It matters that the CEOs of the major companies in this industry are very vocal and often express very strange ideas, fancying themselves as wise political philosophers. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Dario Amodel, and Elon Musk are among the most prominent. They are making predictions that AI will replace a large percentage of American jobs, including white collar jobs such as lawyers and doctors, within the next decade.

To put this into perspective, we have to remember that these people are trying to convince businesses to do what they want, to do what will benefit them — to replace very large numbers of employees with AI, to pay their companies instead of paying workers, whether blue or white collar. They are salesmen, and their sales spiel is that businesses that don’t jump on the bandwagon will be left behind. Independent analysts are not convinced that they will succeed at the level they are predicting. However, even a 15% unemployment increase over the next five years would be highly disruptive and would cause significant human suffering.

Instead, the CEOs like to present this transition as leading to increased leisure for the general public. However, in our society this condition is more commonly identified as unemployment. Further, these CEOs are among the powerful financial interests subsidizing a politics that demonizes the unemployed as unworthy of help and guts the nation’s safety net for people left behind by this substantial episode of capitalism’s “creative destruction.”

This actual behavior contrasts with the very vague proposals that some (Altman, Model, Musk) have expressed for a universal basic income (UBI). Where is this money to come from? Who do they suppose would pay for this very expensive UBI program if not them, the beneficiaries of all this wealth transfer? They are actively financing a political agenda that simply doesn’t include a viable means of support for UBI.

The prospect is one of a major economic transition in which only ultra-wealthy tech titans have a meaningful decision-making role and only they ultimately benefit. This lack of a significant voice is part of the reason we see such intense pushback. At every level of government, people are being cut out of decisions that will shape their lives. Government has too often been unresponsive to public concerns, anxious to cut a deal with a tech company behind the scenes before the public even knows what is proposed.

I’ll close with my usual disclaimer. I’m not asking for a socialist society. I’m saying that capitalism works for everyone only when it is what I think of as sustainable capitalism, responsive to the concerns and interests of the general public, regulated to prevent the worst abuses arising from corporate self-interest, and equipped with a decently funded safety net for those cast aside by progress. If tech bosses want us to believe they share these goals, they should start acting like it.

“I think that speaks to the decline of the quality of our democracy, right? Because what happened was the politics became untethered from public views. Most Americans say that you have a responsibility to pay your fair share of taxes. Most Americans say that paying taxes is patriotic. If you ask people what their top concerns are about the tax system, their top two concerns for literally decades have been that corporations and the wealthy are not paying their share.”

It isn’t just in taxation that our politics are divorced from broader public views. In areas like immigration, reproductive health, and much more polls and behavior show the American people different from and often less extreme than much of our politics.

In South Carolina specifically, we have the well-respected Winthrop Poll showing most of the public not as extreme as the policies in the State House. Our gerrymandered maps make this worse because it makes the primaries, ignored by most registered voters, often the last meaningful election. The judiciary is also culpable. The Supreme Court of the United States, the product of decades of systematic stacking with right wing extremists, consistently rules that people who have wealth and power are entitled to use their wealth and power to endlessly amplify their wealth and power.

I am not advocating overthrowing capitalism, the current popular counter-claim of those supporting what is happening to our nation now, the Heritage Foundation and others like them. However, sustainable capitalism requires a safety net for employees who are left out of work by “creative destruction” at small and large scales. It requires a fair tax system without multiple tax avoidance schemes. It requires an end to giant tax-funded government subsidies to corporations. It requires an end to back room deals for “economic development” without public input and without transparent administration. It requires an end to no-bid contracts for cronies. It requires much stronger conflict of interest laws for public officials. It requires a judiciary that weighs the rights of citizens and the general public as something other than insignificant counterweights to the power of big wealth and power.

And all of this is before we get to the implications of AI’s explosive growth in the hands of people whose frequent public statements suggest they are sociopaths, and to the already terrible cost of anthropogenic climate change.

We live in interesting times, something the Chinese have long recognized as a curse. How will we answer it?

This is much like posting a photo of a traditional Roman Catholic nun without her wimple, or a Sikh man without his turban. What “truth” is to be found in seeing someone without their traditional religious attire? We are already pretty sure that there is a scalp and probably some hair under there.

As an anthropologist, I was taught cultural relativism. This doesn’t mean that all cultures and their religions are equally valid, but it does mean that it is wrong to judge them as wrong simply because they are different from our own. Each can be judged on its merits. As we are told in the Christian Bible, we must judge them by their fruits.

Some religions have surely deserved to die. The colonial ending of the worship of Xipe Totec, for example, the Aztec flayed skin god, is not something I lament. Xipe Totec worship involved human sacrifice and was just as awful as it sounds. On the other hand, the Christian priests who baptized Mayans and then tortured, imprisoned, and killed those backsliding into their traditional faith were pretty awful too. Those priests were surely instruments of colonial control and power rather than anything taught by Jesus of Nazareth.

Islam is as variable in its expression as Christianity. People claiming a foundation in Islam have done terrible things. As in Christianity, usually those terrible things have are grounded in the cultural values and personal goals of people practicing the religion in a particular time and place. Attacking the twin towers in the name of Islam was vile, as is the repression of women in Afghanistan. However, those have foundations in economic issues (hence attacking the twin towers and not the National Cathedral) and tribal misogyny, not in the Koran. All religious scripture can be twisted by those determined to bolster the case for what they want to do, but that doesn’t make it emblematic of a whole faith.

Years ago I had my mother’s paternal line tested for yDNA and there was a match identified with a Muslim student of hydrology at a Belgium school. He is a Palestinian from Gaza. We apparently share an ancestor in the terminal Bronze Age, our family lines diverging as the Iron Age began at about 1200 B.C. We corresponded and remain Facebook friends. He has been back in Gaza for years now. When I read his posts, they are not defense of Hamas or war. He writes about bringing clean water and sanitation to refugee camps in Gaza, his work through an NGO. His concerns are the wellbeing of his family, friends, and of his community in a terrible time.

Most recently he has been posting about the loss of a close friend, like him relatively young. His friend died from stomach cancer, not long after having married and embarked on creating his own family. In this loss, his Muslim faith has been my friend’s consolation. He has posted several touching tributes, with prayers that God will bring his friend mercy in the afterlife and grant his family and friends consolation. It sounds much like what one hears at a Christian funeral. His Islam, his Muslim faith, supports him at a time of mourning.

I would hate for anyone to judge Christianity by those priests who tortured Mayans, or by the crusaders, or by the witch hunters. In return, I don’t intend to judge every Muslim and their faith by the terrorist attack on the twin towers or the attack on Israelis on the Gaza border. When a religion brings support for a life of dedicated service to community and comfort in personal grief we all should be able to celebrate that.

I simply don’t know. There are suspicious elements. Looking at major media versions of the photo, why is there a blank circle around McConnell’s finger on the newspaper? I don’t know.

There are those who say they have spoken with McConnell at length (very specifically 20 minutes or 17 minutes), including Senate Majority Leader Thune. Do I believe that those individuals would lie? Again, I don’t know.

However, there is one very unconvincing element in the statement released in his name. Whether he is recovering or not, the following is not anything Mitch McConnell has ever actually said: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older,” the former Republican leader said. “Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it.”

In this statement he is admitting vulnerability and human weakness, asking the public to identify with his reluctance based on their own or their family’s experiences, asking for sympathy for his aging self. Whoever wrote those words, it wasn’t Mitch McConnell. This is a man who has lived for power, always more power, and avoided any hint of vulnerability. He is asking for sympathy that he himself would never have granted. That doesn’t sound like him. That doesn’t mean he is brain dead, but it does mean his PR people wrote the statement.

What would I believe was genuinely from McConnell? I would believe he said that “In keeping with my well-known contempt for the norms of representative democracy and accountability to my constituents and the public, I chose to stonewall on my condition simply because I can.”

There are easy ways to end this. If McConnell’s condition is as the statement represents it, he could invite Governor Beshear or some other neutral person to visit him in his rehab facility for a few minutes to reassure the people of Kentucky that he was still able to do his work in representing them. In a time before this one, we would have expected that weeks ago.

I honestly don’t know where the truth of his condition lies. What I do know is that it is a threatening time for our nation when we don’t know what to believe. That public lack of confidence and shared understanding of what is true is an important precondition for establishing rule by powerful authoritarians. Whatever Mitch McConnell’s current condition is, this is a sad statement about the condition of our representative democracy. Whether McConnell is healthy or not, our nation is not.

The world knows from harsh experience what happens when powerful individuals and groups are allowed unregulated ability to do whatever increases their own power and influence. Most of our environmental laws and regulations exist because of abuses that have harmed millions. Data centers are the newest example. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t exist. They will continue to expand and have a substantial influence on our lives. It does mean that their owners must be compelled to be transparent about their plans, build and operate their facilities in ways that do not trample on the lives of their neighbors, and they must pay their own way.

The Economist in a current article tells us not to worry about data centers because they "bring their own power." First, many don't do that. When they don't, new generation capacity must be built by public utilities at accelerated speed and at very high cost, costs inflated by the massive demand for energy generation equipment induced by the data center boom. Absent regulations, traditional utility financial models require that those inflated costs are then averaged out including other users.

Second, when data centers do provide their own power, they have a history of indifference to direct impacts on their neighbors, as for example in the case of Elon Musk’s xAI in Tennessee and Mississippi. DoJ has intervened in court on behalf of xAI, not by claiming they are now operating within the law but that they are so important that they should be immune to it. Tech oligarchs are using their political heft to bring the government on board with claiming that their untrammeled and unregulated growth is a national emergency voiding environmental and citizen protections.

Third, a lack of transparency clouds plans for many data centers, with NDA’s from local government officials leaving the public in the dark until it is late in the planning process. If their plans are so benign, why do this?

And finally, many of the tech oligarchs have been very clear about their underlying philosophy of contempt for the people and environments they affect. Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir lectures on the Anti-Christ and identifies as such anyone who opposes his having free rein to do whatever he finds convenient and profitable. Jeff Bezos celebrates a $40 million wedding in Venice while firing thousands of employees to replace them with AI.

Alex Karp of Palantir has said that the tech leaders should be less vocal about cutting jobs to replace with AI. I have found no record that he says they shouldn’t do it, just that they should stop telling everyone what they are doing. Karp has also said that he believes, as do some others in the industry, that AI shouldn’t just aid, but replace, government as we now know it. The industry would presumably continue to be under the control of himself and others like him. Representative democracy in this worldview is just an obstacle to progress and the acquisition of power and wealth by some, at the expense of all. European governments are responding to this threat by ending contracts with Palantir and other American companies.

Sometimes, it is clear that other people simply don’t matter. Elon Musk gloated about cutting USAID at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children. The power of life and death is apparently intoxicating. Why should we trust him, or anyone like him, to conduct his business affairs with concern for the legitimate rights of others and the health of the world in which he operates?

And so, I argue for sound regulation of environmental and financial costs associated with data centers. Responsible owners and managers should agree, not just for the rest of us but for the good of their industry. Ultimately, alienating the public cannot serve them well.

Instead, I think of our national condition like shingles. There was a nasty virus going around years ago (for centuries) and we thought we had been treated successfully for the disease. Many worked to cure it, some even died in the process, but most survived and moved on. Years of reasonable although imperfect health went by. And then, the virus reemerged with a vengeance, devastating and disfiguring.

In our political world, this was made possible by the power dreams of wealthy extremists and others convinced that people who are unlike themselves have no legitimate political voice. They built a Supreme Court that is pleased to overrule everything inconvenient to an unbridled love of power and wealth. They helped to build a Congress willing to roll over and play dead. There was immense planning, and money, devoted to this over decades, playing out against a backdrop of too much public indifference. The underlying principle at work is that people who have power have a right to use that power to amplify their own power at the expense of everyone else. That principle is on its way to controlling our government. Our current national government is an expression of that in all its branches.

And now, many in power flaunt their racism and misogyny, both of which are expressions of socially and politically enforced dominance. They say that women are “underbabied” and should stay home, be submissive, not even have the right to vote. They say that cruelty in the removal of millions of dark-skinned immigrants is necessary. They claim that redistricting to muffle the voices of millions of our citizens is just how the world works, and should work.

Sadly, people who lack real distinction of their own often feel that they need this abuse of power to get ahead. And so we have the conspicuously mediocre Pete Hegseth controlling the most expensive military on earth (most powerful is up for debate) and occupying himself removing the names of every Black and female person from the recognitions at Arlington. This is blatant bigotry writ large, but it is apparently necessary for those who know in their hearts that they can’t actually compete on a level playing field.

Beyond that overt ugliness, a large number of Americans don’t seem to care about representative democracy. They go along without paying much attention. Psychologists tell us that some actually prefer an authoritarian in charge, making the big decisions. Others are just busy with their lives But that isn’t the representative democracy that we have claimed for ourselves, a democratic republic that protects us all from abuse of power while demanding our active engagement.

Many people are responsible for our current national condition, not one. The virus had to be there and the immune system weak to allow this denial of what has been best in representative democracy to develop. If we misdiagnose the disease we can’t treat it. The medicine that we need includes a new national understanding of shared purpose. We must recognize the modern expression of Franklin’s observation on unity. We must hang together, working for equal justice and liberty for all, valuing rather than fearing our many differences, or we surely will hang separately In a painfully diminished nation that is run for the benefit of a small handful of people who truly don’t care what happens to the rest of us.

The problem is that those aren’t the only or even the dominant factors in our maps. Our legislators draw maps for their own advantage.

This is possible because the U. S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) under Chief Justice John Roberts has blessed it in multiple rulings. Their decisions, one after the other, ensure that those who already have disproportionate access to power can use that power for their own advantage. They have found the perfect combination of rulings to prevent a race-blind but fair outcome.

As a consequence, the voices of minority voters are muffled and unheard. However, it isn’t just minorities that suffer. All of us vote using maps designed to protect those who designed them, not the rest of us.

Roberts and friends loudly and self-righteously declare their innocence of bias. They are spectacularly unconvincing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/upshot/redistricting-race-court-gerrymanders-elections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jVA.xaEE.zIeF_rct-G80&smid=url-share

I am also aware that the history of our state and nation is not dead; the lasting effects are many. Yes, I know John Roberts and his friends disagree. This is disingenuous, unless they are stupid. I don't think they are as smart as they think they are, but I don't think they are stupid.

At present, the push for power through a midterm redesign of our political maps (first congressional, and we hear next the General Assembly) ignores this complex history in an attempt to silence a substantial part of our state's people. South Carolina's complicated history remains, as it has always been, a very inconvenient truth for those who wish to have governance by a limited segment of our people -- themselves.

Whether the current effort succeeds or not, the fact that so many are willing to be complicit in overwhelming the voices of more than 40% of our people, and especially those of the more than 25% who have done so much to build the state with disproportionately few rewards, sends a sad message.

“In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others’ members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them. Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections.”

Senator Shane Massey said essentially the same thing in his eloquent floor speech before voting against adding redistricting to the legislature’s agenda following the regular session. This is a fundamental democratic principle that is not just at risk, but lost, if South Carolina’s General Assembly is successful in the leadership’s stated purpose of redistricting for the purpose of ensuring that the interests of about 40% of the population are not represented in Congress. Heck, it is at risk anyway, has been chipped away at for several decades, but this would be the tombstone.

It is unlikely to RIP. Some have intentionally amplified our divisions for decades to make their preferred authoritarian government possible. (Honestly, who thought trans kids required legal control until given a constant drumbeat of that message?) This brings us back to Abraham Lincoln. A nation divided against itself cannot stand.

Even as a child, growing up in Jim Crow South Carolina the racial divide simply felt wrong. It felt like a fracture in the fabric of the little world I lived in. It was embarrassing to see kids like me in everything but color have to drink from separate water fountains and go to a different restroom in public buildings. (Not schools of course, they weren’t there in my schools.)

All these years laters it had felt like healing was well underway. That is not what it feels like now. It is as if a terrible virus lay dormant for years and is back to try to kill us. Or, more accurately, trying to turn us into a one party authoritarian state dominated by only one segment of our people.

it is not the case, as Chief Justice John Roberts claims to believe, that we will solve racial divisions through a legal pretense that they don’t exist. This makes no more sense than saying that a bacterial infection is best healed by ignoring it. No, the infection will surely make the patient very sick, and may kill them.

We are in a sad place as a state and as a nation. Friday the General Assembly begins a special session called by the Governor for the purpose of redrawing our congressional districts and sending our primary elections into chaos to reflect the change. This will be a heartbreaking exercise for anyone who cares for all of our state’s people and for our nation’s highest ideals.

Does the rule of law mean anything at all to this Court? Is John Roberts proud to be moving ahead in a race with Justice Roger Taney of Dred Scott fame for worst Chief Justice ever? Are other justices who are loud about their supposedly Christian beliefs, from Alito to Comey, proud to be doing things that hurt millions of vulnerable people in the service of the rich and the powerful? Are they pleased to be shredding public confidence in the Court as a faithful interpreter of the laws as passed by Congress and the Constitution?

And beyond them and their colleagues, is this who we are as a nation? Are we supposed to be proud of it?

Anyone who knows me or has read my previous posts knows that I have a longstanding interest in South Carolina history. Much of it is my family history. I am a 13th generation South Carolinian, a descendant of four of the original settlers of Charles Town. This includes one, Samuel West, who was among the first five people elected to public office in the colony in 1670 (one of the “commoner” positions on the Grand Council of the Carolinas under the Lord Proprietors). I am descended from many of the Swiss, and later Germans, who settled the Orangeburgh and Saxe Gotha townships. I am descended from people who came down the wagon road to Lancaster and Kershaw counties. And I am descended from an enslaved woman, Parthena, mother of the Pendarvis children. Those children were to become some of the wealthiest mixed race people in the British colonies, apparently because their father actually loved her and them and left the children everything he had, which was a lot, when he died in 1735. That legacy of land and money gave them white husbands and wives and, generations later, descendants who look like me.

I was not raised to revere the Confederacy. My great great grandparents’ generation that lived through the Civil War were of varying political beliefs, ranging from rabid Confederates to people who openly said from the beginning that the war was stupid. The list of signers of the Ordinance of Secession includes the names of multiple close relatives and firebrand Congressman Lawrence Massillon Keitt was a cousin on one side.

One ancestor sold his enslaved people and refused to take Confederate money for them, saying it would shortly be worthless, which it was. He was clearly not a man of great principle, he was buying and selling people, but he had a brain. Another ancestor was a friend of James Petigru, who appears in his will. Petigru was father of famed unionist James Louis Petigru who gave us our unofficial state motto. Commenting on the rush to secession, he said that “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” Right.

Earlier, another ancestor left in his will a personal library that included the works of Wilberforce, the great English abolitionist — but that same ancestor enslaved about twenty people on his plantation. He painted some of them in a watercolor that has become known as “The Old Plantation,” the best known depiction of the lives of enslaved people in the 1700s, now in the possession of the Williamsburg Foundation. It is regarded as a very sympathetic portrait.

Five of my eight great grandfathers died fighting for the Confederacy or within a few months after from disease acquired during the war (at least one drafted rather than volunteered). My grandparents had lost their grandfathers. Widows were hard-pressed to keep their farms to feed their children in the immediate aftermath. One great great grandmother reacted very badly and was reported to the Freedman’s Bureau for abuse of formerly enslaved persons, an incident that was even described in her daughter’s personal memoir. I’m glad I never met that ancestor, for that and other unpleasant reasons. In any case, I was never told that slavery was a noble cause and the war was worth the terrible cost.

I also was not shielded from the realities of what it was like during and after slavery. A man who worked for my maternal grandfather looked like a very tan member of the family. That surprised no one. Everyone knew that his father was my grandfather’s uncle. Even as a child, I knew that this was not the result of a charming love story. Now, I’ve worked with multiple mixed race families to help figure out why the DNA shows that they are related to me. In some cases they already have accurate family oral traditions about how that happened. None are charming love stories. Even in the case of my ancestors Joseph Pendarvis and Parthena we have no way to gauge how Parthena felt about it all.

I grew up in the period of Jim Crow. Separate schools. Separate rest rooms. Separate water fountains (big cooled aluminum ones for whites, low uncooled ceramic ones for blacks). But there were not, especially in rural areas, separate lives. People lived too much together for separate lives. But, the Orangeburg Massacre happened while I was at USC, because black students wanted to bring down the walls of segregation erected to keep them away, even as everyone lived together and shared so much.

So now we have S. 508 to further protect a white-washed history. We have S. 508 because it is apparently very hard for many South Carolinians to accept that slavery really was evil, and that all the death and destruction that the Civil War brought was not heroic or grand. The people who brought us that war and fought it were not heroes. At worst they defended a wretched institution and at best they were misled and swept up in events beyond their control. Apparently it is also hard for many to accept that the Jim Crow era that followed Reconstruction was real and cruel.

And now, we have a Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, gutting the Voting Rights Act that was paid for in blood by so many. Here too, eyes are closed to the lasting legacy of our history, surviving in the hearts of too many of our people. The Court’s majority, led by John Roberts, has adopted a mythology of both history and current realities as a foundation for their rulings. That mythology comes from the same polluted stream as S. 508.

Our state got its motto, Dum Spiro Spero, from Drayton and Middleton, expressing hope of victory during the Revolution. It turns out to have lasting meaning for those of us who continue to hope for South Carolina. However, the James L. Petigru alternative motto often seems far more realistic. Our state really is too large to be the insane asylum that it sometimes seems it should be.

And so, online I am seeing cocky folks saying this shouldn’t matter much, old time farmers managed without an international fertilizer trade, and clever commenters mention historic and even prehistoric American farming methods as the answer. The question is asked, what did Mayan and Aztec farmers do? As if we should just do the same and everything will be fine.

That is stupid. But so is this war. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.

What did the prehistoric Americans do? Well, for one thing, they supported tremendously smaller populations, and sometimes they failed in that. Even in good years prehistoric farming techniques supported only a handful of settlements in the Americas that would be considered significant cities today. And all the years weren’t good.

I specialized professionally in the prehistory of the Sonoran Desert and Colorado Plateau. In the Sonoran Desert, we see the collapse of Hohokam society in the mid-1300s. Over centuries they had built central settlements of several thousand people, supported by many miles of canal systems that had been dug by hand, bit by bit. They were very successful farmers for a long time.

However, according to archaeological evidence and the oral traditions of the O’odham, the sivanyi, priests who reigned over the platform mound communities on the Salt and Gila rivers, claimed control of the wind and rain gods. And then in the mid-1300s, they failed. They lost control. It wasn’t drought that got these folks (they could manage that), it was flooding that wiped out their canal systems. Overnight, support of that size population was no longer possible. The story is complex, but basically these were some of the savviest prehistoric farmers in the Americas and they pretty quickly lost most of their population. Children’s burials became more common as they starved in large numbers, their bones marked by the osteoporotic damage that malnutrition brings. There were no more big towns. Instead, the region supported a small number of tiny farming settlements without the elaborate architecture and social structure of the earlier periods.

There are important lessons in this. One is useful for politicians. The priests, the sivanyi, claimed to control the wind and rain gods. Then they failed. They were killed for their trouble. Their platform mounds were abandoned, along with much of the large communities around them. Politicians always seem to be claiming to control things they can’t control, and this should be an object lesson for them.

However, returning to our current issues — prehistoric American farmers and even historic farmers from a simpler time just a century or so ago do not provide an instant solution to potential crop shortages this year due to current fertilizer shortages.

Yes, over a longer period of time more sustainable agricultural practices, some drawing on traditional methods, could be made more common and would be healthier for the planet and for us. That isn’t a solution to a sudden war-induced fertilizer shortage in the year 2026. Earlier practices would simply not support our modern population, even if they could be implemented very quickly, which they can’t. And if miraculously we somehow reverted now to the time-honored traditional methods of prehistoric and historic predecessors, we would just go hungry and die in large numbers. Those methods won’t support all of us, or even most of us. They aren’t the answer.

Stopping the war would be a much more desirable solution for those of us who like to eat, for an affordable price.

Krugman:

“My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic. If Americans are being brutalized and murdered by rogue ICE agents…well, that’s not their problem. If the Justice Department and the FBI are totally subverted and operate as Trump’s enforcers, they know that vindictive, unlawful tactics will never touch their lives. If Republican budget cuts decimate rural hospitals and deprive hundreds of thousands of health insurance…well, they have their own private doctors and clinics. If Trump starts an ill-conceived war that doubles the price of oil…well, they can certainly afford the higher gasoline bills for their limousines and yachts. And it won’t be their kids hunkered down in a bunker in the Middle East.

So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt.

This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense.”

While people compare this to Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is altogether very different. Those were basically tribal states in which national governments struggled to hold linguistically and culturally diverse groups together. This was especially true of Afghanistan but also of Iraq, a nation held together only by brutal dictatorship.

Not so Iran. While recently the victim of an authoritarian theocracy, Iran was part of the developments during and after the Neolithic that moved humans from hunting and gathering to civilization (such as it is, I’m having a lot of doubts these days). They had a national government by the 7th century BCE, about 2700 years ago, long before Europe. The Abassid Caliphate that began around 750 CE was known for its extraordinary cultural and scientific contributions, lasting for centuries and still influencing life today. Those are just some high points among many. This is not a bunch of internally divided desert sheep herders, folks. Furthermore, our government has been busily insulting and interfering with the allies who have helped us before in the Middle East. They aren’t likely to join in this time; in fact they would be fools to do so in a war run by mediocre U.S. television personalities. This is not going to be a regime-change cakewalk.

I pity the U.S. troops who will suffer and die. However, President Bone Spurs is willing to make that sacrifice. I am sorry for the many innocent Iranians now being bombed and killed. There is also no evidence that one bothers him.

I pray for peace.

Hammond also was a child molester, just like so many of the powerful modern people today who are destroying representative democracy so they can rule as obscenely wealthy autocrats. He abused his sister-in-law’s four Hampton daughters and they (not he) became “damaged goods.” None were ever able to marry.

He is also known to have repeatedly raped enslaved women, including one 12-year-old who may have been his daughter.

Men who choose children to rape are all about power, about exercising their power over others. They were then. They are now.

Life just went on for Hammond. The South Carolina legislature returned Hammond to the U.S. Senate after his sexual abuse of the Hampton children had become very public.

Hammond’s home is now a state park. The Hammond school in Columbia was named for this vile individual. South Carolina is very forgiving, of some people.

So are many in the United States today.

“In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking bitch” after he killed her.

The thread that runs through both [Aubry and Good killings] is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.”

This is not new. Many of us, who thought we were realists, have had to come to terms with the fact that a persistent theme in American life has returned to haunt us. It is doing so in the name of our government, with the support of millions of our fellow citizens.

I look at on-line comments saying that Good deserved what happened, brought it on herself. However, blocking a public roadway is a Class 2 Misdemeanor, for which summary execution is not the normal punishment. What did she do to deserve death without judge and jury, at the hands of someone who is not even an actual law enforcement official but an immigration agent with very limited authority, none of it over citizens exercising their constitutional rights?

Multiple videos, including that by the agent, document that she was not trying to attack the ICE agent, she was trying to escape (at very slow speed) a situation that ICE had made dangerous by their own behavior, described by professional law enforcement as inconsistent with any responsible training and practices.

The agent’s final comment, after shooting Good in the face three times, was “f***’n bitch.” This was said in a voice dripping not with fear but contempt. This clarifies what we are seeing. This wasn’t fear. This was contempt and it was retribution.

Why that contempt? To him, she had no right to challenge him, or to question the regime that he represents. It wasn’t her non-aggressive behavior in driving the car that provoked the shot. First Amendment rights notwithstanding, it was a woman not instantly demonstrating submission to a white man with a gun.

This was an echo of American history that includes the horror of lynch mobs, often including law enforcement, killing Black citizens who were perceived as insufficiently submissive. It was the Emmett Till murder revisited. It was a toxic strain in American life rising once more to the surface, in the name of the national government.

I’ve seen several comments saying that we are learning what Black Americans have known for a very long time. It is not a lesson drawn from our national ideals, but from our real lived history. It is a deeply disturbing lesson.

Some among us, including some with a great deal of power, want women to make up for the damages that a shifting economy and society inflict. It is argued that women should be submissive tools to reassure young men, when what those men actually need is reliable employment in a context that treats them with basic respect, not as disposable tools. They need a community where even their votes are not diluted to serve the interests of people in power, where their voices are not ignored by political figures looking out for themselves. Too many of the people with economic and political power don’t want to provide any of that, so we have the demand that women provide comfort by allowing these frustrated young men to dominate and control them.

This is a solution that works nicely for employers like Amazon, with its plan to replace hundreds of thousands of workers with robots and AI. Those workers will be financially endangered and often personally devastated. Amazon isn’t going to do anything about that but count the profits and maybe throw a $50 million wedding the next time Jeff Bezos gets married. But, surely they would feel better if they can go home (whatever is left of it) and dominate the women in their lives. Pretty rotten for women though, to be treated as human sacrifices to paper over the problem.

https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2025/12/26/young-men-need-help-says-local-woman-who-plans-international-effort-film/

While evangelical denominations and some very right wing Roman Catholics have come to largely support Christian Nationalism, other major Christian denominations do not. “The Crisis of Christian Nationalism,” a report from the Theological Committee of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, identifies Christian Nationalism as not just a violation of constitutional law but of faith. It is called heresy. Anyone familiar with the Episcopal Church knows that no Bishop of this church calls something heresy lightly.

The pernicious effects of the state becoming identified with a religious faith were well known to our constitutional founders, after the massive horrors of religious wars in Europe. One influential individual with South Carolina associations was outspoken about this. Johann Joachim Züblin (anglicized as John J. Zubly) was a theologian and minister in the Reformed Church and became one of the most prominent and widely respected Swiss settlers in the American colonies. He was a close associate and friend of the noted evangelist George Whitefield and of the eminent New England preacher Ezra Stiles. Züblin published about twenty works during his lifetime. He spoke and preached in German, English, and French (reportedly sometimes several of these on the same day), and he read both Latin and Greek.

Although he began his American career preaching in what is now McClellanville and was from a family well represented in the Swiss communities at New Windsor and Orangeburgh townships, Züblin ultimately became a member of the Second Continental Congress representing Georgia, where he had founded the First Presbyterian church in Savannah. Constitutional scholars regard him as a significant influence on the founding founders’ concept of separation of church and state, although he ultimately opposed armed revolt against English rule and became separated from the movement towards independence.

Züblin was not as much concerned about what religion would do to politics as to what politics would do to religion. He saw the churches in Switzerland recruiting soldiers for military campaigns. His father-in-law, Johannes Tobler who founded New Windsor Township on the Savannah River, had left his position as governor of Appenzell Auserrhoden in protest over that practice and its departure from sound faith. Throughout Europe, Züblin saw the message of the Christian Gospel submerged in rationalizations to protect the powerful.

That is what is happening here and now in our country. The clear instructions of Christian faith to love our neighbors as ourselves, to do justice, to love mercy, to welcome the stranger, are brutally ignored. J. D. Vance, a very right wing Roman Catholic, has offered a typical justification for government action in his hierarchy of Christian responsibility, and has now been rebuked by two popes for promoting ideas with no sound foundation in the teachings of his Church.

Similarly, today evangelical churches demand government compliance with edicts that are not present in the Bible (for example, prohibition of abortion) while rationalizing and indeed demanding government actions that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Christian Nationalism is not healthy Christianity. It is not true to sound theological foundations. It is a very real and present danger to those of every religious faith, and to those of none. It is a danger to faith itself.

There are many studies addressing various aspects of anxiety and social alienation, but I think there is an aspect of it that is insufficiently weighted in considering the state of our society today. That is simply how complex life in our world has become, how complicated it can be to navigate.

We often see individual complaints on social media: My internet router died and I have to figure out how to get and install a new one. My employer had a data breach and now I’m vulnerable to identity theft and have to deal with multiple credit monitoring companies that I never chose to do business with in the first place, or face dire consequences. My car won’t start and I can’t even get into the back seat to grab the manual that I keep there. I tried to respond to what looked like an email from a friend and now I have a computer virus. Each of these things in itself is not a major crisis (barring special circumstances and assuming the financial resources to respond), but what of the cumulative impact?

Every time some clever financial executive or engineer thinks of a handy new feature, our world becomes incrementally more complicated to navigate. They don’t consider the cumulative effect. They don’t realize that while what they are doing only adds a small element of complexity to their individual product, overall this is happening everywhere, all at once, to people, many of whom are not prepared either mentally or financially to deal with it all.

This is getting worse. AI will amplify problems because it is not nearly as clever as the hype suggests. It will make our lives increasingly complicated to navigate because both business and government are deciding that computers are cheaper than keeping people on the payroll. The burden is ours, not theirs, when AI doesn’t produce a sound answer.

Dealing with all of this can wear us down, especially when the problems occur in rapid succession and when we don’t have the financial resources to pay for solutions. Is your car an immobile brick because of a technical failure in a complex system? If you can pay for a service that will tow it to a repair shop, if you can pay for the repair, it is annoying but not terrible. If you can’t pay, then what? Do you have transportation? Do you still have a job if you don’t have transportation? What will happen to you? Who is doing this to you?

People who live in a continuing state of low-level anxiety and who personally face the erosion of the financial health of the working and middle classes can look for villains. My personal belief is that the least credible candidates for culpability in making our lives more difficult are the Mexican immigrant who prunes my shrubbery at a very reasonable cost or an impoverished single mother who needs SNAP. However, those who profit most from our increasingly complicated world are happy to throw accusations in those directions.

The cumulative effect of the modern world is to wear people down and to make them more vulnerable to those who would take advantage of their frustration and anger for their own purposes. I don’t have a solution. I believe that solutions (if ever achieved) will be complex. They won’t include an end to modern technology, although they might include more products designed for stable performance rather than flashy features. Solutions would pretty certainly require that working and middle class people have the financial resources to pay others to deal with problems as they occur. For now, though, we need to begin by recognizing the emotional and practical burdens of great complexity if we are ever to find effective ways to make modern society better designed for those of us who live in it.