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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
People have been living together with the potential for someone to commit a violent act since the beginning of time. There is never a 100% certainty that something bad won’t happen to you. To sanction the “pre-preemptive” murder of an unarmed person who is having a mental breakdown just because it might get violent is anarchy. Have they lost their minds?
This is the natural consequence of the whole “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” movement. Self-defense has been redefined to mean you can kill if you simply feel threatened. There’s no responsibility to retreat and there doesn’t have to be an actual threat. Kill first and ask questions later.
It’s not the first time that vigilantism has become defensible in America. Like before, there is a real sense among a whole lot of people that they have the right to kill anyone who offends them and makes them feel insecure in their presence and there’s often a racist component to their “feelings.” It looks like we’re in for another round.
The DeSantis Trump Iowa race has begin. And it’s as absurd as you imagined.
It was supposed to be the first time the two main rivals for the Republican nomination faced off on GOP territory at the same time and the media couldn’t have been more excited. Despite still being undeclared, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was making a foray into Iowa, the first Republican primary state, on the same day as former president Donald Trump. What was going to happen when these two manly pugilists finally entered the ring?
Well, the big confrontation didn’t happen as planned. DeSantis threw on a crisp blue shirt with a button down collar and a pair of skinny jeans and hit the trail and Trump bowed out at the last minute. The New York Times declared that a big win for the Florida Governor describing DeSantis’ intrepid trek to the area where Trump had been scheduled to speak as a “clear rebuke” to the man who has been “tormenting him” — a brave move to ensure that he doesn’t suffer the same result as all the other Republicans Trump has destroyed:
For the first time in months, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday showed the aggressive political instincts that his allies have long insisted he would demonstrate in a contest against former President Donald J. Trump. After headlining two successful political events in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis made an unscheduled stop in Des Moines — a move aimed at highlighting the fact that Mr. Trump had abruptly postponed a planned Saturday evening rally in the area because of reports of possible severe weather…
Mr. DeSantis — who has avoided direct conflict with Mr. Trump — essentially kicked sand in the former president’s face by coming to an area that Mr. Trump claimed to have been told was too dangerous for him to visit.
He’s back, folks! Ron DeSantis, nee Ron DeSanctimonious or “Rob” DeSanctus as Trump has taken to calling him, demonstrated his legendary machismo by making an unscheduled stop near the place Trump would have been speaking if he had shown up as planned. Like the fighter pilot he pretended to be in one of his ads, he swooped down on that location, stood on a table and delivered a version of the same aggressive critique of Donald Trump he had given earlier:
Trump must be reeling from such a blow. When DeSantis finally throws down the gauntlet and confronts him with his knock out punch about the need to end the “culture of losing” he really won’t know what hit him.
The leaders of the Iowa legislature are likewise enthralled with Florida Governor, taking to the opinion page of the Des Moines Register in anticipation of his visit to declare:
Why we, leaders of the Iowa Legislature, are endorsing Ron DeSantis for president. In our view, no one comes close to DeSantis’ record and resolve. He has won the biggest fights in Florida, and he’s brought all Floridians along while doing it.
DeSantis couldn’t have said it better himself. In fact he did say it himself over and over again. He makes it very clear that Florida is a superior state under his leadership and he wants to bring that success story to all of America. Feel the magic.
The Times points out that he has collected a lot of money and reports that he is “beginning to show political strength” by lining up all those local Iowa endorsements noting that local politicians tend to pay less attention to national politics than members of congress who aren’t rushing to endorse DeSantis. (In fact, members of congress, where he served for several years, mostly can’t stand him.)
All in all it was a very successful first campaign style foray into the exotic wilds of Iowa for DeSantis. After several months of disastrous press about his prickly personality and reports at home and abroad about him not being ready for prime time, he seems to be finally getting a welcome look from the mainstream media.
Of course he is. What kind of a horse race would it be if he scratched before the race even started?
It couldn’t happen at a more propitious time for him. Last week Donald Trump had one of the most widely panned events of his political career and that’s saying something. The front runner appeared on CNN for a very friendly town hall and reminded everyone just what an unfit reprobate he is, causing the media to spend hours revisiting everything the majority of the country hates about him. Incidentally, he was also found liable for sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of 5 million dollars. Now he is the subject of derision for failing to show up for his Iowa event on account of a tornado that never appeared.
In lieu of the Iowa rally Trump called in to a meeting of right wing extremists and conspiracy theorists at his Doral resort for a ReAwaken America Tour event. These gatherings are run by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and are often joined by Eric Trump and other Trump family members. (A couple of Nazis were scheduled to appear too but after Rachel Maddow publicized it they were discretely removed from the line-up.)
Trump told the ecstatic crowd that he would be bringing the delusional Flynn back into the White House when he wins back the presidency:
There’s a method to Trump’s madness. According to a recent Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll “nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%)” and Flynn’s ReAwaken America is one of the largest Christian Nationalist groups in the country. He was doing base maintenance.
This weekend’s stories are typical media primary horse race coverage. There is no way they’re going to let Trump just run away with the nomination as long as they can keep DeSantis viable. So we can expect to see him rise and fall more than once, usually in relation to whatever Trump is doing. This Iowa DeSantis coverage is a good example of how these story lines are concocted from the most banal circumstances. All DeSantis did was show up in Iowa in a pair of jeans and give a couple of speeches but it was reported as if he was greeted like he was Bruce Springsteen.
It’s possible that DeSantis will win the Iowa primary. It’s a very eccentric caucus state with very mixed results for predicting the winner so anything can happen. His poll numbers look good and they seem to like him. But the idea that he put Trump in his place is downright absurd and it signals that we are in for some very silly coverage of this primary.
Being whipsawed is tiresome
Right out of the gate this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will review a racial gerrymandering case out of South Carolina.
BREAKING: U.S. Supreme Court will hear case arguing that South Carolina’s congressional map is racially gerrymandered. In the lower court, a three judge panel found that the state’s 1st Congressional District violates the 14th Amendment and must be redrawn.
— If the Supreme Court doesn’t act on Moore v. Harper, a case before the high court that addresses the independent state legislature theory, which gives state courts little to no role in interpreting election laws set by state legislatures, some legal experts are warning there could be chaos heading into 2024. Our Zach Montellaro explains: The future of the case “in question because a state-level ruling could make it moot. The nation’s highest court has also signaled that it may skip out on issuing a decision. That concerns even some strident critics of ISL, who worry that the lack of a clear decision risks injecting disarray into the 2024 election and the litigation that is guaranteed to accompany it.”
So don’t count out ISL just yet. We counted Donald Trump out in 2016. Maybe we shouldn’t with Ron DeSantis either.
That doesn’t mean he won’t collapse on a primary debate stage with Trump.
Ugh. At least there’s Randy Rainbow.
Daniel Penny joins Kyle Rittenhouse
Being homeless and in mental distress is now a crime. One or more Twitter users have declared Jordan Neely, the street performer choked to death on a New York subway, a criminal. The online defense fund for his subway choker, Daniel Penny, quickly exceeded $1.6 million over the weekend.
Neely’s death was not explicitly political violence, but Neely may have been a casualty in the cultural civil war waged by the right. Even as MAGA celebrates Ashli Babbitt as a Jan. 6 martyr, the right is lining up to celebrate Penny as a cultural civil war hero like Kyle Rittenhouse.
Brian Klaas writes at his substack about the right’s open embrace of political violence:
In Texas, Governor Abbott previously said that he was “looking forward” to pardoning a man who murdered a Black Lives Matter protester. The murderer, Daniel Perry, was just sentenced to 25 years in prison. He had previously texted a friend that he “might have to kill” some people on his way to work.
Over the weekend, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted his support for a similarly named killer, Daniel Penny, after Penny killed a homeless Black man, Jordan Neely, on New York City’s subway by placing him in a lethal chokehold. DeSantis didn’t hold back: “We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine… America’s got his back.”
This follows years of Trump’s normalization of political violence, not just with January 6th, but also with grotesque decisions, like his enthusiastic embrace of a Montana Republican candidate who violently assaulted a reporter, lied about it, and later pleaded guilty to assault. (That candidate, Greg Gianforte, is now the Republican governor of Montana). Similarly, Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who killed two men with an assault rifle, has become a rising star in America’s right-wing movement.
There is a “type” who supports political vigilantism:
The study was recently published in a top journal called Perspectives on Politics. It’s titled “Who Supports Political Violence?” and was conducted by two political scientists, Miles T. Armaly, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi and Adam M. Enders, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville.
The catalyst for their research was two-fold, it seems: first, they decided to try to make sense of January 6th. Second, they’re trying to get to the bottom of a worrying trend, in which a 2021 survey found that 56% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats, and 35% of independents agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
Now, as any self-respecting social scientist will tell you, the way you word a question matters a hell of a lot, and the may in that question is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s also very much not the case that all the people who agreed with that statement are actively preparing to use violence.
There are possible flaws in the study’s methods, Klaas suggests, but there is potential good news in it: “most Americans still completely reject political violence.”
And the alarming results? Those who do?
Some of them aren’t particularly surprising: men, for example, are far more likely than women to support political violence. Moreover, those who tend to have favorable views of authoritarianism and populism are more likely to support violence. And people who buy into conspiratorial thinking are also more likely to support violence. So, to recap, here are some key traits that predict support for political violence:
- Men
- Authoritarians
- Populists
- Conspiracy theory believers
No surprise there. What else?
First, perceived victimhood is highly correlated with support for political violence. This is crucial to underscore, because it’s completely different from actual victimhood. A lot of previous research on political violence has found that people who are being oppressed are more likely to turn to violence, which makes sense. But this study shows that it doesn’t really matter whether someone is actually being oppressed; instead, the feeling of being oppressed is sufficient. This was the strongest predictor of support for violence.
That’s important, because it dovetails perfectly with the next strong correlate: a strong sense of “white identity.” Not particularly surprising, perhaps, but good to confirm. And the two likely interact, as those who buy into the right-wing narrative that white people are under attack in America (due to the corresponding loss of social dominance as society becomes somewhat more equal than it was in the past) are also likely to be the same individuals who feel perceived victimhood.
Then, paradoxically, there’s religiosity. Two variables that the researchers tested—religious attendance and being an evangelical Christian—were correlated with those who support the use of political violence. That’s not good news, as it confirms that some of the normalization of violence is also tied to communities that are more religious (albeit, most likely just the slice of religion that is most sympathetic to Trumpism). Not exactly turning the other cheek…
And finally, there’s the most worrying variable: past military service. People who had previously served in the American armed forces were systematically more likely to express support for political violence than those who hadn’t. Indeed, 1 out of every 5 defendants in January 6th criminal cases has served in the military. That is not good news for the United States—or for the world.
You might want to get busy, Klaas urges, making sure Donald Trump does not get another chance to raise a MAGA army.
Trump’s takeover of GOP helped him to write the delegate rules. The number winner-take-all states has grown from seven to 17
I don’t think people have truly grasped what this means:
Republicans seeking to keep Donald Trump from becoming their party’s nominee will have to overcome rules even more favorable to the former president than the ones that helped him clinch the 2016 nomination.
In 2024, more states will award delegates through winner-take-all primaries — a system that helped Trump when opponents divided the vote, allowing him to be awarded all or most of the delegates with less than majority support.
Is it possible that the field will be cleared of everyone but DeSantis (or one of the other candidates) and they will win a majority and Trump will be defeated. But it is highly unlikely. Trump dominates the GOP primary electorate and will probably win a majority in most states even if they manage to clear the field. And, as we know, it matters where you win. If he takes the biggest states with large numbers of delegates, he wins again. And, needless to say, if it’s crowded field and he gets the most votes, even if it’s only 30%, he also wins.
It’s looking very good for candidate Trump.
No, the obvious play for the rest of them is to hope he drops dead on the golf course or the feds have him in custody (which might actually bond him even more deeply to the Primary voters) in which case they are the back-up. Short of that, I think he probably has this all wrapped up.
Everyone scratched their head when pro-choice liberal North Carolina Democrat abruptly switched parties and voted for a draconian abortion ban. Everyone wondered, was it money? Was it blackmail? What could make someone completely reverse course like this and betray every value she had previously held — and do it practically overnight.
I’m still not sure I buy the following explanation but maybe this person is really as shallow as she appears:
Imagine campaigning for a Democratic politician—a thankless, low-paying job, especially at the state level—because you believe in what they stand for. The candidate gives powerful speeches about abortion rights that make you proud. You’re in a purple state, where every single seat in the legislature is critical to protecting abortion access. So you join the fight, help them win, and continue working for them in the legislature. Then inexplicably, in the middle of their term, that politician does an about-face, switches parties, and votes in favor of an extreme abortion ban, delivering Republicans the one vote they needed to override a veto and actually shutter clinics in the state.
Two (now former) aides to North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham found themselves in that position earlier this month. Cotham, a Democrat until recently who was endorsed by EMILY’s List, had given speeches for years about abortion rights, sworn over and over to defend them, and even talked about her own medically necessary abortion. “My womb and my uterus is not up for your political grab,” she said in one particularly passionate 2015 speech.
Then this month, in a stunning move that drew national headlines, Cotham decided to switch parties and vote in favor of a bill that would ban abortion after 12 weeks and could close clinics. Her defection gave North Carolina’s Republican Party the supermajority they need to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) veto and jam the bill into law, which will further decimate abortion access throughout the South.The people who helped elect Cotham and worked for her are, understandably, feeling devastated, betrayed, and confused.
“It makes you wonder, did this person ever believe anything at all?” Jonathan Coby, who advised Cotham’s campaigns and resigned from her staff in April, told me in an interview. “For her to vote for this is not just a betrayal of her district, but it’s a betrayal of who she has portrayed herself to be for her entire life.” Coby said everyone he’s spoken to on the ground in North Carolina feels “deeply angry” and “heartbroken”—and not just about the “disgusting and awful” politics of the move. “There’s also a real human betrayal of just using and discarding people,” he said.
Autumn Alston, a Democratic activist who canvassed for Cotham’s two most recent campaigns and advised her often, echoed that sentiment. “She used people when she needed them and now she has abandoned them,” Alston told me, noting that Cotham stopped contacting her after switching parties.
Naturally, everyone would like to know what could possibly motivate a politician to abandon their whole platform, their constituents, and their dignity so suddenly and dramatically. We reported last week on the possibility that Cotham, a former charter school lobbyist, traded a vote on the abortion bill in order to co-chair the Education Committee. When she announced her defection, she said it was in part because she’d been “bullied by her fellow Democrats and had grown alienated from the party on issues like school choice,” per the New York Times. (Cotham has not responded to Jezebel’s requests for comment.)
But Coby, in whom she confided about her decision to switch parties, said it wasn’t really about any genuinely held beliefs, political issues, or even money. “I wish I could say that she took a giant bag of cash at an IHOP and that’s why she did this—but it’s so much dumber than that,” he said. “It’s just a deeply petty, personal thing.”
Cotham served in the state house from 2007 through 2016; she left the role after failing to win a seat in Congress. In 2022, she ran for her old seat, and Coby said she felt a sense of entitlement that seeped through her actions. Cotham blew off endorsement meetings, didn’t attend freshman orientation, and skipped caucus gatherings.
When Cotham told Coby she was thinking of switching parties about two days before the news broke, he says she was stuck on the idea that her Democratic colleagues didn’t like her. “The Democrats don’t want me, and the Republicans have helped me out a lot,” he recalled her saying.
As local media has reported, Cotham felt Democrats had repeatedly slighted her since her January swearing-in—including criticizing her for using the American flag and prayer hands emojis online and supposedly not clapping for her when the Republican House Speaker recognized her on International Women’s Day as the youngest woman ever elected to the State House. (Local news reported that Democrats did in fact clap for her, but as her mom recalled to a local reporter, Cotham had said of the perceived slight, “That really hurt. This was women’s history. And they couldn’t even clap for me?”) Cotham also bristled at criticism for missing a vote that let Republicans repeal a gun permit law.
Cotham had also been annoyed that Planned Parenthood didn’t endorse her, despite her self-described “very powerful” speech on abortion rights. During her campaign, she’d sought the endorsement of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—the affiliate serving North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia—and filled out their questionnaire, writing that she’d “been an unwavering advocate for abortion rights” and citing her 2015 speech about her medically necessary abortion following a miscarriage. “If elected, I will continue to work hand-in-hand with Planned Parenthood and allied groups to protect abortion rights and access and oppose anti-choice legislation,” she wrote.
But then she blew off the actual endorsement interview for the group multiple times. A PPSAT spokesperson told Jezebel, “Rep. Cotham’s campaign scheduled numerous candidate interviews with our board (the board endorses candidates), but she did not attend any of the interviews,” which is why they didn’t endorse her.
Then the day after the Supreme Court Dobbs opinion leak, Cotham complained to Alston via a now-public Twitter DM that Planned Parenthood and another organization had “really screwed” her. In the message, Cotham asks Alston if she would share a video of her abortion speech.
Alston told Jezebel she believed Cotham sent the DM because she was upset about not getting the PPSAT endorsement, as “she had considered herself such a champion for women and women’s rights.”
“The only thing that I can say for sure about Tricia Cotham from here on out is that she will always be the victim,” Coby said. “That is just who she believes herself to be, just a victim of life.”
And so, feeling under-appreciated and under-celebrated by the left, Cotham saw an opportunity “to be the new shiny object in the Republican Party,” as Alston put it. And that meant being the hero who delivered them a huge victory on abortion. Nevermind everything she said before on the subject, or that she was throwing her own constituents who voted for her, and millions of other people, under the bus
Gov. Cooper vetoes the abortion ban on Saturday. And this weirdo may be the vote to override it. I guess everyone’s hoping she will ‘do the right thing” but it doesn’t sound as if she knows that is. I would guess it’s whoever gives her just the right amount of loving personal attention.
But who knows? I’m not sure this really explains her behavior. But maybe she’s just plain nuts.
Huge Kyrsten Sinema vibes from this person.
The media spent the last couple of weeks relentlessly hyping the end of Title 42 as an apocalypse of epic proportions. Hordes of screaming migrants were supposedly gathered at the border prepared to invade the country on foot like a medieval army and there was nothing we could do about it.
Migrants crossing the border without documentation dropped on Friday, the first day after Title 42 was lifted, two U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped just over 6,200 undocumented migrants on Friday compared with roughly 11,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 10,000 on Thursday, the officials said.
These numbers include both migrants who cross illegally between ports of entry — more than 7,000 of them on Friday — and those who present themselves legally at ports of entry without proper entry documents.
The Covid-era restrictions that allowed immigration officials to quickly turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border expired at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday, ushering in tougher policies for asylum-seekers. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that people who did use a lawful pathway to cross the border would be “presumed ineligible for asylum.”
Title 42 was invoked by former President Donald Trump when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, apparently as a way to slow the spread of Covid, but its implementation allowed the Trump administration to expel migrants more quickly without having to consider them for asylum. It was continued under the Biden administration, which had repeatedly sought to end it but its plans were delayed by legal challenges from Republican states’ attorney generals.
Nobody knows why there has been such a dramatic drop in crossings, but it’s speculated that crossing actually peaked before Trump’s signature anti-immigrant bill expired. That would indicate that there isn’t an endless tsunami of migrants after all.
People are acting as if this is totally unprecedented but it isn’t:
As you can see we have periodically had high numbers of migrants over the past 30 years. As you can also see, they tend to come at periods of low unemployment in the US. This recent one is exacerbated by turmoil in central and South America but the need for workers is a huge draw.
Meanwhile, we have reports of slaughterhouses hiring children and red state Governors are rolling back child labor laws to fill all the open low-skilled jobs. Construction companies are having to shut down projects because they can’t find labor. I think we can all do the math.
Very impressive “oversight” in the GOP House
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) revealed on Sunday that Republicans had lost track of a top witness in the investigation of President Joe Biden and his family.
During an interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo asked Comer about evidence he had of Biden’s alleged corruption.
“You have spoken with whistleblowers,” she noted. “You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information. Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?”
“Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer replied. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”
“Hold on a second, Congressman,” Bartiromo said. “Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?”
“Well, we we’re hopeful that we can find the informant,” Comer said, explaining the informant was in the “spy business” and “they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot.”
“The nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens,” he added, “they’re one of three things, Maria, they’re either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing.”
To the wingnuts that means the Deep State has taken them all out. It will never occur to them that they might all be bullshit artists.
This was the big investigation that was going to take Joe Biden down or at least precipitate an impeachment which Dear Leader has dictated must happen — three times if at all possible. But they can’t find their witnesses. Lol.
I can’t help but feel like a chapter in the evolution of social media is drawing to a close.
Now, surely some of this feeling is a product of my changing perspective. I got my first social media account when I was 19 years old and signed up for MySpace in college; I turn 41 later this month, and it’d be foolish to pretend that more than two decades of maturation hasn’t altered my relationship with social media.
Still, there’s no denying that something has shifted.
Between the haphazard-yet-thorough disassembly of Twitter at the hands of Elon Musk, the driftless and flailing “metaverse” obsessions of Facebook, and the can’t-put-my-finger-on-it-but-something’s-not-right-here vibe of Instagram these days, it’s hard not to feel like we’re at the end of an era. Social media will evolve and persist, but the monoculture days of everyone hanging out in the same few places are winding down.
Like many, I feel a pang of loss for these spaces, spaces from which I’ve taken a lot in the past two decades.
But I’m not here to throw a funeral.
Instead, I view this as a sort of graduation.
Some of us are leaving, headed for new and hopefully exciting places. Others will hang around town for a while, clinging to a moment we’re not quite ready to admit has passed. Things may be better or worse; all we can be sure of is that they’ll be different.
If I can take this moment to imagine us all together in a crowd at some stadium or parade crowd, hungover and sunburnt in our caps and gowns, I’d like to relay a few things I’ve learned from this time we’ve spent together.
I’d like to give my social media graduation speech.
Say less. Some of the greatest, funniest, most memorable things I’ve ever seen on social media were only a few words long. Make your point as economically as possible.
Speak thoughtfully. You don’t know who is listening to you, and what impact a thoughtless or negative statement may have on them. You also don’t know when you’re going to accidentally coin a new term.
You are what you say, not what you say you are. The words coming out of your mouth or off of your keyboard say far more about you than the ones in your bio do, and if you ever have to issue a statement claiming “that’s not who I am”, I have some bad news for you. (Yeah, it is.)
Consider the possibility of other perspectives. You’ll be stunned at what you might learn if you’re just willing to listen and keep an open mind, and you might even make a friend or two along the way.
You are under no obligation to engage someone acting in bad faith on their terms.
Celebrities are just like us. (They’re bored and on their phones most of the time, too.)
To that end—money can buy lots of things, but money alone cannot make you the person you wish you were. (Not even 44 billion dollars of it.)
There is almost always someone smarter than you out there, and there is also someone much dumber than the both of you confidently explaining something in that person’s area of expertise to them right now. Seek out the former, and try not to be the latter.
You do not have to have an opinion on everything. Frankly, it feels great to sit one out from time to time.
One person having a ridiculous opinion does not necessarily indicate a meaningful trend or constituency, and you do not need to write an article about it. (This one’s just for political reporters.)
Punch up, not down, and don’t throw any punches you’re not willing to answer for if word gets back around.
If you plan to share a photograph, make sure you double-check what is in the background first. Someone is going to notice.
Have someone you can privately message your worst ideas to before rolling them out to the wider world. It’ll save you a lot of headaches.
Do not be shy about advocating for yourself and for your work. If you don’t believe in it, why should anyone else?
There may be people out there who think you’re a hack. There are also people who would give anything to do what you do.
You can ask for help. Whether that’s asking for a recommendation on the best sandwich in a new city, seeking non-binding legal advice on a property line dispute, or finding a kind ear when you need it most, you can ask for it. Chances are, you’ll find it.
Likes are free. It costs nothing to share your support, to brighten someone’s day and let them know you’re paying attention to them. It feels pretty good to do so, too.
Cats and dogs make everything better, even in the moments where they’re actively making things worse. (Those make for the best stories, frankly.)
Arguing about food is pointless, but it’s a heck of a lot better than arguing about pretty much anything else. Also, Pop-Tarts are empanadas, deep-dish pizza is soup, and Cincinnati chili is a form of gumbo.
Sometimes people are wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it. (See item above.)
Know when to walk away. Your health and well-being matter more than winning an argument, and the argument will be there later if you want to come back to it.
Who you spend time with and who you spend your time on matters. You may not realize it as it happens, but they are shaping who you will be tomorrow. Surround yourself with good people, and don’t waste your time or energy on bad people.
It’s never too late to do what you want to do or be who you want to be, but you have to be the one to do it.
Finally, your people are out there; you just have to look for them. Wherever we go from here, they’ll still be out there.
(If you can’t find them, try starting a food argument.)
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
I think he’s right that social media is in the process of fragmenting and I’m not sure how that’s going to come out. I suppose in some ways it will be a relief to just focus on a niche, but for me that’s not possible since this is what I do. I even read Truth Social every day and watch (some) Fox News. But I can imagine that fatigue has set in among a lot of people and it would be nice to just have … less.
His advice on how to deal with social media is good though. We can all benefit from a reminder to keep things in perspective.