Yeah, About That GETTR Thing
Mocking and blocking the adversary will give us no peace.
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After all the complaining about how Google, Twitter, and Facebook are censoring conservatives, some of those people who identify as conservatives have taken another run at building a website just for them. Really. They just want their own echo chamber, yet they still want the rest of us to listen to them and their ideas. Conservatives really do believe in their ideas and that they would do a world of good for the world.
We should take them seriously and at face value.
I’m a liberal. I wasn’t always a liberal, though. In the 1990’s I was a hard-right conservative. I was a tax protestor living underground on very meager wages. I believed that the Fed was a private bank. I believed that Vince Foster was murdered. I believed that the income tax was a fraud and that state citizens did not have to pay it. I drove around without a driver’s license or registration, high on adrenaline. I dared not get stoned. And I believed a lot of things that, even if they were true, didn’t serve me.
I spent years filing Freedom of Information Act requests for myself and for my clients. I learned how the IRS really works. I saw people who were just like me, doing a job that they wanted to do. They wanted to serve our country every bit as much as a private first class with boots on the ground in Afghanistan. I saw how human the IRS was.
I realized that I was so lost.
Then I got a job with a W-2. I started to make money and pay my bills and live something of a normal life again. I got married. I started to see how rigged the system was for the wealthy and the powerful. I have come to believe that we might not need much of a welfare state if a few very smart people could lay off the economic predation. Then I saw Trump elected for president, and I saw the true power of the rentier class.
Those conservatives that we mock in social media, they’re me, about 30 years ago. I know where they’ve been. I know their arguments. I also know that they’re operating on a theory of incentives that has never, ever been proven to work. That theory of incentives reduces our great country, the United States, to a luxurious Skinner Box. I want to believe that people have a…
