💌Hanlon’s Reader #11: July Newsletter

"I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." 🥛

Jul 31, 2024

💌 Monthly Update: July 2024

**https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/**

If American voters don’t show up this November, we might not get another chance:

“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians... in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote.”

— Donald Trump, biggest traitor to the U.S. since Robert E. Lee, on July 26, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida at “The Believers’ Summit” —

From Wikipedia:
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

Family Dinner Doesn’t Taste the Same

Hello Readers,

I have a story to tell and it’s unfortunately not speculative fiction, but a concrete reality that’s getting harder for me to accept. The politics of the current moment are bad enough, but all of this has taken a very personal toll on me as well. Like many Americans, I have parents whose political beliefs are more conservative than mine. My mom and I can talk and be reasonable with each other, genuinely seeking mutual understanding, but my dad… oh boy.

To lay the foundation here, I just turned 35. My parents are immigrants and middle-class small business owners with four kids. We were always well-provided for. I had a good home life. Went to public schools close enough to ride a bike to. Got a job at a nearby grocery store when I turned 16. Mom and dad never pushed any religion on me and always encouraged me to read—I’d pick up my dad’s old sci-fi books or my mom’s sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels. And throughout my whole life, they pushed me to do well in school so I could go to college without costing them an arm and a leg.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be doing the same right now if I had kids—even then, college was absurdly expensive without financial assistance. I saw how hard my parents worked for us, so I was more than willing to keep my grades up and stay out of trouble. Plus, they promised to buy me a (modest) new car if I was able to get a fully-paid scholarship at any college I chose. So I did. I worked my ass off in high school, got a full academic scholarship at an in-state university, and my parents honored their deal with a new yet affordably priced sedan!

Growing up, I remember riding along with my dad in his work van and hearing the deep, resounding, AM-radio voice of a real piece of shit named Rush Limbaugh. I was so bored listening to him! Hardly understood a word he was saying, the context for any of it, and really had zero comprehension of the vile things I must have heard at different points over the years. All I really remember is the feeling of his voice, this low, all-surrounding bass droning on and on, almost hypnotically. It usually put me right to sleep, but unfortunately my dad got his “brain poisoned by this freak.”

In furtherance of said brain poisoning, my dad also frequently watched a Fox News show called “The O’Reilly Factor,” hosted by another real piece of shit named Bill O’Reilly. Both of these men have done incalculable harm to the American psyche, and I witnessed it firsthand. When I was in high school, I’d usually avoid the living room when my dad was watching Fox News because I found Bill to be an annoying, smug asshole regardless of the politics I didn’t yet understand or care about—most of what I remember is him sneering at the camera calling people “pinheads” over and over.

When I was bit older during my college years, sometimes I’d plop down in a corner chair while my dad ruled the couch with an iced glass of Diet Pepsi and Canadian whiskey, sipping on it as he watched O’Reilly. I’d stick around until Bill inevitably said something really dumb… I remember hearing a lot of trash-talk about Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act, which directly benefited my family by allowing me and my brothers to remain on my parents’ health insurance plan until we were 26.

Around 2015 or so, years after I graduated college, I became more politically aware due to the 2016 Democratic primary’s Bernie Sanders campaign. Finally, an independent politician speaking truth to power with heartfelt compassion, an honest record, and no corporate masters! I saw the path we could take then, away from the corruption and gluttony for profit that was hollowing out the American middle class and moving money upward to the richest of the rich.

“We are in this together. … The truth is, at some level, when you hurt—when your children hurt—I hurt. I hurt. And when my kids hurt, you hurt. … I believe what human nature is about is that everybody in this room impacts everybody else in all kinds of ways that we can’t even comprehend. It’s beyond intellect. It’s a spiritual, emotional thing.

When we do the right thing, when we try to treat people with respect and dignity, when we say that that child who is hungry is my child, I think we are more human when we do that. … That’s my religion, that’s what I believe in.”

— Bernie Sanders, Feb 23, 2016 at a CNN Townhall —

Clouds Looming Above, Shadows Lurking Below

But of course, along with this hopeful vision of the American political future came the biggest piece of shit in the world, a man named Donald Trump. No citation needed.

During the 2016 general election, my dad converted from a moderate “fiscal conservative,” a self-declared libertarian who votes Republican… to a slightly ashamed Trump supporter. Not the red-hat-wearing, proud-to-be-racist type, but a supporter nonetheless. We started talking politics after our regular Sunday family dinners, and sometimes during dinner if my dad couldn’t keep his snide, passive-aggressive comments to himself. Making potshot comments is easy, but having an actual conversation that starts this way is hard.

Ever since Trump’s first campaign speech after descending the golden escalator, a red flag went off in the back of my head—like when the hairs on your neck stand up to warn of something dangerous approaching. As though every fictional dystopia I’d ever read about was preparing me to be aware of this moment, to think clearly so I could recognize the “Big Bad” and its true motives. At the time, I was worried about things like climate change, healthcare, and the right to abortion since my wife and I didn’t plan to have kids and we live in a red state.

The first time I realized how deep the Fox News brain rot had set in was when we talked about human-caused climate change in the context of whether or not carbon dioxide emissions warm the Earth’s surface temperature by trapping heat in the atmosphere. He just wouldn’t accept that this is a proven scientific fact.

My dad’s main argument was that climate change is a big conspiracy perpetrated by climate scientists so that they could get government funding for their bogus research. He claimed they faked all the data, and the records don’t go far back enough to prove that humans are the cause. I am pretty sure this is based on a debunked email controversy from 2009, dubbed “Climategate.”

“The story was first broken by climate change denialists,who argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. … FactCheck.org reported that climate change deniers misrepresented the contents of the emails.”
“Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists. The loss of trust in scientists, however, was primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology.”

For some reason which my dad couldn’t quite articulate, his theory is more likely than my theory that the climate-denialist “journalism” he sees on Drudge Report is directly funded by the biggest oil & gas companies in the world, who are doing it to make exponentially more money than climate scientists get for their research.

I studied English writing and rhetoric in college—persuasive research essays, mostly—so my angle was to convince my parents that they should vote for Bernie instead of Trump. I wanted to feel like they had my back, so I implored to them that Trump would lead us in the wrong direction by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses. I spent so much time thinking about how I could say the right set of words to persuade them, but even then I knew the odds weren’t good.

Through persistence and repeatedly banging my head against the wall, I made a little headway and begrudging concessions that Trump is indeed a lying asshole and Bernie seemed like a rare honest politician. But we all know how the 2016 Democratic primary turned out. My parents are exactly the kind of voters who might have voted for Bernie, but would never vote for Hillary. I could rattle off all the rational arguments in the world, but it wouldn’t change the way they felt.

I thought I had a slam dunk when Trump’s Access Hollywood video dropped on Oct 7 before the election. As we all sat together on outdoor furniture after Sunday dinner beneath the sloped roof of our covered backyard patio—our sacred family gathering place—I read this infamous quote aloud to my dad and he angrily stormed inside.

“I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Grab 'em by the pussy.”

— Donald Trump, biggest traitor to the U.S. since Robert E. Lee —

“I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” Trump said in a pre-recorded online video after many Republicans, including his running mate Mike Pence, used their leverage to force Trump’s reluctant, empty, hate-filled apology. Surely any good person would see this behavior as unjustifiable, a line they could never cross.

Yet despite this and everything else, he ended up voting for Trump anyway. I think he was hoping that despite the obvious black hole of endless narcissism and twisted moral flaws in Trump’s chest, the guy would be like a political hand grenade tossed into the Oval Office and he’d end up deleting the IRS or something like that.

Sadly, former FBI Director and current Slenderman cosplayer James Comey publicly announced on Oct 28, 11 days before the election, that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey later admitted that the extremely unorthodox statement from the FBI, which typically does not reveal details about ongoing investigations, “may have been … influenced by the fact that he considered it extremely likely that Clinton would become the next president.”

Former FBI Director James Comey:
“It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls. But I don’t know.”

I think this means he did it thinking it wouldn’t decide the campaign and he wanted to hold her feet to the fire when she won—or at least, to not be accused of hiding it and allowing her to win without American voters knowing she was still under investigation. But either way, Comey had to know this would hurt Clinton’s chances even if the outcome seemed inevitable.

So like a piece of straw breaking an overloaded campaign’s back, this event likely cost Clinton the election: she ran a terrible race and it never should have been close enough for this to make the difference, but Comey’s letter coming out so close to the election could certainly have been enough to swing less than 80,000 votes in key battleground states where Democrats lost including Michigan (10k), Wisconsin (18k), and Pennsylvania (44k).

Speaking Truth to A Stubborn Brick Wall

Damn, it still stings going back through all this! Thinking about what could have been.

Anyway, after many heated discussions leading up to the election, and throughout the Trump years, things between me and my dad really came to a head after the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve been carrying this weight for such a long time, I don’t even remember exactly when this conversation happened.

He would never admit Trump was at fault for making the pandemic worse by mishandling it in the beginning, pretending everything was fine and Covid-19 “was going to disappear,” making mask-wearing a political issue, publicly demonizing Dr. Fauci... so many people could have been saved. I gave up on trying to persuade him of anything since it was like talking to a brick wall.

So I asked the wall about the many, many sexual assault allegations against Trump. I asked the wall, out of all those women, does he really think not a single one was telling the truth? Not one? Or can he admit that, bare minimum, at least one of those women was telling the truth about Trump sexually assaulting or raping them?

And the wall admitted yes, he believed at least one was telling the truth.

So I asked the wall how he could still defend Trump despite that.

“Because of his policies,” the wall said.

We went back and forth about how shitty and wrong that is or isn’t, and eventually came around to the fact that each of us both think the other is brainwashed. And I said, yes, that is exactly how I feel given what we just talked about. But the important thing is to examine why we think that—each of us, about the other, as we both point and say, “No, you’re brainwashed.”

I told him what I think is that my dad has been brainwashed by the lies of right wing media over the years, convinced by propaganda of many things that aren’t true… but why exactly does my dad think that about me? I had a feeling I knew, so I asked him if he thinks that I was brainwashed by my education, by the years I spent at a “liberal arts” college learning to write?

And he said yes. He thinks I was brainwashed by my education, as though “liberal arts” in the sense of academic free thinking is the same as political liberalism.

So to me, that’s a father turning on his son. 10 months ago, he apologized over text for “past offenses,” as he put it, and wanted to start fresh, but I told him a blanket apology isn’t what I want. We need to talk through this, not paper over it, because he completely dismissed the thing I worked hardest in my whole life for, that both he and my mom always told me was most important. And we haven’t spoken since then except when necessary. I couldn’t stand to be around him.

After I gave him my answer, he wouldn’t respond to me about it. He won’t talk to me, won’t admit he was wrong. The best he could do was try to get me to just agree to disagree, forget about everything I now knew, and pretend like this is fine.

So I guess that’s why, beyond the whole “The Gang Goes Full Religious Theocracy” thing, I’m so fixated on writing about politics and making sure people vote. I lost my dad over this when all I wanted was to feel like my parents had my back.

Fuck you, Donald Trump, for showing me who my dad really is.

There’s no un-ringing this bell. He’d rather cling to beliefs he can’t even defend than admit he was wrong. I think he understands that admitting to that means unraveling a densely packed ball of yarn, made of deep-bound threads of right-wing talking points that have wound through him over the years. All he can do is silently double down.

We must deny Trump a second term. If he wins, it’s almost guaranteed to be worse than his first. He’s got nothing to lose: he’s running to stay out of prison, he wants to insert tens of thousands of his weirdo right-wing cronies into traditionally non-partisan government positions, the oh-so-incorruptible conservative Supreme Court is bending over backwards to help give Presidential immunity for crimes committed in office, and if it’s close they could potentially tip the election in his favor.

Every vote matters. 2016 was decided by less than 100,000 votes. Let’s not make this one close. Spread the word. Make a plan to vote. Find your polling place. Research down-ballot candidates. Vote by mail, vote early, or take the day off if you can. Ride with friends or family to make sure others vote too.

Just vote! Together, enough raindrops can cause a landslide:

⚠ https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

⚠ https://www.nass.org/can-I-vote

⚠ https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup