Two of the biggest news stories in Northeast Ohio this week are: Trump wins Ohio and the Cleveland Indians are shopping star shortstop Franscico Lindor. If you don’t think these two are related, let this Ohio native explain.
We are reaping what has been sown. This is no mistake. Partisanship will kill us all. Multiple reports have shown that partisanship is the leading factor in affecting people’s attitude and behaviors around this COVID-19 health crisis. It’s not where they live. It’s not how old they are. It’s not how much media they consume. It’s their political partisanship. Let me explain how we got here. Political partisanship creating different realities we live in has been happening in the U.S. well before Trump started running for president. Check out Chris Mooney’s the Republican Brain from 2012. Or George Lakoff’s The […]
In the wake of mass shootings in my home state of Ohio in Dayton and in El Paso, Texas, a familiar trope has emerged – mental illness as the culprit. First, let me say this – white supremacy is not a mental illness. It is an ideology based on hate. Depression is a mental illness. PTSD is a mental illness. Being an asshole isn’t a mental illness. It’s just part of who we are.
By now, you have seen this image or the videos of high school white boys from Covington, Kentucky forming a mob around native elders to mock them. The video went viral and has been the talk of social media for days. Twitter and Facebook served as the public judge and jury for the kids. Then came the backlash and the PR tour. The white privilege counter. The victimhood narrative. The story became both infuriating and predictable in how it played out with the smirking kid in the MAGA hat getting invites to national network news programs.
Who are you? No, seriously. Take a minute to attempt to answer that question. I know it’s not easy. Just think of a few sentences that may describe who you are. I’ll wait.
Senator John McCain has died. Brain cancer. That sucks. Unfortunately, albeit predictably, his death has sparked arguments about how to honor political adversaries. On the one side, there’s “he’s always been a war-mongering dick, so stop kissing his ass because he died.” On the other side, there’s “he fought for what he thought was right from Vietnam to Trump’s America, his service to country is admirable in this day and age.” Or…
Everyone has an opinion. You think the Democratic Party should stand up for progressive ideals. Or you think the Democratic Party should meet voters ‘where they are at’ to play up moderate views. Maybe you think the Democratic Party is terrible. Or you think the Democratic Party should do something else. No matter what, everyone has an opinion. Your opinion sucks.
I cared about professional wrestling once. It was the mid-to-late 90’s. Grunge rock was still a thing, but had given way to hip hop as the dominant music pop culture. I was a teenager. So, rebellion was natural for me – a suburban white boy rebelling against “the man.” Of course I didn’t know what I was talking about (15 year-olds rarely do), but I felt a vague frustration with the world. I briefly found an outlet for that frustration in wrestling.
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket […]
“You know what, Americans have choices. And now they have to make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.” – Rep. Jason Chaffetz