Pedos, deportation, and war: OH MY!

#TransparentTuesdays

Hi friend,

I spent most of January and February sharing my writings about moral distress, moral residue, and the deep dark ache that comes from being a person in the world right now, making it incredibly difficult to feel whole and happy.

A lot of those posts were written in advance, so that I could focus on the show I was doing at the time, and it was a weird feeling for me—seeing the horrendous news rolling in, week by week, without the opportunity to write it about it, comment on it, or process it with you.

The two major topics that were unfolding during this time were the (slow, incompetent, and incomplete) release of the Epstein files, and the (violent and unconstitutional) actions of ICE all over the country. 

As a writer on a mission of collective liberation and justice, it’s viscerally uncomfortable to see what’s going on and not write about it. For weeks and weeks I’ve felt like there was just so much to say; so much to critique and condemn; so much to process and protest… and no time to do so.

But now, weirdly, as I sit down to write about it all, I find myself overwhelmed and a bit paralyzed. What can I say that hasn’t been said? What do people need to hear, and what can I say that will help? 

I could talk about how kidnapping people without due process is bad, and how human rights apply to everyone, and how anyone who has ever been involved in the trafficking or abuse of children must be held accountable. 

But you already know all that.

I thought of writing about how it feels for folks of my generation to reckon with the fact that our entire experience of girlhood and womanhood—including the beauty and body ideals we’ve been encouraged to pursue our whole lives—was created by a small group of billionaire pedophiles. 

I also thought of writing about how scary and destabilizing it is on our psyches to learn that things we once would have called a “conspiracy theory” turn out to actually be true, and why our hard-wired cognitive biases make it so damn difficult to believe, metabolize, and integrate information that sits so incredibly far outside our previous understanding of reality.

But then, like many of you I’m sure, before I had even begun to process all these horrors, we were suddenly at war with Iran.

It’s strange, perhaps, but I keep finding myself thinking about the George Orwell book 1984 (a favorite of mine in high school), and the way he described war as a tool manufactured by the government for domestic control, because perpetual war kept the masses in an ongoing state of poverty and fear. War was used to justify the government’s authority, rationalize their consumption of resources and constant surveillance, and suppress rebellion by keeping people distracted, compliant, and afraid. 

I’m sure you can see why this might be coming up for me lately, given how Trump has made it abundantly clear that he wants us all to stop freakin talking about the Epstein files— which makes sense given that he was reportedly named in them 38,000 times, despite them both being heavily and illegally redacted, and incomplete.

But it’s actually that last bit about fear that I want to talk about, because evolutionary biology tells us that people in a state of chronic fear tend to think and act very differently than people who generally feel safe, and the people in power know it. 

You know that feeling after you’ve watched a scary movie, when you’re jumping at shadows and wondering if the sound of the wind outside is actually an intruder? Yeah. 

Our brains are designed to keep us safe, so when we already feel scared, our brain assumes we’re in a dangerous environment and we start to see threats everywhere. 

I’ve written previously about how, for people of both major political parties there, there has been a significant increase of fear directed toward the people on the opposing side over the last couple of years, and I think recent events in the news have all of us feeling more afraid than normal. 

But I also believe that one of the reasons we’re even in this unfathomable situation as a society right now is that people on the republican-leaning side of the aisle are very, very good at making people feel afraid… and at using that fear to push their agenda forward. 

After all, if giant bandwagons full of violent criminals and sleeper spies were actually crossing our borders every day to rape us, kill us, and get us addicted to drugs, then we must take action to protect ourselves! It would be a no-brainer! And while we might, of course, wish that there was a more efficient and dignified way of doing so, we might be willing to compromise due process to keep ourselves and our families safe. 

The truth is that most republicans do care about human rights and equality, and don’t want people to get hurt or killed. But if you’re scared enough, your survival instincts will kick in and that stuff will go out a window. 

If lives are on the line and it’s between you or them… you will always choose you.

Republican politicians (and the billionaires who influence them) want to get certain things done. So they fabricate a story about a terrifying and imminent threat to people’s safety, which doing this thing would solve. They create a state of fear, and then sell the solution. 

It’s just marketing, really, and it’s brilliantly effective. 

The stakes are higher of course, but in practice this political strategy is no different from how, in 1915, the razor company Gillette started convincing women that they needed to shave their underarms by launching a campaign convincing women that armpit hair was “unsightly” and "unhygienic." 

The brand had a goal—sell more razors, by selling to women—so it convinced women that hairy armpits were actually dangerous and threatening to their wellbeing. That not shaving would negatively impact her status, value, and desirability, and thus (given the way society was structured then), her prospects in the world. 

So of course women started shaving. Fear is the most effective strategy there is for controlling people!

Likewise of course republicans—who have been fed a steady media diet of fear-mongering about immigrants and trans people—support things like closing the borders, deporting the immigrants, banning gender-affirming care, and prohibiting pronouns. They might not feel particularly good about specific government policies or practices being implemented, but they still believe these actions are necessary to feel safe.

And it has to be said that it’s significantly easier to convince people of a new threat when they’re already living in a state of chronic fear, because, again, we’re more likely to interpret shadows and the wind as a threat when we’re already scared. Right-wing news had been encouraging people to view immigrants as a threat to American jobs and identity for years before Trump told us that they were eating our cats and dogs, after all.

This goes back to my thoughts about war being a tool of control, because alarmist right-wing media tends to position everything from young people having fewer babies to the green M&M’s outfit redesign as part of a “culture war,” or a “war on wokeness,” or a “war on American values.” 

The people in power who own and operate these outlets need them to keep people in a state of fear and anger, but there aren’t enough threatening things actually happening (or at least, not things they’re willing to cover, given their loyalties) to justify a constant stream of scary news. 

So, instead, they resort to inventing new (and often blatantly false) things for their audience to be afraid of… like the idea that students are getting transgender surgeries at school. Or that the woke agenda has gone so far that kids are being encouraged to identify as cats, and use a litterbox in the classroom. Or that people are giving out fentanyl instead of halloween candy to get your kids addicted to drugs. Or that millions of violent criminals are illegally crossing the border to rape, kill, steal your job, and eat your family dog.

There was an interesting 2020 study led by researchers from UC Berkeley and Yale University, in which the researchers paid people who regularly Fox News viewers to watch CNN for one hour per day, for a month, and the results were interesting. 

Participant’s views changed in subtle but meaningful ways by the end of the month, including things like being less likely to believe the 202 election was stolen by democrats, less likely to believe mail-in ballots were highly vulnerable to fraud, and and less likely to believe that more police would be shot if Biden was elected. 

I find this study very hopeful, because it means that minds can be changed, even in such a short amount of time, when people are exposed to different perspectives. But that hope is tempered by the fact that when the study concluded, and the participants went back to watching Fox News, none of their new perspectives stuck around. 

Once people were back in the right-wing news ecosystem, they went right back to believing what they believed before, which speaks to how powerful this type of “marketing” is, and also how long it takes for people to make long-lasting changes to what they believe. 

But what I find most interesting about this study is how many of the beliefs that people reported changing were the ones that were rooted in fear about things that simply weren’t happening. 

Before this experience, the participants had been living in a state of fear about stolen elections, mail-in ballot fraud, and increasing violence against police—all things that weren’t actually happening, but that their media was constantly telling them were happening. 

When you believe things like this are happening, and you’re convinced society is waging a war against your job security, personal safety, or traditional/religious values, then you will naturally support the people and policies that promise to protect you. And the people in power know it. 

To be clear, I think there are many threatening and dangerous things happening right now that should scare us. But we all need to engage in critical thinking and media literacy, so that we’re only experiencing a fear response to things that are actually happening, and we need to consider how the media we consume might be manipulating our emotions for their own benefit. 

Beyond that, I think if we want to maintain our humanity and fight for collective justice and liberation, we need to name and metabolize that fear together, and then turn it into action, instead of allowing it to overtake us, costing us our vitality and empathy, alchemizing into apathy or numbness, and allowing it to serve its purpose as social control.

Right now, the administration is dumping a huge and complex amount of scary news in our lap on a daily basis, and I believe it is designed to distract and overwhelm us. 

They want us to be in a state of fear right now, both to keep us too exhausted and hopeless to rise up, or to make it easier to convince us of whatever new “threat” they want us to believe next, so that they can carry out whatever corrupt strategy will benefit them most. And we cannot let that happen.

That’s it for today, and I appreciate you reading, but now I want to take a moment to check in with you!

I’ve been writing these weekly blog posts for over a decade, and it has been one of the great joys of my life to get to explore topics related to worthiness, power, and liberation here with you every single week. But I want my writing to mean something, and be valuable to my readers. 

So I’d love to hear from you. 

What would you like to see me write about next? 

Are there particular topics, issues, trends, or experiences that you’re focused on, confused about, obsessing over, processing, working on, or looking for support/solidarity around? (Or maybe you prefer to listen, and wanna see my podcast start back up? All feedback is welcome!)

Hit reply and let me know what would be meaningful, helpful, valuable, or appealing to you right now. We’re in this together.

Big hug,

Jessi