The Problem of Politics

Dead End Roads Are Fun To Explore Until They End

Back in the early aughts I wrote a blog (yes a blog) called The Lawson Review. I started writing it relatively soon after “blogs” became a thing. I never felt it would be very big, but I quickly had a few thousand followers. Back then a lot fewer people were making blogs, and I wonder how big it might have gotten if I had kept with it and it hadn’t gotten shut down.

I wrote mostly on politics and the environment with a mix of tone that mixed fact and fiction, because as some of us knew even then, that is what the MSM had to offer. I was surprised it had gained traction, but in those days my life was anything but online. I worked for the forest service and was working my way through graduate school. I followed Central Asian politics closer than made sense for someone living in the woods in Montana.

George W. Bush was an easy target for writing. Between him and his team, there were countless stories to cover. It was easy. They hardly even tried to hide what their motives were. You hear politicians who are still all these years later still in office talk about how “they were tricked” which is such bullshit. Anyone and everyone knew they were lying about their motives. Everyone knew Iraq was a mix of desire for more oil money mixed with a little revenge for his Dad. Afghanistan was about pipelines and opium and strategic geographic offense. These weren’t secrets, it was just that none of the major networks would talk about it and politicians acted as though they were above common knowledge.

At the time many of us thought they “were afraid” but really, as the internet grew and we began seeing more of the connections made, it was because those people are all in bed together. Admiral Poindexter was very clear and blatant about what his goals with Total Information Awareness were. It was total domestic/global spying (we’ve seen this play out across the internet landscape since then…) but when a few media outlets found out about it he officially “shut it down” only to rename under a black budget and continue on. Years later, cue Edward Snowden. We’ve seen this play out over the last two decades and they pretty much succeeded and have now added not only monitoring, but censorship and control to the paradigm. It’s easier to see now in an era when people get exposed for true motives all the time, though it’s shocking with how large and vast the internet is that the Epstein connections have not even begun to come out. How they are holding onto that stack of secrets? I have no idea.

I admittedly was very young and had not formed a very wide scope of a world view. It was wide for that age, but in hindsight, not wide enough. And while there was a lot of speculation about the different environmental views, I had not realized the agenda and money that drove most of them far beyond what the science actually hypothesized. But it was solid, consistent writing. I had one particular opponent, the Stansberry Research Group, who was at the time doubling down on fracking. I was at the time adamantly anti-fracking, and I often attacked them. That was when my blog became increasingly popular. I received a few messages from them telling me I was first in the wrong and second needed to stop. This of course increased my resolve, regardless of how correct or incorrect I might be. They were an easy target for someone that thought he knew what he was talking about.

But something strange happened. I took a break when my first kid was born, and my google account that operated that blog was hacked, and Google shut it down. I lost all my original posts. I got suspended before being suspended was a thing. I still think somehow someone at Stansberry was behind it. But honestly I’m not sure how they killed it. Or why But a lot of writing disappeared.

I got cancelled before canceling was even a thing.

I restarted the blog again under a slight variation in name, but never could get myself as into it, and never found the traction I’d had before. Stansberry Research has gone on to become a billion dollar research organization. Apparently they were doing something correctly, even if off the mark environmentally.

Having kids caused a shift in my approach to the world, especially with regards to politics. While my interest is there, my desire to spend the amount of time required to keep up has faded. There is only so much I can do and I’d rather put my energy into other things, other spaces, mentally and physically. The level of corruption in politics and across society needs to be probed. It needs to be exposed. But somewhere along the way I decided I had no interest in being the one doing it. I prefer thinking about, as Barton Fink once stated, “the life of the mind,” and as I’ve found for myself, the life outside.

Politics can be easily summarized with one word: Corrupt. No matter who is running, who is in charge, sadly they all have the backing of corruption. Remember how we all thought, were told in fact that Obama was going to be great. He was going to to do things different. He had a different background. Everything was going to change. Now, and most importantly, remember that it did not. He was a puppet of the system like all the others. He did not close Guantanamo, he did not stop shelling Syria, he escalated bombings in Yemen and did his damnedest to keep it secret, he increased fracking, he did literally everything the opposite of what he said he’d do. Even healthcare got more expensive.

There is no golden knight in the American empire. I’m not saying we should quit the system, I’m just saying the reality is we can not trust our politicians. We keep giving them more power when we should be demanding they assume less. We keep acting as if they are our friends. America is great. But our politicians are not. Our constitution, separate from the government that assumes responsibility, is what makes us great. There is a distinction. We’ve built a bloated bureaucratic monster that takes trillions of dollars and redistributes it to pet projects that often were never set up with intention to succeeded but rather to make cronies rich. This goes for the war machines as well as the social justice machines. The government is not your friend. America is still the land of opportunity, but beware who you trust.

With each decade there seem to be more and more reasons the government would like to step in to protect you. The first big one was the Patriot Act. Remember that? A lot of young people have never heard about it. When it first got introduced it seemed like well over half of America knew it was bs, but all our politicians, again who know better, said it was the only way to stay safe. We got the TSA, militarized local police, and a Homeland Security agency. Bigger, more expensive, more bureaucratic. Add to it, the surveillance state became a possibility. But surveillance was only half the goal. Manipulation and restriction were the real goals. The best way to “Keep the Country Safe” is to have a set of guards who patrol the landscape making sure everything every says is in line with the current governing parties. That is where we are at today.

We have major politicians talking openly about the need to restrict speech because it is “dangerous.” But herein lies the danger. You may like and support most of the policies held up as needing to be protected by these current specific politicians, we need to recognize that as soon as the political powers shift, a new set of values are going to be held up as needing to be protected, and you may find yourself on the other side of the spear. This is exactly what happened to “patriotic americans” back when the Patriot Act passed. “Oh, these laws will only make sure that the Arabs are kept in check” was the word. Or something a little more vulgar.

But here, years later, many of the people that once supported the Patriot Act find themselves at the pointy end of the spear, with leading party officials stating that “rural whites” are the terrorists we need to be protected against.

The point is this… we’ve allowed the idea of “safety” to corrupt our government. Now the definition of what it means to be safe is being altered. When we allow these slippery slopes to play out we are always in danger of having it turned on us. Better to keep the weapons out of the hands of our government, or at a minimum make sure the weapons are always, always pointed outside our nations boundaries. Once allowed to turn them inwards there is no telling who they will define as “enemy.”

As I see it now, the freedom of speech is one of the biggest threats to our country. If limited, it revokes our ability to change any other aspect of government. You can side with this war, or that war, or you can oppose or support abortion rights, or you can be for or against a more stringent border policy, or you can be for or against tax money being spent on healthcare, but if you lose the right to free speech, if you find yourself on the opposite side of an issue from the ruling party, you have no voice at all to try to change anything.

We’ve been told for years that “hate speech” is bad. Sure, it’s what assholes do. We’ve been told “words are violence” and the result is that it has simply made people extra sensitive and over-self focused. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. Words are speech. I’m all for letting the assholes have a voice. It lets us know who they are, and keeps them from needing to go underground and assume the roll of martyrdom among their ilk.

Words have consequences. Let the people who spew hate face the judgement and condemnation of their peers. The government is not worthy of our trust to determine what is and isn’t hate speech. Only the broader society should be given that right. If we allow government to determine what can and can’t be said, it is a guarantee that it will someday be used against you. Opposing views are necessary for a healthy country. Even when they are wrong. We need to continually hit the hammer to our heated metal to form the tools of our future, and only through this continued refining and reworking can we move forward. But some basic principals must be held to allow that. Free speech is one of them.

If you’d told my twenty year old self that these decades later I’d be typing about first amendment rights, I’d have laughed. First off, there would be no need. In the America of yesteryear no one was attacking free speech like they are now. Granted, speech was far more limited. Pre-internet few had a voice. That is why we saw such a rapid attack on civil liberties… suddenly civil society had a platform. A nobody in Montana could suddenly be speaking to thousands. The writing was on the wall. Every day thinkers, without the “proper connections” could suddenly become hugely influential. That is a danger to establishment powers, ie the corporations that our government has allowed to latch to it like zebra muscles.

It is honestly wild to witness the single story of X. One rogue billionaire has led to the exposure of the Censorship Complex, and main stream media that are part of it create endless stories attacking him now because he wasn’t willing to play and saw the dangerous direction the censorship was going. Like or hate Tesla (I dislike), like or hate Starlink (also dislike) and Space X (kind of cool?), like or hate X the platform (diabolically enjoy), Elon Musk will go down in history as one of the most disruptive influences on this era of American history. And in my mind, I see it as a good thing. He exposed, or allowed to the exposure, of the entire corruption of censorship in public life by government interference. Wild stuff.

So here it is, probably one of my only posts on politics. But not in the way you think. I don’t want to know who you vote for. I don’t need to know. And I do my best to avoid judging people on such a ridiculous premise. I’m not in the part of my life where I want to focus on this shit. And shit is the only word to describe it. It’s a mess. If you want to know what’s going on in that space there are plenty of good writers, though none of them work for what have been traditionally considered relevant media. [If you are curious who I like, check out Walter Kirn, Matt Tiabbi, and Michael Shellenberger as a start. Do I agree with them on everything? No. But I find them to be honest and truly working on writing about the way things actually are.) You will find them here on Substack and scattered across the social media landscape, but not in any of the major papers or “news” organizations which have all taken on the role of speaking for one of the two main party establishments.

But that is life. We evolve into not only thinking differently, but thinking about different things. We have seasons of life, but we also have different decades and each one takes us to a new place. In my twenties I considered it very important to know and write about something I could now care less about (sort of, sometimes I still get drawn in.) Now my mind wants to figure out how to best utilize my time on earth, learn, love, explore, and enjoy.

For fun, I’ve attached a few ridiculous posts I found available on the Way Back Machine. Hope you enjoy. I’m fully willing to take the criticism it deserves. It was born of my love of news and geopolitics combined with the satirical humor of the onion combined with South Park and a childhood of Beavis and Butthead.

Here you go: