How to Become Unpopular

I’ve finally accepted the harsh reality that the majority of Americans are never going to wake up out of their long, long stupor. They are broken largely into two equally misguided groups. One, the “liberal” group, reacts emotionally to every prompt of the thoroughly corrupt, state-run mass media. The other, the “conservative” group, is in denial of how far America has fallen, worships greed and the tattered American flag, and consoles themselves with an insincere religious cocktail.

While I’ve been a radical all of my adult life, until I became a published author, and gravitated to the limited public platform the glorious internet provides, my family and friends tolerated me with a wink and a shrug. They supported my first book, the sci-fi novel The Unreals, to a gratifying degree. When Hidden History was published, the support diminished somewhat, but still some old friends and many family members were there for me. They just didn’t talk about the book. At all. Outside of one cousin, no member of my very large family has even acknowledged reading the book, let alone shared what they thought of it.

It was the publication of Survival of the Richest that really opened my eyes. Now the support had become threadbare, with only a handful of loyal friends and family members supporting me in any way. And again, not a single mention of the book at Christmas or any other large family gathering. My writing in general has become the large elephant in the room, which everyone ignores. I stopped mentioning it myself to them, because it was crystal clear they didn’t have any interest.

Social media has mirrored the reactions of my friends and family. It’s been all that I can do to stop myself from posting one of those dramatic farewells on Facebook. I have posted what I thought substantial news about Survival of the Richest, from interviews with the likes of Sean Stone, the son of director Oliver Stone, to quizzes and book giveaways by the publisher, with only a handful of people at the most ever “liking” it, yet alone commenting.

I’ve lost Facebook friends, and a few in real life, over my writings. Posting in support of Donald Trump during his campaign caused long-time friends to become apoplectic. And now, oddly, this same “liberal” group has shown no interest in Survival of the Richest, a book they should logically be drawn to. While my “liberal” friends have for the most part acted as if my new book didn’t exist, my “conservative” friends cling loyally to chronic promise-breaker Trump, and obviously resent the very subject matter of Survival of the Richest. 

So what’s an independent-minded populist like me to do? I’ve had to grovel in promoting myself on social media, even begging for Amazon reviews and Goodreads ratings, to no avail. I suppose the same “friends” that can’t take two seconds to click on “like” would have a problem taking five seconds to rate my books on Goodreads. I have over 1,500 friends on Facebook, the vast majority of them people who sent me friend requests, and yet I can seldom get even 1% of them to “like” my posts.

If and when my next book is published, whether that winds up being my book on bullying and the social hierarchy, or Hidden History 2, present trends would indicate that almost no one among my real friends and family, let alone Facebook “friends,” will pay the slightest attention, let alone read it.

One of my favorite writers, Charles Fort, once said, “I do not know how to find out anything new, without being offensive.” I can relate to that. It would be far easier to salute the flag, or scream at Trump, or talk about black lives only mattering, or demand we “do something” to protect “the children.” Pointing out the inevitable holes in every official narrative paints you as a conspiracy “kook.” The sheeple just simply roll their eyes and hiss, “you think everything is a conspiracy.”

When conspirators run the world, everything important they engage in will involve some kind of conspiracy. History is written by the victors, and so is the coverage of current events. I question everything that gets widespread coverage in the mainstream media, or is the thrust of hackneyed political speeches. Those who disseminate information to the masses have been proven to be demonstrable liars time and time again. Do we give the slightest credibility to any individual pathological liar? Why then do we think that a collection of pathological liars should be trusted on anything?

Throughout my life, others have counseled me that something I’d said or written was “too extreme.” I have regularly colored outside the lines, strayed from the narrow parameters of acceptable debate. I really don’t know how anyone stays within those restricted lines, and accepts the maddening limits of mainstream public discourse.

The unexpected success of Hidden History was somewhat bittersweet, given not only the lukewarm support from friends and family, but the fact that one of my primary demographic groups, the JFK assassination research community, with a very few exceptions, has treated the book like the plague. Given the huge egos and difficult personalities within that community, I really shouldn’t have been surprised, but I still was. For a cynical, Ambrose Bierce fan, I am often shockingly naive and trusting of people.

To those of you who read this blog regularly, I will ask again for Amazon reviews, Goodreads ratings and mentioning my writing to your friends. Sometimes I feel like some poor soul on a street corner with a tin cup in hand, but the publishers and the reality of the marketplace dictate that authors do most of their own promotion.

If some of those who regularly write to me, telling me how much they loved my work, would only promote my work to others, I wouldn’t have to toot my own horn so much. There’s no way to do that without sounding arrogant, egotistical, etc. I’ve actually had several people contact me, tell me they were writing a review, and then the review never appeared. One “fan” of mine on Facebook gave the book he supposedly loved three stars on Goodreads! Another “fan” gave it two stars! With “fans” like that, who needs all those one-star bandits that populate Goodreads?

I’ve grown tired of explaining to those mired in the phony left-right paradigm how I can be against capital punishment, legal penalties for all victim-less crimes, the abuses of our intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex and our sinful economic inequality, while at the same time being against affirmative action and all identity politics, the DACA program and our entire insane immigration policy, the excesses of feminism, and any concept of “hate” crime or “hate” speech. I’m a populist, and see corruption everywhere.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.” William Faulkner once said. “If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.” “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. I get a strange kind of thrill in going against the grain, in knowing that I’m in such a minority that my perspective faces astronomical odds.

Andrew Jackson perhaps said it best: “One man with courage makes a majority.” All of us need to point out that the emperor is stark naked, with not a stitch of clothing on. It shouldn’t take courage to simply tell the truth. Everyone should want truth to be known, and should naturally speak it. There are plenty of us out here who will be the first in the crowd to speak up. All we’re asking for is others to support, and not remain silent.

As my book on bullying will show, the concept of popularity requires there to be unpopularity. We shouldn’t be treating civil discourse as if we were all still in high school, seeking attention from the quarterback or prom queen. Truth and justice should always be considered popular.

 

Politics- The Greatest Hoax of All

This “Russian” conspiracy thing really has me down. The fact that so many good people have mindlessly bought into it has increased my disillusionment about the general gullibility of people. I’ll probably be whipping out my well-worn copy of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary soon if this continues.

The elite that control us all, those puppet masters behind the scenes, have succeeded in dividing America into two camps, both of them clueless about the real enemy controlling everyone. Donald Trump has become the Lightning Rod of all Lightning Rods. Those who hate him- and there are a lot people who hate him- have been persuaded that he is more corrupt than the entire rest of the deep state. Forgot those Rockefellers and Rothschild-types, and every previous crime committed by swamp dwellers. If we can just get rid of Trump, we’ll really make America great again.

While Trump has become the Goldstein of 1984 fame, stirring up the masses into fits of far more than two minutes of hate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama form a sort of amalgamation on the other side, as dartboards for conservatives. Our masters have succeeded in constructing believable cardboard caricatures, much as they have used foreign bogeymen for similar purposes for well over a century, to incite the war fever that our monstrous military intelligence complex relies on for sustenance.

Lots of us were fooled to varying degrees by the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. We ignored those photos of Trump laughing with his “former” friends the Clintons. We ignored Trump endorsing Hillary for president in 2008, and his 2012 comments calling her a “terrific” Secretary of State. We ignored the fact that Trump’s name, like Bill Clinton’s, was listed as being on the notorious “Lolita Express” of convicted underage girl aficionado Jeffrey Epstein.

Astute political researchers- which unfortunately doesn’t include many professional journalists or historians- have long known that congressional voting, for instance, can be largely staged. There are a myriad of examples of Democrats and Republicans “permitting” a loyal ally in either their own party or the “opposing” one, to cast a vote that will be popular with the public, as long as the outcome is already assured for the establishment, if they are facing a difficult re-election challenge. Of course, this doesn’t happen very often, since well over 90% of all incumbents are returned to Congress in each election.

Now we appear to be in the midst of a remarkable, unprecedented battle between an arrogant, confused president and the entire left wing of the establishment. Every night, establishment leftist “entertainers” rant and rave against Trump on those competing yet carbon copy talk shows, almost as if he has become the central talking point of every television program. The relentlessness and vicious nature of the attacks would make a more sympathetic figure than the egotistical Trump the kind of underdog that the vast majority of the public would rally around.

The attacks on Obama during his eight years in office were similar, but far less intense. And the mainstream media, being generally “liberal” in an establishment sense, was as collectively enamored with Obama as they are collectively incensed at Trump. Trump has been transformed into a figurehead for White Maleness, which appears to be the number one enemy of the most radical social justice warriors.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, was marketed as the kind of smart aleck black man that conservative America has always feared. Hillary Clinton is the quintessential feminist who won’t back down to male “privilege” and “speaks her mind.” As she told us in the early days, she’s never liked to bake cookies. She is the anti-June Cleaver to Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to bring back the days of Leave it to Beaver. But he’s doing it without that 90% tax rate on the richest Americans; in Trump’s case, he wants to channel the 1950s primarily with more tax cuts for the wealthy.

So what’s an informed American to do here? What if we don’t like smart aleck blacks or feminists who just happen to support perpetual wars, disastrous trade deals, outsourcing and massive immigration, and a sinful disparity of wealth? But what if we don’t like the only alternative offered to us; the unfathomably greedy and selfish disciples of Ayn Rand- the Paul Ryans of the world? Are we forced to empathize with this clownish billionaire “outsider” who is either giving an Academy Award performance as a beleaguered Twitter addict, or is exactly as dumb as he sounds and is being unwittingly used?

I devoted an entire section of Survival of the Richest to our “best and brightest.” Our elected representatives have seemingly always been the target of jokes by wits like Mark Twain. Is it believable that our representatives could be such laughingstocks, Congress after Congress? Would’t some competent and/or honest citizens run for public office at some point, and win? I propose that such consistently putrid “representation” cannot happen accidentally. It cannot be a natural phenomenon for our Congress to be forever filled with pedophiles, anti-gay gays, utterly bribe-able blowhards, who vote against the interests of their constituents with such stunning predictability.

Are our politics akin to the alleged event at Sandy Hook, or the Boston Bombing, or any other number of incidents over the past few years, which have been investigated by alternative researchers and found to be so implausible? Has American politics become a charade, or even something wildly surreal like The Truman Show? Are we all unwitting Jim Carreys, blissfully unaware of the giant stage Shakespeare spoke of, and the prominent actors strutting all around us?

Politics largely makes history. I have written a lot about history, and perhaps I should have referred to it more as fake than merely hidden. “History would be a wonderful thing,” Tolstoy once wrote, “if it were only true.” Today’s politics will become tomorrow’s history. The court historians will chronicle it as inaccurately as their predecessors chronicled their own times. If we survive as some kind of civilization, future court historians will probably note how “hateful” our age was, led by the greatest hater of them all, Donald Trump. They are as unlikely to even mention all the crimes and conspiracies that are happening even as I write this, as they are to ever expose them.

The reality is that 50% of Americans are making less than $27,000 annually. This same bottom half of the country has less than ONE percent of the collective wealth. Illegal immigration and foreign visa workers continue to flood a labor market with nearly 100 million American adults unemployed, further lowering wages. Social Security and Medicare are bound to burst unless something is done to redistribute wealth downwards, instead of upwards. Military spending is always increased, no matter who is in office, and the huge budgets of our intelligence agencies remain a secret. All over the country, police forces are out of control and granted the power to seize the personal property of those not even charged with a crime.

With all this going on, our “representatives” and our media should have plenty to discuss, investigate and reform. Instead, we are being fed a nonsensical casserole, whose main ingredients are Black Lives Matter, North Korea, “dreamers,” transgender bathrooms, military parades, and #MeToo, with a liberal (pun intended) sprinkling in of vapid celebrity opinions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like what’s being served, as Huey Long said long ago; all the waiters work for Wall Street.

This is well beyond taxation without representation. It’s being forced to watch a never-ending dog and pony show. We can’t yell “fire” in our crowded theater, so all we can do is visit the overpriced concession stands and eat the stale popcorn.