Blog: It Must Be Nice

Every two to four years the US likes to turn up the gas on the conversations that happen over family gatherings & across social media platforms. I’ll be the first to admit I kind of enjoy the biannual purge that cleans out my social media followers & friends. It can actually be refreshing from time to time to know where people actually stand. And look, I know a lot of you read that last bit of sentences & had the lovely sentiment of “just because we disagree in the voting booth, doesn’t mean we can’t still be friend” & unfortunately I think we’re way past that societally, morally, & “loving.” I’m sure, once again, me saying that has lost a few of you & some of you have already checked out or clicked out of this blog because you “won’t be a part of divisive politics” which in this day & age is, let’s face it, oxymoronic. If you’re still here & you have a little bit of time I’d love to fill you in on what I mean by all of this & show you why I, & so many who find ourselves living in marginalized groups, feel this way.

Let’s start at what prompted this blog with a little bit of back story. I was on the phone a few weeks ago with someone, whom I shan’t name here because they trusted me enough to speak about their political beliefs openly with me & inadvertently trigger the contents of this blog from the conversation that they & I had. In said conversation we were talking about the upcoming election in which I voiced my support for the Harris/Walz ticket & the general feeling of hope that came with it. We talked policy & things of that nature & the rebuttal of the person I was talking to was very economically driven, as most people are to do when they vote red. They are a well off individual & were upset over the amount of taxes they’d had to pay this year from the sales of an entity that they had worked their lifetime for & which had allow them to retire. I informed them that we hadn’t had a new tax bill since 2019, but their concern was that the incoming potential of a Democratic win would further reduce their earned pile & that which they had prepared to leave for their children once they passed. My response was, what a luxury, that must be nice.

You see while they’re dealing internally with issues like tax policy & inflation (which is mostly a global issue by the way, majority of the rest can be chalked up to corporate greed) I’ve just spent the last several months investigating the deep possibility & probability that had Biden not dropped out, Evan & I would most likely need to expat to another country.

I don’t think that’s over exaggerating either. In fact a lot of people that I know who are members of the LGBTQ+ community, individuals of color, or women, had been doing exactly the same thing to varying degrees. Evan & I had gotten to the point where we were narrowing down countries, looking into visa applications & price, & planning to start the processes for all of these things. Tax policy was honestly the farthest thing from our minds & that’s exactly what I mean when I say “it must be nice.”

It must be nice not to worry about your fundamental rights every election cycle. It must be nice not to fear that the only way that you & your significant other to be together would be by fleeing the country. It must be nice when the things on the ballot for you are not life altering, but instead whether or not you have access to a military grade machine gun. It must be nice not to be worried about whether or not you’re going to be able to afford or attain healthcare. It must be nice to know that certain aspects of who you are as human will not diminish you in society to any degree no matter the outcome. It must be nice not to worry about housing or food or whether or not we will even have a livable planet in 20-30 years. It must be nice to balance the fate of so many, whom you are supposed to love unconditionally as a so called christian, on a vote in favor of your wallet when the alternative could potentially ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. It must be nice.

So no, I don’t mince words, because we are past the point of where an election is simply deciding where & when we spend our tax dollars. We are voting on whether or not those who are different than you; who look different, worship in a different way, love different, have a different tax bracket, have different core beliefs, are worthy of basic human liberties or not. And if you are not someone who can agree with that from a moral stand point, I have little to no interest in anything you say. Because at the end of the day if we can’t agree that all people, no matter their race, gender, background, sexuality, religion, etc. are worthy of life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness equally, without barriers or restrictions that keep them from living a life with no consequence of your own, then you have lost my respect & any integrity that I thought you might have.

This is not about tax policy. This is not about budgets. This is about the livelihood of millions of Americans who don’t fall under the christian, cis-gender, heterosexual, white blanket & I fear that should this election go the way it looked like it was headed just a month or so ago, then we will have lost any & all hope of regaining & rebuilding America as any form of a United States.

-C

Blog: Time Is Once Again Ticking For Tik Tok

If you’re not a frequent user of the clock app, also known as Tik Tok, you may have missed the news that the federal government is once again attempting to ban Tik Tok in The US. If you were already aware of this news then you’ve probably also heard that the reason behind the potential ban apparently relates to “national security” but that reasoning is demonstrably false & we’re going to go over why.

I’m not sure at what point I became a political pundit blog but it seems to be the field of writing I’ve found myself most frequently in of late. Maybe it’s because I, myself am often invested in the world of politics & am a very active advocate against a lot of the BS laws that have been coming out over the last few months. I feel like I’m in the middle of the Trump years again, sharing all the horrible things that I don’t feel are receiving enough attention from the general public, but that’s not why we’re here today. We’re here to talk about the threat that has once again presented against Tik Tok.

As I mentioned above, Tik Tok is on the line in a new bipartisan bill that would force the Chinese based company to sell the United States portion of the app to a US company or face shut down. Sound familiar? Well, it should, because the same thing happened back in 2019. As also aforementioned, the federal government’s reasoning falls under the mustachioed guise of “data mining.” The humorous part about that being that Tik Tok doesn’t collect any more or different data than groups like Meta or Twitter have done for years. We’ll get back to Meta in a minute. The real problem that the feds have with Tik Tok falls into two categories, neither of which should be reasons for the outright ban of the app.

The first of these problems arises from Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s monstrous baby, rigging public opinion one Russian funded post at a time. Zuckerberg is upset that Tik Tok is out performing his two platforms; Instagram & Facebook, the latter of which has seen a fairly consistent decline in users, especially amongst those who embrace Tik Tok, Get Z & Millennials. In an attempt to compete Meta added “Reels” to their platforms which are essentially just Tik Tok rip offs, most times, quite literally. Zuckerberg, in the spirit of free market capitalism, hired GOP targeted PR firm, Targeted Victory, to run a smear campaign against the clock app amongst primarily conservative voters, a base to which has struggled to find a foothold on unfiltered, unregulated Tik Tok. Zuckerberg’s tactics clearly worked as here we are again, looking down the barrel of the same legal gun that we did when Trump found he couldn’t regulate the content of the Tok.

The second part of this is what brings in the bipartisan support for the ban. You see Tik Tok has around one hundred million users. These users, on average, spend about 90 minutes a day using the app. The networks don’t like this. In their minds 90 minutes spent on Tik Tok is 90 minutes you spent not watching CNN, HBO, Fox News, MSNBC, you name a network, I’ll give you a corresponding corporate donor. Additionally these networks are no longer in control of the message being delivered directly to the people, they no longer get to filter or modify their stories to fit the narrative that they want to push. Two recent prime examples of this are the TN’s anti-LGBTQ policies, whose law makers were exposed using Tik Tok for their hypocritical ways (Gov Bill Lee dressed in drag & LT Gov Randy McNally commenting on suggestive photos of twinks) & the train derailment that happened in East Palestine, OH which was barely, if at all covered, by new sites & networks. Tik Tok has repeatedly drawn attention to problems being swept under the rug or misdealing of politicians & the people in charge have grown tired of the wool being removed from the general publics’ eyes.

I know some of you just read those two paragraphs & are immediately discounting what I’ve just told you as conspiracy but I’m reporting exactly what has been said & what is being done. Don’t believe me? Here’s an article about the meta things & here’s a clip of the quiet parts being said out loud at a press briefing regarding the bill (skip to 5:55).

This should be frightening. It should be frightening to all of us because the logic isn’t logicing. The reasons we’re being given for the ban don’t add up. The truth of the matter is that the powers that be don’t like that we can speak to each other unfiltered, they don’t like that we can see each other’s lives, have dialogues, share news that isn’t being covered openly without passing it through the muzzle of the already foreign owned media. I don’t see people, especially younger people, standing by & taking this. I know to a lot of you Tik Tok is just an app but in reality Tik Tok has become the new ultimate exchange of ideas & information. It is digging up parts of the narrative that others would rather have silenced & they don’t like that & the fact that they’re moving so quickly to silence this platform should be alarming to all of you.

As always I hope you all have a great weekend, much love to you all!

-C