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Introducing the Sorensen Subscription Service
At long last, I’m launching the Sorensen Subscription Service. Many readers have inquired about this over the years, with some going so far as to set up their own “service” through recurring donations (thanks!). While I’m still fortunate to have paying clients who make the strip possible each week, it seems clear that reader subscriptions will be a necessary part of my business model going forward. Especially if the GOP destroys the Affordable Care Act and my health insurance premiums approach the cost of porn star hush money.
Those who join the S.S.S. (which may eventually take on a more novel name — The Eagle’s Clutch, anyone?) will, at an absolute minimum, receive the cartoon via email each week as soon as it is ready for consumption. I have big plans to include bonus material, such as behind-the-scenes glimpses of the creative process and photos of what I’m up to. You’ll also stay in the loop regarding public appearances, side projects, and forthcoming books.
So sign up today! It’s cheap and easy and will give you a warm, gentle glow of satisfaction.
Tips for Stopping Extremist Violence
Sometimes I can’t believe the things I have to draw cartoons about these days. When I began the weekly strip some eighteen years ago or so, I never imagined I’d be making the case against fascism in America. It felt like the dam broke this past week, that whatever was holding back an explosion of violent nutballery that’s been waiting in the wings is now gone. All I can do is try to point out the obvious, that these acts are the culmination of decades of over-the-top conspiracy theorizing and incitement on the American right. And no amount of being “nicer” or more “open-minded” is going to change things.
Debate to Nowhere
In previous cartoons, I have dealt with the folly of giving fascists and roundly-discredited racial theorists prestigious speaking platforms — such as Steve Bannon headlining the New Yorker ideas festival — and made the case that it is not “closed-minded” to object to such norm-violating appointments. Here I take on the same basic topic from another angle: if fascists and racists must be treated as part of serious contemporary intellectual debate, as some insist, surely there must be some point when the debate is over? If not, then it follows that there’s no way to ever condemn a set of ideas or come to any conclusions. An analog would be people who want endless “debate” over climate change, long after scientific consensus has been established. The Bannons and climate deniers of the world are free to speak their nonsense, but rehashing it endlessly leads absolutely nowhere.
Cartoon: Fun with Ethno-nationalist Dog Whistles
Like many progressive-minded Americans, I wish we could do a lot of things here the way they are done in Europe. So I’ve found it ironic and darkly humorous that various factions of the alt-right are touting the greatness of “European culture.” Unfortunately, it’s the fascism they’re drawn to.
Allies of Evil
I have to say, the news from the past few days has me feeling more alarmed than ever. Trump’s behavior at the G-7 was, as others have noted, nothing less than an effort to destroy the West. While this all seems very Putin-esque, I also keep thinking of Viktor Orban, the far-right nationalist Prime Minister of Hungary, who has declared the era of liberal democracy to be over. Given the multi-pronged attacks on voting rights in the US, including Monday’s appalling 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that Ohio can purge people from its voter rolls if they fail to vote frequently enough, I fear we may be farther down the authoritarian path than many Americans realize. And Trump is, unfortunately, just the tip of the fascist-berg. Not to bum you out or anything.
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.
Immigration Fixation
There were other economic factors I could have mentioned in this cartoon, such as tax policy that promotes extreme inequality, or companies offshoring, or the entire perverse system of Wall Street incentives that benefits the investor class at the expense of workers. And there’s also the much-ignored fact that economic-minded voters tended to go for Clinton. Alas, I couldn’t fit all of these complexities into one comic. But I wanted address the problem that many anti-immigrant types tend to unfairly blame immigrants for economic woes while overlooking (or even enabling) policies that hurt ordinary Americans.
While I tend to avoid self-checkout lines myself, I understand that it’s impossible to go through life avoiding technologies that displace workers. Mobile check depositing, for example, is a blessing for freelancers. I try to look at the big picture and do what I reasonably can.
Smearing the messenger
Seems like a lot of otherwise clear-thinking people are falling for the Fox News claptrap about liberals not being “open-minded” enough. This is how you wind up with another white conservative dude being chosen as a diversity hire for the extremely not-diverse NYT op-ed page. Yes, we live in politically-polarized times, and everyone is angry, and sometimes protesters go overboard (neo-Nazis do have a way of bringing out that response in people). But to dismiss progressives as “elitists,” “PC,” and so on, is just trading in insults. It isn’t engaging in honest, thoughtful debate — it’s just trolling.
Get Your Words’ Worth
There were so many mind-blowingly illogical quotes in Roberts’ McCutcheon v. FEC opinion, it was hard to pick just one for the cartoon. Another classic:
“[Many people] would be delighted to see fewer television commercials touting a candidate’s accomplishments or disparaging an opponent’s character,” he wrote. “Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so, too, does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects. If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades — despite the profound offense such spectacles cause — it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”
Way to confuse the content of the political ads, which no one is objecting to on free speech grounds, with how they are funded!
The University of Chicago guide to free speech
The University of Chicago recently sent a letter to incoming students that bluntly laid out the school’s stance on freedom of expression. This NY Times article gives more background, but unfortunately suffers from a dopey headline that uses “political correctness” as though it were an unbiased term. This commentary on the issue is also well worth reading.
Students, like anyone else, can take things too far, but the whole concept of “trigger warnings” has now been picked up and blown out of proportion by conservatives. In the age of Trump and Black Lives Matter and campus protests by minority students, this letter is tone deaf and inappropriate. It’s largely name-calling and buzzwords with an attempt at plausible deniability.
Some will claim I’m arguing that students should be shielded from points of view they may disagree with. I have not said that at all. I do think that when a university brings in, say, a known internet harasser who uses his public profile to intimidate and abuse women online, students have the right to protest the legitimacy being granted by the university. If anything, the letter suggests that the leaders of U. Chicago are trying to make a “safe space” for themselves so they can frame criticism they don’t want to hear as anti-free speech.
Update: Some important background info for people who mistakenly think this whole issue is about “silencing offensive speech”: “What University Of Chicago Students Think Of Their School’s Campaign Against ‘Safe Spaces’“
Punditspew, Orlando shooting edition
One of my least favorite parts of being a political cartoonist is having to process these mind-boggling tragedies on a short deadline. It was absolutely clear from the beginning, however, that easy access to assault rifles did not help this situation.
The worst possible response to this attack is to demonize Muslims, as Trump is doing, which only fans the flames of hate and extremism. We know the shooter was virulently homophobic, a belief that may have preceded any affiliation with extremist groups. Whatever the findings in the coming days, it’s obvious that Trump deserves zero “congrats for being right.”
Radical Cleric vs. Trump
Given Trump’s penchant for threatening the press, encouraging violence among his followers, and directing hate towards minority groups, he sometimes seems like a mirror image of the very extremists he claims he’d protect us from. Actually, more than anyone, Trump reminds me of Turkey’s authoritarian president Erdogan, who has pursued a harsh crackdown against his critics in the media in recent years, while enjoying support from the nationalism-and-traditional-values crowd.
In case you were wondering, there was no new strip last week because I was in Memphis for the National Cartoonists Society convention.
