Dead Men Walking, Revisited: Don’t Stream It. Own It.

I’ve written about capital punishment here before--going back to 2013 on this platform.

In June 2013, in “Dead men walking,” I argued that Americans tolerate executions because they are insulated from them, and proposed a condition: keep the death penalty, but an execution can proceed only if the governor personally walks into the chamber and carries it out. 

When I began college in 1980, fresh out of the USAF, I got into a big debate in my philosophy class with our professor. The class went quiet. For the entire class. It was not the first time that would happen in that class. 

Another time I won the debate with him, alone in the class with few comments/question from the class, but by the end of that session frustrated, he simply said that I could just leave class. So, I shut up. 

But everyone knew, including him, that I'd won the debate.

This time it wasn't so much heated as intense. I had believed in capital punishment. I had never really given it much intellectual, ethical or moral consideration. It was Old Testament. It just seemed "right." Raised old Slovak Catholic, head altar boy at our small Slovak church (for those wondering about my Irish orientation, that's my dad's family, not mom's).

In the end after all our prof's arguments, the one that finally stunned me and won me over was this: 

"It sets a bad precedent for a state to murder its citizens." 

Note taken. That, along with the rest of his comments, had changed my orientation--forever. 

In March 2025, in “An Ethical Framework for Last-Resort Capital Punishment Neutralization,” I went further and laid out a model where execution is off the table by default, stripped from politics entirely, and reserved for the rare person who remains an unavoidable danger even inside maximum security.

This week the Secretary of Defense managed to propose the opposite of both.

Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, is scheduled to die by military firing squad in December. Last week Pete Hegseth announced the execution would be made public, that people would be able to watch it. The backlash came from both parties. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned the footage could become a recruiting tool for terrorists. Vice President Vance said he wouldn’t watch. Senator John Kennedy said he wouldn’t publicize it. Yesterday President Trump overruled Hegseth on Truth Social: no livestream, though victims’ families may attend in person. According to Reuters, the White House hadn’t known the plan was coming.

Watching is not owning

Hegseth’s plan and my 2013 proposal share one feature. Both drag the execution out of the dark. That is where the resemblance ends.

My proposal puts the weight on the person who authorizes the killing. His hands it to an audience. A livestream doesn’t cure detachment. It is detachment with a better camera. It turns a death into content and the viewer into a consumer who can close the tab and go make a sandwich.

We’ve tried this before. The last public execution in America, a 1936 hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky, drew thousands of spectators and a national press that treated it like a carnival. That embarrassment is why the practice ended. Public executions never proved to be a deterrent. They proved to be entertainment.

The President’s reason gives the game away

Trump said streaming might have been a strong deterrent, but that many good and well-meaning people would rather not watch Hasan die.

Sit with that. If decent people can’t bear to watch the thing, what exactly are they consenting to? The discomfort isn’t a side issue. The discomfort is the information.

What the 2025 framework would say

Run Hegseth’s plan through the principles I laid out last year and it fails every one.

The framework makes execution non-punitive. Its only legitimate purpose is neutralizing an ongoing danger, never retribution. A broadcast meant to show the world “how America deals with” anyone is pure retribution with a production budget.

The framework removes the decision from national politics. This plan came from a cabinet secretary on a cable interview and was settled by a social media post.

The framework keeps deliberations away from the public precisely so that crowds and politicians can’t steer them. A livestream invites the crowd into the room.

I’ll be honest about where Hasan fits. He arguably falls into a category I named in 2025, the ideological extremist whose influence can outlast his crimes. But the concern with that category is inspiration, and nothing would inspire his admirers more than a government-produced martyrdom video. Speaker Johnson saw that immediately. And under my own framework, the question isn’t what Hasan did in 2009. It’s whether he remains an unavoidable danger in custody today. The government hasn’t made that case. It has made a punitive one.

The hardest case

Hasan is exactly the kind of person both of my earlier posts conceded might deserve to die. His guilt is not in doubt. He represented himself at trial and made no real effort to deny what he did. The argument I called strongest in 2013, that executing even one innocent person is one too many, doesn’t apply to him.

So why do I still object to how this is being handled?

First, the soldiers. We are asking young service members to shoot a bound prisoner on command. A firing squad doesn’t lighten that burden. It spreads it across more people.

Second, martyrdom. Every bit of ceremony serves the story Hasan wants told. A cell at Leavenworth gives him obscurity, the one thing he can’t spin.

Third, the state itself. A government that kills its own citizens should do it reluctantly and soberly, if at all. Never as messaging.

Visibility or secrecy?

A careful reader will notice tension between my two earlier posts. In 2013 I wanted the official to be personally exposed. In 2025 I wanted the process shielded from public view. Both aim at the same target: take the theater and the politics out, and make whoever decides carry the full weight of the decision. What neither allows is what Hegseth proposed, where the decider stays comfortable and the public gets a show.

Half right is still half wrong

Trump made the right call, for half a reason. If officials want executions, let them sign the order and stand in the room. No cameras. No audience. No podcast appearance afterward. Better still, take the decision away from them entirely and leave it to people with no votes to win. Then watch how fast the enthusiasm fades.

Strength does not mean killing people. It is harder not to.

We still don’t need more dead men walking. We need fewer people comfortable watching them.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

 

The Pardon Is the Crime Scene: How America Ends Impunity for Good

On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon "to heal the nation." He healed nothing. He wrote an instruction manual, and its lesson has been absorbed by every aspiring authoritarian since: rise high enough and the law stops at your door.

I'll say outright, NO human being, not just American citizens within the confines of our borders, should be illegally harmed or even detained. I'll ignore for the moment all those who have been and will continue to be illegally harmed and/or confined by this President, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump read that manual cover to cover. If we fail to act now, the next one will have memorized it.

The Record

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of evidence, much of it in Trump's own voice.

He called Georgia's Secretary of State and pressed him to "find" 11,780 votes. He organized slates of fake electors in seven states. His own attorney general, Bill Barr, told him the fraud claims were baseless. His own vice president refused to overturn the count. Trump summoned a crowd to Washington, sent it to the Capitol, and for 187 minutes did nothing while it attacked the building and hunted Mike Pence. 

He took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed their return. On tape, he admitted he wanted to "play down" a virus he knew was deadly. His own coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, later said most American COVID deaths after the first 100,000 could have been mitigated or substantially reduced.

A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts. Federal grand juries indicted him twice. Much of the key testimony came from Republicans who served him.

The Escape

Then the system failed, one piece at a time.

The Supreme Court handed him immunity. The federal cases evaporated when he won back the White House. And on his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged over January 6, including leaders convicted by juries of seditious conspiracy.

Read that again. Men convicted of conspiring to overthrow the United States government walked free on one man's signature. That isn't a loophole. It's a recruitment pitch. Every future would-be autocrat now knows he can raise a loyal army with a single promise: do what I ask, and I will erase your crimes.

Severity Isn't the Problem. Impunity Is.

Many Americans, furious and exhausted, want the harshest punishment imaginable. History shows what actually fails. South Korea sentenced former dictator Chun Doo-hwan to death in 1996 for his coup and the Gwangju massacre. He was pardoned in 1997. The harshest sentence on earth meant nothing because it could be undone.

Now look at the democracies that got it right. Brazil convicted Jair Bolsonaro for plotting to overturn his election and sentenced him to 27 years. Peru imprisoned Alberto Fujimori. South Korea imprisoned two more former presidents. France sent Nicolas Sarkozy to a cell. Each proved what America has never once proved: a head of state can walk into a courtroom a powerful man and walk out a prisoner.

Criminologists have said it for decades. Certainty of punishment deters. Severity adds little. The autocrat's calculation is never "twenty years or worse?" It's "will anything happen to me at all?" In America the answer has always been no. That's what has to change.

Why This Moment Is Singular

Nixon resigned in disgrace, abandoned by his own party. Trump survived two impeachments, a felony conviction, and four indictments, and came back stronger. That has never happened before in American history. MaGA isn't a policy platform. It's a loyalty structure built on the belief that its leader stands above the law, and every escape confirms that belief.

The next version will be smarter. Deadlier.

He'll be disciplined where Trump was chaotic. Consider if it had been Steve Bannon, not Trump, elected.

Whoever it is, he'll arrive with AI tools that can produce propaganda at industrial scale, target every voter individually, and flood the information space faster than any fact-checker can respond. He'll have studied which guardrails bent and which broke. If the lesson he learns is that pardons and immunity will protect him, we won't get another chance to teach a different one.

The Court That Built the Shield

In July 2024, six justices did something no Congress and no founder ever did. They invented presidential immunity from criminal law. Trump v. United States grants absolute immunity for a president's "core" constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. It even bars prosecutors from using official acts as evidence of other crimes.

The word "immunity" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The framers debated shielding the executive and rejected it. They had just fought a war against a king who couldn't be prosecuted.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent spelled out the consequence. Under this ruling, a president who orders the military to assassinate a political rival may be immune. She closed with five words every American should know: "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."

The Court that issued this ruling isn't beyond the reach of the people. The Constitution gives us every tool we need.

Fix the Court, and the Reversal Follows

The Supreme Court is the only federal court with no binding code of ethics, and it shows. Justice Thomas accepted years of undisclosed luxury travel and gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow. He refused to recuse himself from January 6 cases even though his wife, Ginni Thomas, had pressed the White House chief of staff to fight the election results. Justice Alito's homes flew flags associated with the Stop the Steal movement.

Congress must pass a binding, enforceable ethics code for the justices. Where the documented conduct warrants it, the House must use its impeachment power. Impeachment exists precisely for judges who place themselves above the rules every other federal judge obeys.

Congress must also restructure the Court. The Constitution doesn't fix it at nine seats. Congress set that number by statute in 1869, and it has ranged from six to ten. Staggered 18-year term limits would give every president two appointments per term and end the lottery of lifetime seats. Expansion remains on the table. A Court reformed and accountable to ethics law is a Court that will revisit Trump v. United States, and a ruling this indefensible won't survive honest review.

The People Have the Final Word

We don't have to wait for the Court. When the Supreme Court gets the Constitution wrong, the people can correct it, and we've done it before. The Eleventh Amendment reversed Chisholm v. Georgia. The Fourteenth buried Dred Scott. The Sixteenth overturned a ruling that struck down the income tax. The Twenty-Sixth passed in about three months after the Court divided over the voting age.

Trump v. United States belongs on that list.

What Accountability Must Mean

1. Prosecution without exceptions. When legal barriers fall, every provable crime committed by Trump and those who conspired with him must be charged and tried in open court, with the full evidentiary record placed before the public.
2. Maximum lawful sentences, served in full. No plea deals trading prison for a quiet exit. No "healing the nation." We tried healing in 1974, and it brought us 2021.
1. Capital Punishment - While it won't stop the next Trump, it will forewarn and help to wake up the body politic about what they are doing, who they are liking, and for a change where this has previously led.
3. A constitutional amendment that closes every escape hatch:
   • No president is immune from criminal prosecution for violating federal law.
   • No president may pardon himself, his family, or anyone for offenses connected to an election, the transfer of power, or crimes committed at his direction.
   • The statute of limitations for federal crimes is suspended while the offender holds office.
   • Anyone convicted of insurrection, seditious conspiracy, or election subversion is permanently barred from federal office.
4. A reformed Court: binding ethics, term limits, impeachment where conduct demands it.
5. A permanent public record. Germany didn't reject Nazism because of a few verdicts in 1946. Most Germans at first dismissed Nuremberg as victors' justice. What changed the nation was decades of confronting the documented record in courts, classrooms, and law. America needs its own permanent record of what happened, taught and preserved, so no future generation can be told it was a hoax.

What They'll Say, and the Answer

"It's a witch hunt." The evidence came from grand juries, Republican-appointed judges, a New York jury, and Trump's own attorney general, vice president, and White House staff. A witch hunt doesn't produce sworn testimony from the accused's own people.

"Prosecuting presidents will start a cycle of revenge." The cycle has already started, and it was started from the Oval Office. In 2025 Trump's Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, officials whose offense was investigating him. Meanwhile Brazil, South Korea, Peru, and France prosecuted former leaders through courts, and their democracies are still standing. The threat to democracy isn't prosecution under law. It's a president who can't be prosecuted at all.

"Presidents need immunity to do the job." For 235 years, no president had criminal immunity, and every president but one managed to govern without trying to overturn an election. Ford's pardon of Nixon only made sense because everyone, Nixon included, understood a former president could be prosecuted.

"He won the election. The people have spoken." Nixon won 49 states in 1972. Winning an election has never erased a crime. Votes grant power. They don't grant pardons for what was done to seize it.

"A constitutional amendment is a fantasy." The Twenty-Sixth Amendment went from Congress to ratification in about three months. Amendments seem impossible right up until the public demands them. Our job is to make the demand undeniable.

"Court reform is court-packing." Congress has changed the Court's size seven times. Term limits are supported by majorities across party lines. The only thing radical here is a Court that invented a king's immunity and answers to no ethics code at all.

The Hard Choice

Extreme times demand extreme resolve, and this is a singular moment. 

The most extreme thing America could do is also the one thing it has never done: make a former president answer to the law, and make that answer permanent. 

Not a verdict someone can pardon away in a year. 

Not a sentence that evaporates with an election. 

A judgment the Constitution itself guarantees will stand.

Nixon was the warning. Trump is the proof. 

The next one will be the ending, unless we write a different one--NOW.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Unintentional Victim Monster

My son sent me a note the other day. Not a text, not a meme, but an actual piece of thinking, the kind of thing you write when an idea has been rattling around in your skull long enough that it needs to get out onto a page. 

I've read it three times now, and I want to share it and chew on it a bit, because he's put his finger on something most of us have run into and very few of us have named. I've also lived it, from more than one direction, and I'll get to that.

He calls them unintentional victim monsters.

These are people who do real harm to others, but not out of malice. They do it because they see themselves as the victim. And when the people they've harmed push back, stand up for themselves, or simply point out what happened, the monster experiences that pushback as the original attack. The response becomes the crime. The consequence becomes the catalyst.

Read that again, because it's the whole thing in a nutshell.

The boss who didn't read the law

My son offers an example that anyone who has spent time in the working world will recognize.

An employee takes protected family leave. When they come back, the boss has cut their hours. The employee, who has a clean record and no documented discipline, points out that those hours are legally protected and can't simply be cut on return. Reasonable. Calm. Correct.

The boss hears this as a threat. I hear some narcissism rattling around there...

They'd been building a new scheduling system because money is tight. Of course, money is tight partly because of a lifestyle they consider non-negotiable, which sets a financial floor the business has to cover. They never looked up the leave laws. In their own mind, they were just adjusting a schedule, which is what bosses do.

So the boss lashes out. And here is the part that matters: the boss genuinely believes they are innocent. From inside their head, an employee they did nothing wrong to has suddenly started making legal threats out of nowhere.

That's the monster. 

Not a cartoon villain twirling a mustache. A person riding the road to hell, pavement freshly laid with good intentions, who sees every objection as an obstacle and every objector as stupid, arrogant, lazy, deceitful, or plotting.

It's interesting that some of the stories in my Anthology of Evil series are not traditional horror but the horror of those things in life one might not perceive as evil, but they surely are.

The paranoid innocent

My son makes an observation here that I think is the sharpest in the piece. 

Those reactions, the sense that everyone is scheming against you, that the people raising concerns are acting in bad faith, are not the reactions of a true innocent victim. They're the reactions of a paranoid mind. The monster is a victim, but a victim of the responses to their own corruption. A corruption they can't see, or worse, one they see as virtue. Necessary. Justified.

He calls this a kind of false light, and then he reaches for mythology, which is where I got interested. We're not religious people, but we are deeply steeped in the mythologies of cultures and religions. Having been raised old school Slovak Catholic myself, I grew up with, if not the religion, the fascination for the fundamentals of the ethereal. I guess I passed some of that on to my son. 

The gaming universe picked up from there.

Lucifer, the light-bringer, didn't fall because he woke up wanting to be evil. In the old tellings he fell because he was so convinced of his own rightness, and so wounded by what he saw as injustice against himself, that resistance to his will looked like tyranny. 

Milton gave him the line "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n," and that's not a villain speaking. That's someone who believes he's the aggrieved party. The prince of this particular kind of monster.

Self-empathy, and the thing that beats it

This is where my son lands on something I haven't seen framed quite this way before: self-empathy.

The monster isn't empty of empathy. 

They have plenty. It's just pointed inward. Even monsters who sacrifice for others, who think of themselves as givers, can have so much empathy for their own suffering that it outweighs the empathy they'd need to extend to the people they're hurting. The resentment, fear, and anger they feel toward their "attackers" grows naturally out of a lack of humility and a lack of remorse.

And remorse is the hinge of the whole essay.

He separates guilt from remorse, and he's right to. They get used interchangeably and they are not the same animal. Guilt is about me: I feel bad, I am bad, make the feeling stop. Remorse is about you: I see what my actions did to you, and I own it.

A person can be drowning in guilt and have no remorse at all. 

He suggests this may come from being overpunished as a child, where guilt was so heavy and so dangerous that the only survival move was to reject it outright. In a healthy person, guilt ripens into remorse, and remorse opens the door to empathy and repair. In the unintentional monster, guilt gets thrown out at the door, and what's left is defensiveness wearing the mask of righteousness.

My mother

I didn't have to reach for mythology to understand this. I grew up with it, and I watched it harden over decades.

My mother, my son's grandmother, was addicted to painkillers, and the pain she was killing wasn't physical. It was emotional. When our youngest sibling died of liver cancer, it broke something in her that never mended. I don't say that to judge her grief. we all felt it. It was a horrible experience losing him as a brother. 

Losing a child is the one wound nobody is built to survive intact. I understand that now even more than when it happened, when I was 19.

But she became addicted to something else, too: being the victim. Though, frankly, she'd always leaned into that a bit too heavily. Actually it was something that seemed to overtake her around the time I hit high school and it grew until my brother died a few years later.

Her grief became the center of the family's gravity, and everything else got pulled into it. 

Those of us still living started to feel like we didn't exist to her anymore. We were alive, we were right there, and we were invisible. She couldn't see it. 

Literally. We'd be standing in front of her telling here that, but she just didn't seem to hear us. We tried to get her professional help but that was when I learned about something else. Some people have a mental condition that needs professional help but they are functional enough that legally, nothing can be done. They become experts at survival. At not getting help. We have a president like that, today.

From inside her pain, any sign that her other children were hurting, or needed her, or resented being erased, looked like an attack on a grieving mother. Or, she'd just ignore it. Exactly the inversion my son describes. The response became the crime.

The turning point for me came in couples therapy with my wife. The therapist said something I'd never let myself think: sometimes when you have toxic people in your life, even if they are a parent, you have the right to cut them out.

I didn't do it right away. I gave her more chances after that. Then more. It got worse, not better, until it was bad enough that I cut her out of my life, and she stayed out until she died. It hurt. The mother I grew up with, whom I loved dearly, seemed to be gone now. I realized one day, she had died, but was still living. I just didn't recognize her anymore. 

I'm not telling that story for sympathy, and I'm not telling it as a triumph. I'm telling it because it's the other half of my son's essay. He explains how the monster is made. What he doesn't say, and what I learned the hard way, is that you can't remorse someone else into remorse. 

You can name the harm, you can offer the door, you can hold it open for years. If they won't walk through it, sometimes the only way to stop being their victim is to walk away yourself. 

That isn't cruelty. It's triage.

Breaking out of the womb

There's another piece of this that's on my mind, because my son is standing, in his own way, in a spot I once stood in myself.

When he was born, I'd been working nights at a hospital for five years, alone on a mainframe. I loved it. No one around, I did what I wanted, I had total control of my little kingdom. The people there were good people, and they liked me. But there was no advancement, and I had a new kid and needed more money. 

So I left. I took a daytime job in a busy office, the opposite of everything I'd enjoyed, specifically to get daytime office work on my resume. They understood at the hospital. They were sorry to see me go. Eighteen months later I landed a high-level, high-paying, prestige position, and it changed my life.

Here's what I've learned from that and from a lot of other turns since: the low points, once you act on them, often become the doorway to the best things that happen to you. But it's painful. Leaving the comfortable dark room where you have control, or leaving a situation where someone else's unacknowledged harm is slowly grinding you down, feels like being born. 

You're breaking out of the womb into the world, and nobody does that without some screaming. And you have to do it, there simply is no want about it. 

Impact over intention

My son closes his essay on this point, and I'll let him have the last word in substance if not in exact phrasing:

It isn't what you intended that matters. It's the impact your actions had.

We can't control everything. We don't know everything. Sometimes the effects of what we do will surprise us, and sometimes they'll land on someone else like a brick. Owning that impact, taking responsibility for the unintended effects, respecting them even more than our intentions: that's how you keep from becoming this kind of monster.

What unsettles me most about his idea is that it doesn't let any of us off the hook. 

The boss in his example isn't evil. My mother wasn't evil. They were cornered, frightened, grieving, protecting something they couldn't let go of. Put almost anyone under enough pressure and the door to monsterhood swings open a crack.

But the action it visits upon others, I would argue, IS evil.

The only thing standing in that doorway is the willingness to say: 

I didn't mean to, but I did, and I'm going to make it right.

And when someone else won't say it, the only thing standing between you and a lifetime as their victim is the willingness to leave.

My son figured out the first part on his own. I'm proud of him for writing it down. The second part, I had to learn from my mother.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible. 

Out of Many, One: The Motto We Should NEVER Have Replaced

Sixty-nine years ago today...

Small things over time become big things. Small changes can lead to large consequences, and a four-word phrase added to our money in 1957 has grown into a tool for telling Americans who belongs. 

What was slipped in quietly should be able to come out the same way. 

But today, Trump and sadly, his, HIS Republican Party would ridiculously sell its removal as a war on Christianity, proof that the left wants God erased from American life. 

That reaction is itself the argument: a motto that cannot be questioned without being called an attack on faith has stopped being a motto and become a loyalty test.

On October 1, 1957, the first American paper money carrying the words "In God We Trust" that didn't seem then as divisional and divisive as we now know they have been, went into circulation: the Series 1957 one-dollar silver certificate. 

Sixty-nine years later, the phrase is on every bill in your wallet. Hanging in our courts and government offices. This was not the America we created originally, or wanted, and for good reason.

It has also become something more than a slogan. 

Christian nationalism has moved from the fringe into statehouses, school boards, and the White House. 

Donald Trump learned that religion is a loyalty test he can sell, and he has used it to regain power and hold it. 

A national motto that ties American identity to one idea of God is the perfect tool for that project.

So on this anniversary, a modest proposal: 

retire "In God We Trust" and restore the motto that held this country together for its first 180 years. 

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Our best and original national motto. 

How God got on the money

The phrase is not a founding principle. It is a product of two wars, one hot and one cold.

1. 1864. During the Civil War, after a minister petitioned Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to recognize God on the coinage, "In God We Trust" first appeared on the two-cent piece.
2. 1907. Theodore Roosevelt, a devout Christian, approved new gold coins without the phrase. He argued that putting God's name on money came close to sacrilege, cheapening something sacred by stamping it on what people spend. Congress overruled him in 1908 and put it back.
3. 1955. At the height of the Red Scare, Congress required the phrase on all U.S. currency, paper included. One year earlier it had added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
4. July 30, 1956. President Eisenhower signed the law making "In God We Trust" the official national motto, a deliberate contrast with "godless" Soviet communism.
5. October 1, 1957. The first bills bearing the motto reached the public.

The Soviet Union has been gone for 35 years. The Cold War branding outlived the Cold War, and a new movement found it waiting.

The motto we already had

E Pluribus Unum turns 250 this year, alongside the country itself. 

In August 1776, weeks after the Declaration, Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design a seal for the new nation. Their committee proposed the phrase, and it went onto the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, where it remains.

It was never written into law as the national motto. It didn't need to be. It should have been. Our Founders also didn't imagine they would need many laws to protect us from someone like Donald Trump, or that we'd ever elect such a vapid, malignant narcissist career criminal as POTUS.

It just couldn't enter than patriotic mind back then, or even in 2016.

For 180 years it served as our nation's motto in practice, on the seal, on coins, and in the civic imagination. It described what the founders were actually attempting: thirteen quarrelling colonies, many faiths, many origins, one republic.

Notice what it does not say. 

It does not say what you must believe. 

It says what we are building together.

Why it matters so very much now

A motto is not harmless just because it is old. Courts have upheld "In God We Trust" by calling it "ceremonial deism," a phrase so worn by repetition that it supposedly means nothing. 

Christian nationalists treat it as the opposite: proof that this is a Christian nation and a legal foothold for the next step.

It aids the putrid Christian accelerationism too many of them support and desire.

You can watch that step being taken. 

Several states now require "In God We Trust" posters in public school classrooms. Louisiana and Texas have passed laws ordering the Ten Commandments posted there too. In Washington, the administration has opened a White House Faith Office, launched a task force on "anti-Christian bias," and created a Religious Liberty Commission, while the president who hawked $60 Bibles casts himself as Christianity's defender.

The pattern is old and well documented. Strongmen wrap themselves in faith because faith converts political opposition into heresy. 

If the nation officially trusts in God, and the leader claims God's favor, then dissent becomes a sin. 

The motto on the money is a small piece of that machinery, but it is the piece every American carries in their pocket.

Look at the illiberal, autocratic, corruptive direction this Donald Trump administration, his Republican (Maga) Party are taking us. These tools in their war chest seem harmless, certainly to their supporters. But are far less harmless than they seem, then they proclaim, than seems obvious to many, but painfully obvious once you see it and can no longer not see it.

The case for Out of Many, One

It includes everyone. Tens of millions of Americans are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, pagan, agnostic, atheist, or simply unaffiliated. "In God We Trust" speaks for some citizens about all of them. E Pluribus Unum speaks for all of them about each other.

It matches the Constitution. 

The First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion. A government that declares, in its official motto, whom the nation trusts has taken a side. E Pluribus Unum takes no side on belief. It takes the side of the Union.

It ends the insider test. "In God We Trust" has become a quiet way of sorting real Americans from suspect ones. A motto about unity leaves no room for that sorting. You cannot be outside of "one."

It is civic, not sectarian. Believers lose nothing. Their faith does not depend on the Treasury's endorsement, and many would argue it is better off without it, as Roosevelt did. What the country gains is a shared identity built on citizenship rather than creed.

It is the original. Restoring E Pluribus Unum is not a radical change. It is a return to the founders' choice, made in the year of independence, after a 70-year Cold War detour.

Before God, there was "Mind Your Business"

The first coin authorized by the United States government carried no reference to God at all. The 1787 Fugio cent, approved by the Confederation Congress, used a design traced to Benjamin Franklin's 1776 Continental Currency.

One side shows a blazing sun over a sundial, the Latin word FUGIO ("I fly," as in time flies), and the motto MIND YOUR BUSINESS. In Franklin's day that meant attend to your work and use your hours well, not "stay out of my affairs." The other side shows thirteen linked rings, one for each state, around the words WE ARE ONE.

Franklin was a Freemason (I am one myself) and a Grand Master of Pennsylvania's Masons, and the coin speaks a language any Mason will recognize: the sun as light and reason, the dial as time and discipline, the linked rings as a chain of union. 

No record says the coin was designed as a Masonic piece, and it should not be sold as one. But its values are plainly Enlightenment values, the same ones that run through the Craft.

Read the whole coin as a sentence and you get the best civic creed this country ever minted: Time flies. Mind your business. We are one.

Sixty-nine years is long enough

The national motto lives in a single line of federal law, 36 U.S.C. § 302, and the currency requirement in two more. Congress put them there. Congress can take them out.

That will not happen this year or next. But mottos change when people stop treating them as untouchable, and that starts with saying plainly what this one has become: 

a Cold War slogan now serving a movement that wants citizenship to depend on belief.

On this anniversary, tell your representatives you want the founders' motto back. 

Share the Fugio cent with someone who has never seen it. 

And the next time someone tells you this is a Christian nation, hand them a dollar and ask them to read the seal on the back. 

It is still there, in the eagle's beak, where Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams put it 250 years ago.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. 

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things here at Murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Formula - A thought experiment, followed to the end

A note before reading:

This is a thought experiment, and it is labeled as one for a reason. It takes a formula that many people have quietly run in their heads, states it plainly, and tests it link by link to see whether it holds. It does not. Nothing here advocates violence against anyone. The piece exists to follow a dangerous idea to its end and show where it breaks, because ideas left unexamined do more damage than ideas taken apart in daylight. Read it to the last line before deciding what it says. 

I am a humanist, a Buddhist of sorts, and I wish harm on no human being. Therein lies much of our problem today against those who do not share that orientation. 

The answer is not to become them. Still, one must think it through. What follows does.

Here is the formula, stated plainly.

Remove Putin. Remove whoever reaches for the chair next, and the one after, until a Russian leader emerges who wants back into the world. Moscow, stung, answers in kind, and the American president falls to hands no one sees. Neither country's opposition carries the stain. Both are freed. Peace follows.

It has a terrible symmetry. Two countries locked in death spirals by two men. Two oppositions that cannot act without inheriting the illegitimacy of the act. One exchange that frees them both.

Plenty of people have run some version of it in their heads. Few have run it to the end. So test it. Link by link.

Link one: remove Putin

This is the strongest link, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The war is unusually personal. Putin wrote the essays denying Ukrainian nationhood. He made the decision in a small room with a smaller circle. Russian elections cannot remove him; this month's managed vote returned his party as designed. The people bleeding for the war cannot vote their way out, speak their way out, or walk out.

There is evidence that leadership removal matters. Economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken studied a century of assassination attempts on national leaders and found that successful killings of autocrats were followed by moves toward democracy more often than failed attempts were. Stalin's death in 1953 was followed within months by an armistice in Korea and the end of the Doctors' Plot.

So link one holds, as a proposition: Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. Keep that in mind. It matters at the end.

Link two: remove the next, and the next

Here the formula starts to strain. The constitution hands power to the prime minister. Behind him stand the security services, people who survived twenty-five years by being the most careful and most ruthless in the room.

Each removal teaches the survivors one lesson: the West kills Russian leaders. The ones who rise next are the ones built for a siege. The filter does not select for the rational. It selects for the paranoid.

And someone has to decide who counts as rational. Whoever makes that call is choosing Russia's leader. Russians have seen this before, in other countries, and so have we. Iran, 1953. The installed leader held power for a quarter century. Then came the revolution, and the grievance still shapes Iranian politics seventy years later. A leader chosen by elimination abroad is a leader illegitimate at home.

Link three: Moscow answers in kind

This is where the formula contradicts itself.

It requires the new Russian leadership to be two things at once: rational enough to want back into the international community, and willing to kill an American president. Those are not compatible. A rational leader seeking reentry does not commit the one act guaranteed to make reentry impossible. Through forty years of Cold War, with every motive and every capability, neither Washington nor Moscow killed the other's head of state. Not from squeamishness. From calculation. Both understood what came after.

If the retaliation comes instead from the security hardliners in the interval, before the rational leader arrives, then the formula has handed the decisive act to exactly the people it was designed to filter out.

Link four: no one carries the stain

This is the load-bearing beam. The whole formula exists to solve one problem: the domestic opposition cannot act without inheriting the act.

But the stain does not disappear when the hand is foreign. It moves.

If Russia is identified, Russia owns it, and the United States is at war footing with a nuclear power. If Russia is not identified, the vacuum fills with certainty in every direction. John F. Kennedy had a known shooter, and sixty years later most Americans still suspect a conspiracy. A death with no author would be assigned one within the hour, along tribal lines. Tens of millions would name the American left no matter what the evidence said.

The formula does not remove the stain. It distributes it to everyone.

Link five: both countries are freed

The American half of the premise holds that the movement lives only in the man. Remove him and it dissolves.

History says otherwise. Perón was exiled in 1955 and died in 1974; Peronism still structures Argentine politics. Chávez died of cancer in 2013; Chavismo continued through Maduro. Personalist movements survive their founders routinely. They survive best when the founder is taken from them. A sudden vacancy would not end the movement. It would hand it a martyr and hand the successor a mandate.

And it would hand the state a pretext. The Reichstag burned on February 27, 1933. The emergency decree came the next day. In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, a gunman produced not collapse but a raised fist and a wave of sympathy. A government already testing emergency powers would not treat a sudden vacancy as an ending. It would treat it as an opening.

Link six: peace follows

The final link asks the United States to make peace with the state that killed its president. No American public would accept it. No American government could survive proposing it. The formula ends not in peace but in the war it was built to prevent, this time between the two largest nuclear arsenals on earth.

The verdict

On the American side, the formula fails at every link after the first. It does not break the spiral. It feeds it, then hands the spiral a martyr, a pretext, and a foreign enemy.

On the Russian side, the question stays open.

Link one held. Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. What the formula got wrong was not the destination but the hands. Every case where a leader's death changed a country's course for the better shares one feature: the change came from inside. Stalin's successors ended the terror because they feared it themselves, not because anyone abroad made them.

Whether that happens in Russia depends on whether the people around Putin decide the war costs them more than it gives them. That calculation is happening now, in rooms no one outside can see. The outside world can raise the price. It cannot pick the outcome.

Hundreds of thousands dead. One man ordering it. The arithmetic is real.

The formula is not. 

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Filing Cabinet Never Lied to Me, I Just Kept Changing the Rules

The Mess That Isn't One

For most of my life I've described my own organizational skills the same way, apologetically. I'd call them a nightmare. I'd say I work in a round robin, jumping from one piece of a project to another whenever I hit friction, following whatever sparks interest at the moment, circling back later to pull it all together. I'd say my filing, physical and digital both, is a disaster I've never solved in decades of trying. And I'd say all of this like it was a flaw I'd learned to work around rather than fix.

I want to lay out what I've come to understand about that pattern, not because I think I've cracked it, but because I suspect a lot of people with ADHD brains, or brains wired something like mine, have lived the same confusion without ever having language for it. If any of this lands for you the way it's landed for me, that's the whole point of writing it down.

Two different systems, and only one of them was ever broken

Here's the thing I got wrong for years: I treated "how I organize" and "how I produce" as the same problem. They aren't. They're two entirely separate systems, and only one of them was ever actually failing.

The producing side, the actual work of writing, filmmaking, tech writing, whatever the project, has never been the problem. I've moved through projects fast, one foot in front of the other, doing whatever seemed most productive or most interesting at the time, switching to something else the moment I hit an impediment, working multiple fronts until they converged into something finished. From the inside, that always felt chaotic. No plan, no sequence, no visible structure. But the results were consistently strong, often produced faster than people working a more linear, methodical way.

The storage side, archiving material, categorizing information, filing papers, remembering where things went, is the part that never worked. Every system I tried to build for it eventually became confusing and then just fell apart.

For years I conflated the two. I assumed the chaos in my process was the same chaos causing my filing problems. It isn't. The production chaos was never actually chaos. It only looked that way because the thinking happening underneath it was invisible, including to me, while I was in the middle of it.

What the production side actually is

I spent years as a technical writer, and I had a habit that, in hindsight, tells you everything about what was really happening. When someone requested a document, I didn't write one version. I wrote three: what they explicitly asked for, what I thought they actually needed in order to use it well, and what I suspected they didn't yet know they'd need. Every time. Across companies, across states, across managers who had never met each other and had no shared context for what I was doing.

They almost always chose the version that matched their original request. That was their call to make, and I was never bothered by it. It usually worked fine for them. Sometimes it didn't, and I could see that clearly when it happened, quietly, without saying anything.

What made this strange to the people I worked for wasn't the three versions. It was the process that got me there. I'd take notes in a meeting, write a first draft, and hand it over, and it would come back looking, to them, like I'd missed the point entirely. "How are you so off track here?" Then a second draft, closer. Then a third, final draft, the one they'd originally asked for, landing with a precision that visibly surprised them. One manager once asked me directly how I'd gotten to something so right, so fast, when my first draft had been so wrong.

The first draft wasn't wrong. It was me mapping the terrain before committing to a path through it, walking the version they hadn't asked for and the version they didn't know they needed, in parallel, before converging on the one they'd requested. What looked like being off track was actually the width of the search happening before the narrowing. The confusion those managers felt, more than once, in more than one company, wasn't about my competence. It was a mismatch between how they'd been trained to expect a draft to evolve (straight line, incremental correction toward a fixed target) and how I actually worked (wide first, multiple models held at once, fast convergence once the terrain was known).

There's a real term for this, sometimes called divergent-then-convergent processing: generating broadly, including deliberately exploring paths that won't be the final answer, before narrowing to the target. Most people are taught to go straight at a request. That method skips the information that, for me, is exactly what makes the final answer precise. Going wide first isn't a detour. It's how the correct answer gets found.

What the storage side actually is

Now the part that never worked, and still doesn't.

When I try to build a category system, physical filing, digital folders, doesn't matter, the categories I settle on make sense to me in the moment I create them. Weeks or months later, they don't hold. A document that felt like it belonged in one category when I filed it looks like it belongs somewhere else entirely by the time I go looking for it, because what I was thinking about, what mattered to me, has shifted. The framework itself doesn't stay fixed long enough to function as a framework.

This has a name too. Organizational psychology sometimes calls it schema instability: the categorization system depends on holding a consistent framework in mind and applying it the same way every time, and that consistency is exactly what doesn't hold. It's not that I lack a system. It's that my systems don't stay still.

It compounds. When I update my understanding of something, new information, a new angle, the framework changes in my head, but nothing marks what changed or when. The things I filed under the old logic just sit there, unlabeled as to which version of my thinking put them there. Later I'm trying to read my own filed material using a decoder that's already been quietly replaced. That's retroactive interference layered onto schema drift with no version history. The mess isn't that I forget where things are. It's that I forget which rules were in effect when I put them there.

A pile of unfied papers builds because filing requires a decision I've never been able to make reliably. Scanning becomes its own time sink for the same reason: it still requires deciding where something belongs, so it just becomes a digital pile instead of a physical one. The frustration isn't laziness. It's hitting the same broken step every time, no matter what medium I try it in.

Why this matters, if you recognize it

The reason I'm writing this down isn't to complain, and it isn't to make a case for my own process, though I'll admit some pride crept in while thinking through the tech writing years. It's because I think a lot of people with minds like mine have spent decades doing exactly what I did: treating the disorganization as the whole story, and missing that the "chaos" driving their actual work might be a completely different, and completely functional, system.

If you produce well but can't explain how, if your first attempts look wrong to other people right up until they suddenly aren't, if your filing has never once made sense to you a year after you built it, it might be worth separating those two threads the way I eventually did. One of them might not need fixing at all. The other one might never fully resolve, and that's worth knowing too, so you stop treating it as a moral failure and start treating it as a known cost of how you think.

I still don't have a solution for the filing cabinet. I'm not sure I ever will. But I finally understand what it is, and what it isn't, and that on its own has been worth the years it took to work out.

We Once Loved the Birth of the Internet.

We LOVED the text-based Internet.

"Information is free!" "Community, not capitalism!"

We weren't socialists, or communists, or anything but Humanitarian and purveyors of elevating humanity, education and enhancing everyone's understanding of the world around us. Many were of positions that allowed them access from higher levels, universities, research groups and so on as the Internet was disseminated on a larger and larger scope in pushing it out to every more people. Until people with not the best of intent gained access and we started to notice a downside.

People in newsgroups back in the late 80s and early 90s got run off, if not off of being online, our of newsgroups for trying to monetize OUR Internet. Our, being what we were cultivating in its best orientation for all, not just those with money, or those with military intent.

That was the deal. That was the culture. It was a positive thing, for the masses.

Around the same time, on C-SPAN, Newt Gingrich was giving fiery speeches to an empty chamber, knowing the camera only showed him, not the empty seats. Theater, not debate. A lie, not truth. Weaponizing what was for everyone, for only the few, his few.

Anything goes, once you decide you're done losing. That's where our toxic politics really got its legs.

Then the internet grew up, and it turned out to be the perfect stage for exactly that kind of theater, at scale. Gingrich-style scorched earth built the audience. Russian disinformation operations later found that same audience ready-made and went to work on it. 

I spent decades studying KGB influence tactics, going back to my Air Force years in the late 1970s. By the 90s I started seeing the same playbook show up in GOP messaging, and it floored me that almost nobody else in public was saying so out loud. 

Not until about the 2010s when people started realizing it and saying aloud what they had not that long ago claimed I was crazy for saying. It was relieving, rewarding, and irritating for the two decades of abuse, or worse, being discounted. Ignored. Looked at like I was a fool, while I watched most of us acting like exactly that. 

Especially in one political party in particular. One that finally saw it's desired fruition in electing someone like Donald Trump. Twice. Now regretting that. 

Except for those making the most money under his mob boss tutelage. 

I started noticing in the early 90s how Soviet/KGB subversive efforts against America, against the West were being picked up and used by the American Right, the Republican Party, people like Newt Gingrich. Lies sold as truth. Spin was the rule of the day, they broke that barrier and pushed that spin by the Left were lies, and lies by the Right, were Truth. Now we have what?

Truth Social, perhaps the biggest lie of them all but our biggest liar ever.

The internet still gave us real things. More community. More connection, for more people who never had it before.

But capitalism got in anyway. And got in the way, as we knew it would. We watched out dream die on the vine.

And it won. Toxic politics and toxic capitalism ended up feeding each other, each one making the other more profitable.

Now we've got broken social media, engagement over humanity, platform owners emboldened by both.

An AI now able to weaponize it ALL. Against US, We The People. For THEM. Those who own most of the money while we all are struggling.

We tried. We failed. But all is not lost--yet. Only if we let it be.

Better leaders. Better products. Dynamics that pull us together, not apart. They are out there, asking for our votes, rather than for those whose only and best interests are not for us, but for them.

They merely say it is for us, but their actions prove otherwise, constantly, incessantly. Sadly. Sadly, for us as they grow ever stronger in wealth and power. But we are waking. Slowly, sick of the abuse.

Truth over spin. Over lies. Reality over performance.

We are the People. Never forget that.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!