The Sorensen Monologues

Dog Whistles of Our Times: “Identity Politics”

This paragraph from Linda Burnham in the Guardian last year spells out the problem nicely:

It’s never a good idea to enter willingly into a frame your opponent has constructed to entrap you. The term “identity politics” is part of a whole vocabulary including “thought police,” “politically correct,” and “liberal elites”, whose main intention is to undermine the legitimacy of liberal and left politics. Uncritically adopting the “identity politics” language of the right is the equivalent of dropping our guard and waltzing on to their terrain. Master’s tools, master’s house, anyone? We need to recognise a toxic frame when we see one and refuse to be a party to its proliferation.

Once upon a time, “identity politics” was a phrase heard occasionally in the halls of academia (at least, for those of us who were social science majors), typically in discussion of nationalist movements or other phenomena outside of day-to-day US political debate. Now, thanks largely to right-wing media, it has become a noxious catchphrase that lumps together all social justice movements — the fight for civil rights, equality for women, same-sex marriage, immigrant rights, to name just a few — into a belittling abstraction that makes these great historical movements sound frivolous. The phrase has become so normalized, many progressives use it uncritically. We need to wake up and recognize it for what it has become: a sanitized shorthand for “those people” — a dog whistle. You want to talk about these issues? Be specific. Spell out what you mean. Are you referring to Black Lives Matter? Don’t hide behind a sterile, human being-erasing euphemism.

In Trump They Trust

It seems no amount of shady business partners, porn star payoffs, mafia-esque fixers, blatant nepotism, fraud lawsuits, looney tunes campaign advisers, secret contacts with Russians, or income tax secrecy will ever convince some of Trump’s devout followers that he’s a con man. Indeed, some of them would probably cheer Oregon being sold off to the House of Saud; I really just felt like drawing some Portland hipsters.

Fueling Our Demise

When it comes to fuel efficiency and climate change, automakers have been brazenly talking out of both sides of their mouths. To quote from the NY Times:

At auto shows and on dealership floors, automakers are quick to talk about the latest green technology — electric vehicles, hybrids, even hydrogen cars.

But in Washington, the industry is sending a different message. Last month, one of the largest lobbying groups argued in a regulatory filing that the basic science behind climate change is not to be trusted.

In the same filing, the lobbying group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, also cast doubt on the negative effects of tailpipe pollution on human health.

As the article goes on to explain, they’re actually using the same doubt-sowing tactics that were infamously used by the cigarette industry. A 2013 MIT study found 200,000 premature deaths in the US every year due to air pollution, with “emissions from road transportation” being the most significant contributor. If anything, I lowballed the estimate in the third panel of this cartoon.

EPA chief and beady-eyed corruption sponge Scott Pruitt rightly gets much of the blame for cutting Obama’s CAFE standards, but let’s not forget that the automakers began lobbying for this immediately after Trump took office. As much as they might not want to be publicly linked to Pruitt, they are more than complicit. (And yes, we’ll see what happens with California’s challenge to all of this.)

Other recommended reading: this Greenbiz column on the automakers’ hypocrisy, and one of my perennial faves, Mr. Money Mustache on the folly of gargantuan luxury pickups.

Cartoon: Parkland Potshots

Over the past couple weeks, the right has been grasping at ever more ridiculous krazy straws in its efforts to smear the Parkland school shooting survivors calling for modest gun control reform. Rick Santorum laughably suggested that the students stop looking to others to solve their problem and do something useful like take CPR classes. Laura Ingraham gratuitously mocked student David Hogg for “whining” about not getting into the colleges he applied to. Frank Stallone tweeted that Hogg was, among other things, a “rich little bitch” deserving a “sucker punch” and a “bitch slap.” He also called him “Hogg (breath)” (yes, he went there). Ted Nugent called them “mushy-brained children” who have no soul, which is actually a mild-mannered statement as far as Nuge-speak goes. A recent widely-shared RedState article begged the students’ parents to step in and put a stop to their “bloated sense of entitlement.” The list goes on, but all these bile spewers have accomplished is demonstrating how ludicrous and extreme the right has become.

Post-Facebook Privacy Breakthrough

Print journalism has of course never been perfect, and social media can be enlightening (see: #BlackLivesMatter). But sometimes I fantasize about what would happen if everyone turned off cable news and unplugged from Facebook and Twitter, and simply subscribed to a print newspaper. And read their local altweekly, if they’re lucky enough to have one. I suspect America would be a lot less crazy.

Assault on Reason

As we see some news outlets try to portray “both sides” of the school shooting protests, let us remember that “the students don’t understand gun owners or gun culture” is not an argument. It’s just a tired, vacuous insult that does not contribute in any way to the discussion at hand.

Troubled Times

As a longtime loyal New York Times reader, it saddens me to have to critique the paper like this. The Times has always been a mixed bag, but some of their investigative reporting is very good. And really, the country needs a fully functioning New York Times — so we should all be trying to make it better, not destroy it.

That said, they have recently gone down a rabbit hole on their editorial pages. In their hiring decisions and topical obsessions, they have doubled down on a misguided attempt to not appear to have “liberal bias.” For example, they (or whoever specifically makes these decisions) have apparently bought into the hyperbolic, highly-distorting, and relentless Fox News obsession with a small number of overzealous college students as an attempt to smear all progressives. Fox’s game is straight from an authoritarian playbook, attacking academia and academics as the “real threat” to a free society, even as we are in the middle of an actual attempted fascist takeover of the country. (Meanwhile, Trump cozies up to people like Erdogan of Turkey, who literally throw academics in prison and fill populations with a sense of victimization at the hands of intellectuals, teachers, etc.) It’s worth noting that the Times actually hired as an editorial page editor a woman who, as a college student, was known for attacking professors who criticize Israeli state policies toward Palestinians.

Indeed, the Times’ self-righteous condescension towards, and stereotyping of, its own readership seems an awful lot like the attitude it chides “liberals” for displaying towards Trump voters — those saintly, salt-of-the-earth people who are definitely not racist (perish the thought!), and are above reproach.

Here are some suggestions for columnists they could have picked if they valued actual diversity of perspectives, and elevating underheard voices instead of dominant ones:

• • An environmental expert commenting on climate change and the rampant gutting of environmental protections
• • A Muslim, or Palestinian-American, who might talk about the criminally-neglected topic of Palestinian rights
• • A woman of color
• • An immigrant
• • A critic of late capitalism, talking about how to innovate away from its worst excesses and power structures towards a more sustainable system of commerce

The country desperately needs the Times to rise to the occasion and help good people preserve democracy in America. Some readers have canceled their subscriptions, and this may or may not be an effective form of protest. I’m not sure about the best tactics here, but I hope the Times sees the light soon.

Beyond the Paleo

I know a lot of people are going to argue with this one, but you have to admit the caveman thing is getting just a little ridiculous. For example:

Dark chocolate almond coconut nutrition bars… just like early homo sapiens used to eat when they needed an energy boost on the big mastodon hunt!

At the same time that lots of scientific evidence was accumulating about the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, Americans were embracing the Paleo diet – a diet ridiculed by nutritionists (even back in 2011), and consistently ranked near or at the bottom of expert diet recommendations. Wikipedia provides some criticism of the caveman fantasy. In some ways, Paleo is healthier than Americans’ normal terrible diets (particularly where it intersects with the Mediterranean diet), but that’s thin praise.

So why has it been such a big fad? Part of its popularity probably stems from the fact that meat-eating is encouraged, and the “primal man” narrative has a certain easy-to-grasp truthiness. But also, I suspect because it ties into the macho gender politics, a search for tough-guy authenticity, and conspiracy theorizing (the nutritionists are lying to you!) that have consumed American pop culture and politics for the last twenty years. One might say that Americans chose the wrong diet for many of the same reasons that they chose the wrong president.

Which brings us to the all-meat diet in the third panel, inspired by this fascinating Motherboard article on the trendlet of Bitcoin carnivores. It’s well worth your time!

Future Veterans of the Information Wars

While there’s been chatter in the news about conspiracy theories and Russian trolls, I think Americans are underestimating the problem of unreality and the dangers this poses to democracy. I’m reminded lately of this chilling article I read in the Seattle Times last fall, about a University of Washington researcher who studies information flows after mass shootings and other massacres (the infographic shown in the photo is enough to give you the willies). To quote the professor, Kate Starbird:

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

…

Starbird sighed. “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”

Sure enough, a video making the claim that the Parkland students were “crisis actors” was the #1 trending post on Youtube shortly after the shooting. But the problem is hardly limited to Alex Jones’ legions of followers (and there truly are legions of them). Republicans in Maine and California have been setting up their own propaganda sites masquerading as news.

School of Glock

As I was telling a colleague of mine, responding to mass shootings as a cartoonist has become a macabre sort of exercise in drawing the same thing over and over, but in a new way. It’s like a darker version of what non-political cartoonists face when asked to come up with yet another desert island gag.

The Selective Free Speech Warrior

A backlash against the #MeToo movement rages, with conservatives spluttering about the awful feminists posing an existential threat to liberal democratic order, or some such thing.  Look, I am not a fan of Twitter’s mob mentality even when I agree with the mob. But that’s the nature of the medium, a problem not isolated to just anti-sexual harassment activists.

This backlash is a massively disproportionate response, indicative of a highly distorted media universe where pundits are rewarded for saying that the nation’s biggest problems originate with liberals — remember the obsession with “PC on campus” during the election? As I have noted elsewhere, the speech concept has been utterly perverted to suit right wing efforts to chill speech.

A few relevant links:

The linguist and progressive activist George Lakoff, author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant”, is being sued for defamation by a wealthy Georgian-American businessman who was present at the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. Lakoff cited the businessman’s alleged involvement in money-laundering in a TV interview. The businessman’s legal team includes a lawyer who represented Trump in a previous lawsuit. I find this incredibly chilling, and deserving of much, much wider coverage than it’s getting. Lakoff has a GoFundMe set up for his legal expenses.

Also deserving major headlines is the plight of the “J20” inauguration protesters still facing felony rioting charges. Many had their charges dropped, but 59 people still face the possibility of years in prison for merely being present when a few people engaged in vandalism. This is huge news with major implications for the right to protest.

Then there’s the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.” In this day and age of neo-Nazis, it sounds fine, right? But in practice, it conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry. Many liberal Jewish groups are opposed to it for this reason. Of course, the Trump administration is appointing a fervent supporter of the act to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

If Watergate Happened With Today’s Media

I was busy gestating during the Watergate crisis, and not paying much attention to the news, but hopefully this re-creation will resonate with people who lived through it. This comic was of course inspired by the Nunes memo, about which an objective headline might look something like: “Republicans release piece of garbage intended to mislead public about the Russia investigation.”

An amazing and highly-relevant detail that should be household knowledge but that I learned only this week: the origins of Fox News can be traced back to the Nixon White House. The Nixon administration wanted more favorable coverage in the media and hatched the idea of creating a pro-GOP news network. Roger Ailes offered to do it, though it took some 25 years for the network to actually materialize. Via the late Gawker (which was sued out of business by billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel):

But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo—called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes’ work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries.

Flash forward to February 1, 2018. Fox’s Geraldo Rivera tells Sean Hannity “Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74.” (Hat tip to Daily Kos commenter MiketheLiberal who alerted me to this development, which I’d missed).

Between the corrupt Fox and an intimidated/lobotomized mainstream media deathly afraid of showing “liberal bias,” we have a crisis of journalistic ethics on our hands, one that deeply threatens American democracy and, ultimately, the freedom of the press itself.

(Full disclosure: I currently do editing work for the company that used to publish Gawker.)