our bosom and look after them.
It’s called solidarity.
It’s what good people do.
It’s why I shared the Cold War story of trying to help people who might have been killed without the help of others.
I’m no hero. I just got put in a spot where I was given the chance to make a decision.
I’m glad I made the right one.
And if loads of us don’t make some hard choices, right here, right now, people are going to die.
Crazy
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinRyan Wesley Routh and some of his forebears
I hope a time comes before my own death, in which people come to understand that the “crazies” in USA society are not just sick or “evil” aberrations – nor do they spring out of nothingness.
So-called “crazies” are the entirely expected human outfall from centuries of:
interpersonal and institutional violence,
duplicity,
religious extremism,
racism,
misogyny,
homophobia,
environmental pillage,
greed and consumerism as national ideology, and
the incessant lies, lies, lies used to cover-up, justify, and obfuscate the almost ceaseless hypocrisy of The American Myth.
*****
Take Ryan Wesley Routh, an American “weirdo”, who wanted to dispose of another American “weirdo”.
The only difference between the two? One comes from the American underclasses, the other from the world of inherited wealth built upon underclass exploitation.
One wanted to commit violence out of a misguided(?) sense of social justice.
The other is a catalyst for violence internationally, vandalizes constitutional law, and evades justice in order to preserve and extend his wealth, power, and privilege.
Two crazies.
The rich one spews hatred against immigrants, even though his own mother was an immigrant and his father’s father was also an immigrant. Of course, being Johnny-Come-Latelys in terms of American history doesn’t matter – the main thing is that they were such very “white” Scottish and German immigrants, and they got their hands on some money through unscrupulous and immoral business dealings.
Money and whiteness have always been at the core of “The American Dream”.
*****
Don’t be fooled by Ryan Wesley Routh‘s gaunt, Northern European-looking hangdog appearance and sandy hair.
Routh is in fact part of a confusing mish-mash of people who have been ethnically intermixing in the eastern part of the USA for generations – long, long before the USA even existed.
Without comprehensive DNA testing, these peoples from the Carolina Piedmont and Southern Appalachia proper are often impossible to tease into clear familial threads.
Some come from families of large slaveholders, while others come from relatively poor farmers and tradespeople who held only one or two slaves.
Many in fact descend from the PROGENY of these slaveholders – whether big and small – children of the women abused, raped, or kept on the side as “consorts”, separate from their “official families”.
Subsistence farmers too poor to keep slaves were often those most likely to marry the “mulatto” women born within this deep and wide cauldron of wickedness.
This “not quite white” American underclass has existed literally for centuries – long before certain Drumpfs and MacLeods arrived in the USA, shiny and white on the outside, ruthless, dark and bigoted on the inside…
It has never been easy for members of this mixed-ethnic American laborer underclass to get ahead.
And before they could even imagine “social mobility”, they had to achieve “racial mobility”.
The minute some of them managed to achieve “racial mobility”, they were often still too poor to resist the onslaught of the land barons, railway barons, coal barons…
This is one of the greatest untold secrets in US history – how a “brown” underclass spent generations on the outside peering-in at “The American Dream”.
Trying to be “white” enough to be part of “White Christianity”.
“White” enough to serve as actual soldiers in the military, rather than as cooks, janitors, or supply workers.
“White” enough to gain access to a good apprenticeship or a decent education.
“White” enough to eventually gain access to middle-class jobs.
Such an intergenerational struggle is not easy to keep on a steel-rail track leading to eventual success…
Many fall by the wayside.
Self-loathing can often lead to profound social sicknesses like domestic violence and substance abuse.
Even those who did manage to reach the “white” side of the color bar – but without becoming skilled or educated – were often left clinging to little more than their “whiteness”, their Christianity, and birthright “American-ness” as markers of their self-worth.
This underclass represents much of the cannon fodder sent to places like Vietnam or Iraq – while proudly proclaiming “I come from a military family” and telling themselves that they are “protecting our freedoms”.
Many of these people forgot, or were never told about their socio-ethnic roots.
Unaware of the original reasons their family had been locked-out of social advancement, they eventually came to resent nebulous groups like “Welfare Queens“, “Non-Christians“, “Experts” or “Elites” or “The Deep State“.
And they are also the ones most easily fooled by fascist propaganda and rhetoric which plays upon their various insecurities and resentments.
Too proud to see themselves as victims, they would rather align themselves with the rich and powerful, however unlikely it is that they will ever sit at the same table.
But some, a very particular subset of the disempowered, don’t want to sit at the table of the rich and powerful.
They just want to have some goddamn AGENCY in this life. Any kind of agency. Like the agency to take-out some of the rich, corrupt, and powerful.
Most of the currently enraged members of these underclasses are perfectly sane, if misguided, in where they choose to apportion blame. A few are batshit crazy.
Many of the rich and powerful are also perfectly sane, just selfish and greedy. Many are utter sociopaths.
Ryan Wesley Routh. Donald John Trump.
A couple of crazies in this crazy story called “America”.
I know which one I’d sooner offer a spare bed in my house if either knocked on my door in the middle of a stormy night…
BWWW (Before We Were White) Answers MAGA Questions…
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinDetail from Mercator’s 1569 world map
Q. Hey, we’re the biggest greatest nation in the history of the world. We got coastal real estate all along The Gulf in Texas and Florida and some other states that I can’t remember right now. We have oil rigs all over the place out there. What the hell do the damn Mexicans have to do with our ocean?
A. Well, the “Gulf of America” wouldn’t be a bad name for the large body of water lying between North and South America, if it wasn’t for dipshits like yourself constantly using the term “America” to mean only “The United States of America” – which is of course just one country among 35 sovereign states in the Americas.
But let’s set that aside for now.
The indigenous peoples of the Gulf region have had their own names for this body of water for upwards of 14,000 years.
We all know that European conquerors and colonizers often gave their own names to the places they overran.
The earliest European to set eyes on the Gulf would have been Sebastián de Ocampo, when he sailed around the western end of Cuba in 1508.
The very earliest maps referred to the Gulf as “Seno Mejicano” or “Golfo de la Nueva España“. Those names are in Spanish, by the way.
By 1569, this sea was officially being referred to as the “Golfo Mexicano” on a map made by Geert Kremer, aka Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish mapmaker and geographer.
Go look up “Flemish” yourself. We haven’t got all day here.
If you can count, you will notice that the year 1569 was about 38 years before the founding of Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America.
Which was nowhere near the Gulf, in case you’re wondering.
The placename “Gulf of Mexico” precedes the founding of The United States of America by 207 years.
Furthermore, the USA did not even control ANY land on the Gulf of Mexico until after the Louisiana “Purchase” of 1803 – a full 238 years AFTER it had first been called “The Gulf of Mexico”.
The United States’ length of coastline along the Gulf exceeds Mexico’s by about a third, but this situation was of course helped by the US war of aggression and annexation waged against Mexico during the 1840s.
Hope this helps.
The Red Curtain Falls
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinDavid Lynch
When film director David Lynch was creating his first great works back in the 70s and 80s, it seems fairly unlikely that he envisaged an America sliding into full-blown authoritarianism or fascism in what would be his latter years.
One could argue that there exists the art of emotion, and the art of ideas. There are very, very few artists who seem to operate inside and outside of both categories.
Many if not most humans seem to prefer art, music, film which takes them by the hand and leads them on a journey with clear waymarkers, with their patient guide periodically pointing to the things they should notice.
Some artists, like David Lynch or the late author Cormac McCarthy, refused to take the reader or viewer’s hand, choosing instead to assemble an entire world out of vignettes – often horrifying – and leaving us as witnesses to navigate the meaning of it all.
One thing which seems clear (to this writer at least) is that both Lynch and McCarthy were mesmerized and possibly traumatized by a darkness at the heart of American society, in which The Truth is never spoken.
David Lynch in particular appeared to be obsessed with the dissonance between the popularly agreed perception of American society and the actual realities lurking just behind the curtains…
All of this is visible in what is arguably his masterpiece, “Blue Velvet”, in which the American myth of itself is scraped back with a metaphorical razor until reality lies exposed and bleeding.
As someone far less oblique and artistic than David Lynch, this writer is happy to blurt it right out:
The pomp which will surround the “return of a great America” tomorrow – desired largely by a very “un-great” people – is exactly the sickly-sweet ersatz shopping mall confection which caused artists like Lynch to scream and spew into the unredeeming void…
Lynch was no product of the “coastal elites” so despised by MAGA types. He was born in Montana just after WWII, the descendant of Irish and Scandinavian immigrants.
It would be his travels to both coasts of America which opened his eyes to the stark contradictions between the conjured “fluffiness” of small-town America and the lives of not-so-quiet desperation being acted-out on the streets of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
Lynch did not look to the privileged classes when seeking long-term collaborators.
The people in his close circle were artists like Dennis Hopper and Sissy Spacek, heartland Americans willing to show up when he needed help – including financial help.
*****
Probably his most long-term collaborator – maybe even a “muse” if that word is appropriate – was Jack Nance.
Jack Nance played the lead in Lynch’s first feature length film – the surreal and profoundly disturbing “Eraserhead” from 1977. Nance would later show up in everything from “Blue Velvet” to “Twin Peaks”.
The year “Eraserhead” came out was also the year Elvis died, and there is no figure in American history who more embodies the Lynchian red curtain between glitzy stardom and backstage human reality than Elvis Aron Presley.
Jack Nance came from a similarly complicated background to Elvis, although falling on opposite sides of the tracks by a trick of birth.
Jack Nance with grandmother Maude
Both men had mixed-ethnic ancestors in their family trees including “free people of color” – and in Nance’s case, his ancestors included both slaveholders AND “free people of color”.
Having “free people of color” actually inside a slaveholding household in a census from the 1800s was often a sign of the “Pater familias” taking sexual liberties with his “property”.
And that’s a charitable way of describing such ugliness…
In America, two people might have common ancestors, but how the cards fall down the generations in terms of happiness, normality, and economic security is often very, very different.
The much-vaunted promise of America was dependent on whether the mixed offspring of slaveholders and their consorts were accepted by their fathers and later able to “pass as white” – the less usual scenario.
More common was a situation in which mixed-ethnic children arrived into the world just a shade too dark-complected, meaning they were rejected, shunned, or even exiled or sold by their “white” family.
Whether a particular family line was seen as “colored”, “passed as white”, or worked slowly towards “passing”, the internalized shame and self-loathing became a part of America’s fabric among both the descendants of the enslaved, and the descendants of slaveholders. It is a transgenerational poison in the bloodstream of American culture.
It is difficult to know if Jack Nance was descended from the “mulatto” children of his prosperous slaveholding forefathers such as the van Dorn family. His Heathcock ancestors were certainly free people of color.
But a couple of things ARE certain. Jack Nance was a troubled man, and Jack Nance was a hardcore alcoholic. You know something has gone terribly wrong when even Dennis Hopper decides to bring you to rehab.
With a failed marriage behind him, Jack Nance managed to get dry eventually, but I guess “America” kept getting in the way.
Jack Nance and Kyle McLaughlin in Blue Velvet
He ended-up married again, this time to a porn actress named Nancee Kelly – whose real name was Kelly Jean Van Dyke – niece of that symbol of American show-biz razzmatazz and smiling good cheer, Dick Van Dyke.
In one of the most absurdly depressing stories ever, Jack Nance phoned Kelly Jean while filming a low-rent B-movie in California to say that he would break off their relationship if she continued drinking.
He tried to hang up, but Van Dyke threatened to kill herself if he did. Apparently the phone lines went down due to a passing lightning storm.
Van Dyke was found hanging, dead, shortly after.
Jack Nance went back to the bottle, and died in mysterious circumstances five years later.
*****
David Lynch set the film “Blue Velvet” in Lumberton, North Carolina – which oddly enough, is home to the largest mixed-ethnic community in the eastern USA – the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, one of the original American communities comprised mainly of “free people of color”.
Filming actually took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, not Lumberton. Which is in some ways even more odd, as Wilmington is the picturesque and centuries-old seaport town where in 1898, white supremacist paramilitary terrorists known as “Redshirts” staged one of the most outrageous insurrections in US history.
Post-Civil War, Wilmington was one of the few bright spots for Black Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line. Through ambition and industry, African-Americans had created a thriving local economy which included the first wholly Black-owned newspaper. Elected offices were held by both “white” and Black citizens, with the latter forming a majority of the city’s population.
Southern Democrats (who were the more racist of the two mainstream political parties back then) led a 1500-strong “white” militia against the legally elected aldermen of Wilmington, murdering dozens and installing their own gang in local offices. Wilmington’s Black population never recovered following the mass exodus in the face of racist violence and new laws created specifically to disenfranchise Black voters.
I have no idea whether the darkness behind the modern gentrified and mostly “white” Wilmington, NC played any role in David Lynch‘s decision to film a tale of the violence and lies lurking just beneath the surface of white picket fence American gentility.
It doesn’t really matter. Lynch saw the weirdness at the dark and violent heart of American culture, and refused to flinch.
David Lynch never gave up on the damaged souls skirting the shadowy margins of Americana, either.
I wrote something years ago, and have found no reason to amend my thoughts:
If it weren’t for his great good fortune in being born to a wealthy, racist property developer, the man being sworn into office tomorrow has the character of a slimy traveling salesman propping up the bar after midnight in a cheap-ass Vegas motel.
The kind who keeps trying to get the woman at the table nearby to notice his fake Rolex. The kind who tells racist and misogynist jokes to the bartender in a loud voice. The guy well past his prime hitting on girls half his age, not noticing their nausea at seeing his fat, translucent, gouty feet spilling out of cheap and near-to-bursting loafers.
A villainous side character in a David Lynch film is president of the USA tomorrow.
And we get no astonishingly brilliant soundtrack to compensate…
RIP David Keith Lynch [1946-2025]
Greenland, Panama, and Orwell
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinPolitical map of the future as per George Orwell
Update to readers:
I have been keeping new podcast episodes on the backburner since the run-up to the November election.
I felt at the time that carrying-on as if everything was “normal” was just somehow frivolous and…wrong.
So for the last three months of 2024 I focussed on political posts, blogs, and essays, hoping to exert a tiny bit of positive influence from my battered old keyboard up the back of a mountain.
Unfortunately, over 75 million Americans preferred to give their vote to someone who embodies the very worst in us.
We are two weeks out from the inauguration of a man who I believe is an authoritarian at best, and an outright fascist at worst.
He is speaking of internment camps. He is speaking of the annexation of sovereign states and territories.
His campaign was funded by a multi-billionaire – an avowed technocrat – who is now interfering in European politics by supplying oxygen to the far right.
These people want to burn the whole thing down, so they can rise from the ashes as “strongmen” able to “bring order”.
Pre-election, I published and shared the information I had gathered over many years regarding the plastic identity of fake “hillbilly” J. D. Vance and his technocratic groomers.
There are no more alarm bells left to ring.
I will return to publishing podcasts this week, mainly out of respect to the Patrons who have put their money where their mouth is, and decided that independent researchers, historians, and journalists are our only hope for the foreseeable future.
Thanks are not enough, but thanks.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that every believer in democracy begin making themselves fascism-resilient:
1) In terms of continued access to evidence-based journalism and education.
2) In terms of protecting their privacy, digital footprint and general internet access for community building and community preservation.
And I hope for the love of all that’s good and decent in this world, that everyone can have a good hearty laugh at my expense in four years time, as they recall my foolish and paranoid scaremongering.
Hello 2025…Get Ready to Rumble
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinI am not given to conspiracy theories.
It is my considered opinion – as a thinking 60-year-old who unashamedly claims to be reasonably well-read and well-informed – that the current spread of right wing extremist politics in North and South America, in Europe, and elsewhere, is no organic “grassroots” development.
This is being coordinated by authoritarians, billionaires, and technocrats through the organs of the mass media – which are of course owned and controlled by these people, by and large.
This is a cross-border, internationalist project.
Some will quite rightfully argue that the ever-rising cost of living – housing, food, fuel – has stoked a widespread dissatisfaction with our current institutions. This is true.
The mass movement of refugees from zones of famine, poverty, gang violence, political/religious persecution, and war (mostly in the global south) to wealthier or more stable countries (mostly in the global north) is bringing with it a sense of social and cultural flux which angers conservative – and many centrist – voters. This anger is found mostly among the underclasses who bear the brunt of large scale unskilled immigration.
This anger is being tapped-into by various opportunists only too happy to use populist rhetoric and fascist-adjacent language to stir up further “right wing” sentiment.
All of this has already been written about and published in innumerable places.
So what’s the point in repeating what many people already know?
The point is, people on both the Left and Right have allowed themselved to be divided into camps and set against one another in an endless series of carefully crafted culture and identity wars.
Why?
In order to distract the underclasses from their common foe – the ultra-wealthy, and their worldwide push for complete authoritarian, technocratic, and corporatocratic control of governmental systems.
Traditional nation state borders have become irrelevant.
But those who currently hold shocking amounts of wealth and control over basic resources – everywhere – have come to see a serious danger to their position.
So they are now in the “shoring-up the defences” phase.
*****
Consider the following social issues, and how they are framed by a corporate media, within a corporatocratic paradigm:
The REAL cause behind the cost of living crisis – corporate greed – is NEVER framed and elucidated honestly by any mainstream political candidates.
The REAL cause behind the climate emergency – corporate greed – is ignored, while blame is shifted onto consumer habits alone.
The REAL causes of war and poverty – which are driving immigration – are likewise never discussed by any mainstream political candidates.
When was the last time you heard a USA or European politician say “Our colonialist policies over the centuries have left a legacy of conflict and dysfunction in the Middle East and elsewhere. If we want to stop immigration from the Middle East and Latin America, we must get our corporatocracy to share their ill-gotten gains until we raise the living standards of people everywhere. We must stop getting rich supplying arms to conflict zones – especially the ones we created ourselves. Only then will the mass migration of refugees stop”.
Most politicians are beholden to the corporatocracy, so of course we will never hear such unvarnished truths.
With real power being held by media barons, technocrats, and the wider corporatocracy, they are the ones who get to frame the terms of political discourse and the daily news agenda.
Not the politicians, and certainly not us.
The corporate media and mega-wealthy invite us to argue stupidly and endlessly about SYMPTOMS instead of CAUSES.
Example “news item”:
Everyone is “said” to be up in arms about crime, drug gangs, and drug use.
And often, this in itself is true.
But the corporate media invites us to argue about welfare and unemployment among drug users.
The corporate media invites us to argue about a general decline in “morals” and “work ethic”.
The corporate media invites us to look at the color, religion, or immigration status of those involved in crime or drug use.
What politicians and the corporate media will never do, is discuss the shallowness and hopelessness of a society designed for Big Business and consumerism, which leaves many turning to drugs in despair.
And we are of course sometimes even allowed to turn to drugs, as long as those drugs are controlled, sold, and distributed by the corporatocracy.
Opioids, anyone?
So why are the ultra-wealthy and their political minions now “shoring-up the defences” with a coordinated push toward authoritarianism?
Because addressing the climate emergency and world overpopulation properly would require nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of current forms of multi-national capitalism.
(And yes, the world is overpopulated. Could we feed everyone with equitable wealth distribution? Sure. But just because we could feed everyone doesn’t change the fact that there are too many of us.)
At any rate, equitable distribution of wealth will not be allowed to happen…
And the consequences of refusing to address this climate emergency will include famine, mass migration, and social unrest on a scale never seen in historical times.
For the ultra-wealthy to survive this turmoil and widespread civil unrest – with their fortunes intact – requires a brutal, forced lurch away from democracy.
*****
A free media is the very heartbeat of a free society.
Over the past few of years, we have seen ceaseless attacks on the free media.
A cheerleader for authoritarianism has already taken over one major social media platform, and spent millions to get “his man” elected.
The owner of The Washington Post (the paper of Woodward and Bernstein!) no longer allows the paper to take editorial positions which might annoy the incoming government.
In an act of pre-obeisiance, Disney (the owners of ABC), have recently directed the company to settle out of court a case taken against it by DJT.
The head of Facebook has already donated $1 million to the inauguration day “celebrations” coming-up in a couple of weeks.
The latest terms and conditions of use, and the advice to “content creators” on that platform, make clear that “political posts” are discouraged, and will be downranked by the magic invisible algorithms controlling public discourse.
In an atmosphere of zero transparency, writers seeking an audience are left second-guessing which formulation of words will find favor.
Not favor with their readers, mind you, but with an unknowable, inscrutable AI system, programmed to optimize addictive engagement.
It is already patently clear that Facebook is awash with AI-generated “content”, full of factoids and phrases scraped (stolen) from the wider internet and the scribblings of real-life writers.
This “content” has also been scraped clean of emotion and human motive, bleached of complaint or social conscience.
Actual humans – writers, poets, activists – are “guided” toward becoming low-paid producers of anodyne “content”.
“IF YOU WANT AN AUDIENCE, DO IT THIS WAY.”
You may speak of “love”, “peace”, and “social justice”, but under no circumstances will you be allowed to point to the corrupt human obstacles and institutions standing in the way of achieving those things.
*****
This writer has spent years trying building an online readership honestly. Every person who ever followed me on social media (other than trolls), found me via word of mouth or recommendation from other kind and generous booster souls elsewhere in the ether (or miasma) of the internet.
Facebook in particular, however, has a very simple and effective mechanism for shutting-down unwelcome shit-stirrers like myself.
After a person “likes” or “follows” a page, they should expect to see more from that page, right?
Wrong.
“The Platform” has three almost hidden settings behind the “liked” or “following” button – “unfollow”, “default”, and “favorite”.
It has become apparent that if a writer or content producer is “too political”, the settings on their READERS’ PAGES are toggled to “default”, rather than “favorite”.
The “default” setting means a writer’s posts are then distributed according to the platform’s internal, secret ranking system.
Most people never notice this “off-toggling”, and presume the person they once followed has simply quit posting articles.
“X” and Facebook are no longer “social media”.
On “X” and Facebook, users are now the equivalent of unfortunate French geese being force-fed grain so the ultra-wealthy can have their foie gras.
I’ll say it again. I am not given to conspiracy theories. But I’m not ready to be someone’s liver paté, either.
Maybe the standard of my writing has fallen off a cliff, and people are ignoring me in droves on Facebook.
Or maybe people who write about the things I do are being quietly ushered from the foyer there?
I’d like to believe that every one of the 7K-strong “legacy” followers of my Facebook page followed it because they had read something which informed, entertained, or touched an emotional chord.
But I cannot know for certain, because my writing there is being slowly “disappeared”.
We are entering challenging times. I fear they will be more challenging than most people imagine.
We must “gird our loins for battle”, to borrow a phrase from my long-abandoned evangelical upbringing.
I’m signing aboard the good ship Substack, with my website as a lifeboat just in case…