The Will of Yangdru

Kit Parsons is a lad with a dream.

Kit Parsons is a lad and on a mission.   

And having a mission can be a good thing.  

Just as having a dream can be a good thing.

Kit's dream was to interview his hero, Andrew Yang.  And his dream -- 

Thanks for believing in our ability to accomplish something positive Kit!! 🙏🚀 https://t.co/qLV01lm0vt

— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) August 20, 2022

-- came true:

Life is complete https://t.co/NzvjJQ1AwF

— Kit Parsons 🧢⬆️ (@KitParsons3) August 20, 2022

Turn off your snark detectors, because I am 100% sincere when I say that I am delighted when I see a young writer who is passionate about his subject matter receiving encouragement from someone they idolize.  

And now Kit Parsons' has been elevated to the rank of Forward Party spokesperson by Andrew Yang.  But now that he has written two articles preaching the non-gospel gospel of the Forward Party, he's finding the reaction, well...

The amount of hate I've gotten the last two times I've written articles supporting @Fwd_Party is making it very difficult to keep doing so. I'm trying my best to support the party but it's getting difficult in all honesty. Mentally draining.

— Kit Parsons 🧢⬆️ (@KitParsons3) August 19, 2022

Did I ever tell you that I've also worked from time to time as an editor and a mentor and facilitator to  young writers?  

I know that I drop the occasional typo (ha!) here and there because my writer brain and my editor brain have about a four day lag time when talking to each other.  Meaning I can almost never spot errors in my own work until the piece has "cooled" sufficiently for me to view it with a critical eye.  And that lag is a luxury which the hurry-up-and-publish-it-and-move-on ethos of blogging usually does not usually allow.

But when it comes to other people's work, I've got skills.  I've edited speeches, presentations, tech manuals, you name it.  Book-sized magazines of previously unpublished works by science fiction writers.  I've also led writing groups and taught seminars in content and intent:  what are you trying to say, and to whom are you trying to say it.  

So take this advice as it's intended.  Or not.  

First, if some blowback after two articles is this painful, to quote president Art Hockstader in The Best Man,  it may be that "the job is not for you. And it never will be."  I say this as a +17 year, +11,000 post blogging veteran who has seen my fellow liberal bloggers slog through one venomous shitstorm after another, decade after decade, because they believed that what they had to say was true and important.  All while facing the fact that our setbacks would be enormous and heartbreaking and our victories would be incremental at best.

I say this as a blogger who was abandoned by many of my "allies", pounded by the Greenwald Horde Purity and lost 1/3 of my meager income from this little weblog of mine for daring to point out that Glenn Greenwald was lied a lot about stuff that was terribly important, then lied about lying, and used his newly acquired world-wide media presence to routinely savage anyone who disagreed with him to any degree.

History has proven me right, but the damage had already been done.  

Second, the axel on which your Forward Party turns is the same Big Lie that has powered every third party grift to come down the pike for the last +30 years.  The same Big Lie that has saved the fascist Republican party from being consigned to the ash heap of history over and over again.   The same Big Lie that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.   

The Big Lie of Both Sides Do It.  

Since I've already pretty much exhausted my store of adjectives on the literally thousands of posts I have written and hundreds of podcasts I have done over the years carefully deconstructing the Both Siderist Big Lie and the motives and means of those who propagate it, so pardon me if I take a pass from doing it one more time.

And it's not just me or Liberal bloggers like me.  After years of hewing to the Beltway Both Sides ethos, some of the most caution, circumspect Beltway-friendly political analysts finally threw up their hands and said, "You know what?  We give up.  The Republicans are the problem.  Period.  Full stop."  From Ornstein and Mann in the Washington Post, in 2012.  Right about the time Mr. Kit Parsons was probably entering sixth or seventh grade:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

This is also the judgement of a number of battle-hardened Republican campaign veterans who were, at long last, run out of their own party by the monster they had made.

So, using your writerly imagination, just try and imagine how simultaneously laughably gullible and cringingly privileged it sounds when, right out of the fucking gate, your party launches itself using exactly the same Both Siderist Lie and exactly the same empty, 1990s-process-reengineering-consultant-buzzword rhetoric that every Republican party apologist, every craven Beltway hack and every other Third Party grift has used for the past +30 years.

Imagine how automatically it sets the teeth on edge of anyone who has actually been paying attention to politics decades when this --

It's hard having hate tossed at you all day especially when you are empathetic and have a heart like our group does. Just do not take it personally as hard as that is to do. Remember it is hard to chill chimps out once they are in a frenzy. ✌️❤️🤗 pic.twitter.com/ceLfK6qvsF

— Will ⬆️✌️❤️😃 (@WJADragon) August 19, 2022

-- is a proud example of your party's fan art.

And finally, just for fun, let's turn an editorial eye to one of those two articles that got you so much negative feedback.  Let's see if we can pinpoint exactly what might have triggered it.  

Let's start with Mr. Parsons' headline:

Against the Forward Party? You’re probably Pro-Trump

Why being against the Forward Party’s democratic reforms means you are indirectly (unconsciously) supporting extremist candidates like Trump.

Cool.  So right of the bat you have decided that anyone who might disagree with your party or critique your party must be arguing in bad faith.  Must either be Pro-Trump or a hypnotized zombie who indirectly supports "extremist candidates like Trump."  

This is cult-talk.  It abides by the first rule of cults and makes the same claim that every cult, from the Manson Family the Scientologists to Heaven's Gate, has made: 

That you're not in a cult, but somehow everyone else is.  And only your Dear Leader and his worshipful followers can see the Real Truth.

That you and only you hold clear title to the Real Truth and anyone who doesn't agree with you and join your cult is either damaged or brainwashed or motivated by sinister hidden agendas.  

And this Manichean mentality allows for no half-measures: the only cure for us poor, brainwashed dupes who cannot to see your Real Truth...is imbibing of your Real Truth.

We must join The Body.

If this were the 1960s, the pitch would be about joining a commune, or selling flowers at the airport and trying to sell people on Krishna Consciousness.  

If this were the 1970s, maybe you'd be fresh from an EST retreat, where you spent two days trying to hold your piss in until the group leader granted you permission to use the head.

The 1980s might have found you clad in orange and following Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the guru who loved his limousines.  Or having your engrams scrutinized by ElRonners.

I've known people who were acolytes or adherents to all of these -ologies and more.  Some of them were family members.  All of them were serious and sincere seekers looking for answers in a fucked up world.  And they were also incredibly susceptible to every snake oil salesman out there peddling enlightenment and access to the inner secrets and a stepladder to the True and Only Heaven.

Let's look at a few more of Mr. Parsons' contribution to the discourse (emphasis mine.)

The establishment media, and those unconsciously frozen in a state of partisan paralysis by this deeply dysfunctional duopoly are doing all they can to discredit the Forward Party and its efforts to reform US democracy and give the American people more choices, which would also begin to suffocate extremism and authoritarianism.

See everything I have already said.

If these petty partisans who vociferously claim to be defenders and fearless warriors for democracy actually cared about it, they wouldn’t be opposing the Forward Party with quite so much falsely targeted outrage.

Sigh.  See everything I have already said.

If you oppose these changes the Forward Party are fighting for, you are very likely to be unconsciously, or consciously supporting Trump, Trumpism, and other types of extremism that the dysfunctional duopoly provides a platform for. If the system that led to Trump doesn’t change, what is to stop an even more dangerous candidate finding electoral success?

File under: "Women Who Won't Date Me Must Be Lesbians". 

The "system" didn't lead to Trump.  The trajectory the entire Republican Party has been on for decades led to Trump.  So, using your writerly imagination once again, just try to imagine how offensive it must be to people who have been fighting the rise of the fascism in the Republican Party since before you were born, to be lectured by you that we don't really care about democracy because we don't want to join your fucking cult and we think your Dear Leader is a huckster.  

Until the partisan hacks propping up the Democratic and Republican establishments wake up and start giving the Forward Party an honest and fair chance, I fear that the extremism that the nation is already facing will only get worse.

So, more insults.

And more parroting the Both Siderist lie.

After which you whine on social media that some of us partisan hacks think you're a child being used by a political Fagin.

I get it that you passionately believe in this Forward Party nonsense, and are ferociously opposed  to us petty, partisan hacks who believe otherwise.  And there is a word for this: a word you Forward Party goofs throw around all the time.

That word is "partisan", which simply means "a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person."  Which, as a writer, you should damn well know.

You are a Forward Party partisan.  

And if partisans are the problem then,  golly, doesn't that mean that you are part of the problem!

And if you really can't see how monumentally arrogant, alienating and insulting your very partisan writing comes across to the very people you are presumably trying to persuade, then I can't help you. 

Selah.

Me?  I'm Partisan A F