A Conversation with Abraham Washington

An antifascist Substacker on Rick's page (https://neofascism.substack.com/) who's furious at disinformation

Bob: So-called objective journalism was a product of postwar newspaper consolidation, journalism becoming a credentialed middle-class profession and the cold war consensus. It's an outlier in American history and its legacy is ambiguous. A lot of important things we couldn't talk about when Uncle Walter was on TV every night.

But I suppose it's better than Thomas Jefferson's campaign calling John Adams a hermaphrodite. True story ;)

Abraham: that's true about John Adams; I saw it on TikTok - pictures and everything

Bob: LOL Jefferson himself didn't indulge in that kind of lurid rhetoric, but by the vicious personal attacks of his second election campaign he did begin to rue the First Amendment.

Our Framers loathed Faction. The evils of Faction are all over the Federalist Papers and there's not a word in the Constitution about political parties. But as soon as the first presidential election, the country split into Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Republican-Democrats. And there weren't newspapers that covered politics as we know it -- the interaction of those two forces. There were partisan broadsheets, each printer and publisher choosing a side and sticking to it. The legacy of that lasted well into the 20th century with all these long established local and state papers named after political parties. The proto-media moguls had their agendas, too, Horace Greeley (for good, mostly) and William Randolph Hearst (for evil, nearly always). The yellow press was pretty yellow.

John Adams, a distinguished defense attorney with a pistol of a wife Abigail, was short, pudgy and never comfortable on the hustings. I'm not enough of an amateur historian to know how exactly it got into the public discourse, but there were questions about his manliness. And yes, Team Jefferson began openly speculating in the broadsheets if something down there might not be quite right.

And hey, it's not on TikTok. Just google "John Adams hermaphrodite" and read the first few hits, which are historical publications and not somebody's YouTube channel ;)

Abraham: Thanks Bob, I guess it's a relief to know that ugly lying political campaigns are nothing new. (also nice to know that Adams won that one, in spite of the smears)

I think it might have been Republican campaign guru Lee Atwater who once said it was a waste of time digging up opposition research on your opponents: just make up shit!

So when war-hero John Kerry had a real advantage over service-dodging George Bush, the Bush team made up a story that Kerry STOLE his Purple Heart - and they found some Republican veterans to back up their BS story. So that became the election issue: not George Bush's non-service, but the hotly debated issue was: did John Kerry actually steal a Purple Heart from a more deserving veteran?

And now we're living in a world where the Republican Party is running on a total BS lie - that Trump won in 2020 and got robbed.

We're in an age of Mass Delusion. But maybe, hopefully, reality will win out.

If not, then I'll either play it safe and buy a MAGA hat & Trump's gold sneakers, or move to Canada.

My wife won't even watch the news any more. No wonder there's so much escapism. We watched 80 episodes of Game of Thrones - knights and dragons and total blessed escapism.

Bob: John Adams lost that election and was our first one-term president. As I mentioned, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Bill of Rights (which his government-skeptical anti-federalists pasted in after the ratification of the Constitution), was strenuously facepalming about it by his second campaign. His first, in 1800, is considered by historians as one of the nastiest in American history and this pained Jefferson greatly as Adams was one of his closest friends.

When you consider the diverging interests of the industrializing and urbanizing North and the neo-feudal South with a cash crop economy, living in separate epistemic universes is not strictly a product of mass media, let alone social media. We really didn't become a unified nation until long after the Civil War in the 20th century and it took a couple world wars to do it.

We boomers (I'm inferring from context) are particularly pained because the world we grew up in and took for granted for three charmed decades was a magic bubble, an historical exception and not the rule. The industrial bases of our trading partners were in rubble and we were the only game in town. The East Bloc was consolidating and whatever the blunders and excesses of our responses to it (Tailgunner Joe, Vietnam, etc.), we had to lead the free world in opposition to it, after smiting unto extinction the century's other poisonous international ideology.

So yes, the TV anchors, editorial pages and leaders of both parties sung from the same American hymnal for a good long time, something we deluded ourselves into thinking would go on forever without us having to return to the trenches and fight for it. But think about it for a minute and count our blessings. We're not Ukraine. We're not Yemen or Syria. We're not -- gods forbid -- Russia. We still have freedom of speech and freedom of thought and we'd still have both even if Stupid Hitler legitimately wins or manages to successfully steal this election.

American resistance dies hard. We have the strongest economy in the world and we're still the place that everyone wants to come to. We have so much to be grateful for and more than enough worth giving our all to defend.

Stay strong, antifascist brother.