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 Oldest Hustle in American Crime: When They Say It's About Who You Are

There is a script. It is older than anyone currently living. It goes like this:

I am not a criminal. I am a threat. And they hate me because of what I represent to you. 

Al Capone knew it by heart.

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By the late 1920s, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was the most powerful organized crime figure in America. He ran bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution across Chicago with an iron fist wrapped in a silk suit. He ordered murders. He bribed police captains, judges, and aldermen wholesale. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre -- seven men machine-gunned in a garage on his orders -- was so brazen it shook the country.

And yet Al Capone's public posture, maintained with remarkable consistency, was that of a persecuted man.

"Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua," Capone said, "the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.'"

He wasn't just complaining. He was building a brand. Capone cultivated a Robin Hood image, donated to soup kitchens during the Depression, made himself accessible to reporters, and cast himself as a simple businessman being singled out by hypocrites. "When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging," he pointed out. "When my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality." He told crowds he had "spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time," and received in return only "abuse, the existence of a hunted man."

This country wanted booze, he said. He organized it. Why should he be called a public enemy?

The argument was not without a certain populist electricity. Prohibition was absurd. The rich did drink openly while working-class men went to jail. The cops Capone bribed were on every other corner. He was telling people things they already half-believed, and wrapping himself in their grievances as insulation against his own accountability.

His defense attorney argued at trial that the tax prosecution was simply a pretext -- that the government wasn't really after tax fraud, it was just trying to "stow Al Capone away." The jury should not, he told them, be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.

The jury convicted him anyway. He died at 48, his mind destroyed by syphilis, the empire he built already in ruins.

But the script survived him.

---

Donald Trump did not invent the populist criminal's persecution narrative. He inherited it, refined it, and ran it at a scale Capone could never have imagined -- not across one city, but across an entire country, through television, social media, and the machinery of a major political party.

The playbook is identical. Only the costumes changed.

Where Capone said "every time something goes wrong, they blame me," Trump told his supporters at a Waco rally: "They're not coming after me. They're coming after you. I'm just standing in the way." The logic is the same move, executed a century apart. The criminal reframes his own legal accountability as an attack on the people who love him.

Where Capone cast himself as a simple man meeting a public demand -- beer, whiskey, a good time -- Trump cast himself as a simple man giving people what they wanted: jobs, a wall, a middle finger pointed at the people who looked down on them. "From the time I came down the golden escalator," Trump said after his first indictment, the radical left had been engaged in a witch hunt "to destroy the Make America Great Again movement." Not him. The movement. You.

Where Capone pointed at the hypocrisy of Prohibition -- the law applied selectively, to the poor and the ethnic, while the wealthy drank freely -- Trump pointed at real and perceived hypocrisy in the justice system: Hillary Clinton's emails, Hunter Biden's laptop, the two-tiered application of law. Some of those complaints had genuine substance. That's the point. The hustle works best when it's built on a foundation of things that are actually true.

Trump claimed the prosecution "would immediately stop" if he decided not to run for president -- framing his legal exposure as purely political, a weapon aimed not at a man who broke the law, but at a movement that threatened power. He compared his situation to Alexei Navalny dying in an Arctic prison. He called it "the existence of a hunted man."

Capone would have recognized that phrase. He used it himself.

---

Here is where the comparison becomes not just rhetorical but precise.

Capone ran an organization built on intimidation and bribery, surrounded himself with men willing to commit violence on his behalf, and corrupted every institution he could reach -- police, courts, city hall. He positioned this as American enterprise. "My rackets are run on strictly American lines," he said. He was not knocking the system. He was just using it.

Trump surrounded himself with what a presidential historian called "a team of felons" -- eleven top allies convicted or having pled guilty, their combined sentences totaling roughly thirty years. He pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. He urged his attorney general to go after Hillary Clinton. He leaned on election officials in Georgia to "find" votes. He was impeached twice. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. He pardoned rioters who broke into the Capitol at his encouragement, including the first man to breach the building.

And throughout all of it, his line never wavered: this is persecution. They are doing this because of who I am, and what I mean to you.

The crucial difference between Capone and Trump is that Capone never got his hands on the actual machinery of the state. He had to bribe it from the outside. Trump won the presidency twice. He used the Justice Department as a tool of personal vengeance. He pardoned his own criminal associates. He sat in the Oval Office and directed federal power at his enemies while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of federal power.

Capone claimed he was being hunted. Trump made himself the hunter, from inside the building, while still claiming to be the prey.

---

The populist criminal's greatest trick is not the lie. It's the grain of truth.

Capone was right that Prohibition was selectively enforced. Trump is right that the justice system does not treat everyone equally. Both men took that truth, swallowed it whole, and used it to insulate themselves from consequences for things that had nothing to do with inequality and everything to do with their own appetites for power and money.

Capone's defense attorney told the jury: don't be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.

Trump's supporters say the same thing today, at a volume that shakes windows.

But here is what the script always leaves out: the question of whether the government is treating you fairly is entirely separate from the question of whether you did the things they say you did.

Al Capone did the things they said he did.

Donald Trump did the things they said he did.

The jury that convicted Capone did not acquit him because he made them feel good at rallies. The question of what we do with that fact -- what we do with a man who turned the oldest hustle in American crime into the platform of a presidency -- is not a question about him.

It is a question about us.

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.

Mike Johnson Is Doing Putin's Job for Him

Given how thoroughly Mike Johnson and his MaGA Republicans have crippled American governance in service to Trump, how differently would Putin actually guide them -- because from where I sit, the overlap is nearly total.

Mike Johnson, the First Proudly Trumpian Speaker | The New Yorker

This is worth taking seriously as political analysis. Here's how I'd frame it:

Putin's known strategic wishlist for America:

Russia's two long-standing strategic goals are dominion over Ukraine and the weakening of U.S. power, especially in Europe -- both embedded in its ambition to undo the post-Cold War order. More specifically, Putin knows his military can't defeat NATO conventionally, but he can create enough division from within its ranks to fracture trust across the 32-member alliance. 

And beyond Ukraine, his goal is to regain the position of the Soviet Union of his youth: control over Eastern Europe, most of Central Europe, and at least parts of Southeastern Europe -- in a Europe largely abandoned by the United States. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace + 2

So the script Putin would hand an American Speaker would look something like this:

• Abandon Ukraine or force humiliating terms on Zelensky
• Hollow out NATO's credibility, especially the Article 5 mutual defense commitment
• Create internal American chaos that consumes all political oxygen
• Erode trust in democratic institutions, courts, press, elections
• Alienate European allies so they can't coordinate against Moscow
• Keep America turned inward on culture war and grievance politics
• Weaken the intelligence community's ability to counter Russian ops

Now compare that to what Johnson is actually delivering:

Europeans have been taken aback by Trump's refusal to commit additional assistance to Ukraine and the pressure placed on Kyiv to accept Russian demands, including the formal ceding of sovereignty over seized territory and the abandonment of NATO membership aspirations.

Putin himself pointed out that Trump's national security strategy doesn't name Russia as a direct adversary, asking pointedly:

"How can you prepare NATO for a war with Russia if the main member of NATO doesn't consider us an enemy?"

That's Putin not complaining -- that's Putin gloating publicly.

On the domestic chaos front, Johnson's tenure has been marked by few legislative accomplishments and a series of internal splits that consistently stymied his party's own agenda.

The House Republican conference is so consumed by factional performance politics that basic governance has become nearly impossible -- which is exactly the kind of dysfunction that makes America look weak and ungovernable to the world.

Where would Putin change the script?

Honestly, very little.

If Putin were actually advising Johnson, the additions would be marginal -- maybe push harder on dismantling the intelligence community's Russia-tracking capacity (DOGE cuts to the IC have already helped here), perhaps push for formal U.S. recognition of Russian territorial gains in Ukraine, and encourage more friction with the Baltic states specifically.

But the core program -- institutional erosion, NATO skepticism, Ukraine abandonment, culture war distraction, authoritarian executive consolidation, media delegitimization -- is already running.

Putin wouldn't need to issue new instructions so much as send a thank-you note.

The uncomfortable conclusion: the gap between "what Putin would want" and "what Trump/Johnson/MaGA are doing" is so narrow it barely constitutes a gap.

It's the kind of convergence that doesn't require a conspiracy to explain -- it just requires shared interests in weakening the liberal democratic order, for very different stated reasons.

They don't need to be coordinated to be useful to Moscow.

Any more than those under Trump need a direct call to his illiberal, or illegal actions. They know what he expects. It's what they telegraphed to him for selection. It's what they were hired to do. 

It's also how the Mafia worked. It's how criminal organizations work.

It's Why RICO was created to deal with that criminal universe.

They just need to keep doing exactly what they're doing.

This isn't rocket science. It's not complicated. 

They're not even any longer trying to hide it, any of it.

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.

Goldwater Was Right: The Toxic Gospel of Capitalist Christianity

Before I get started, I hope you and yours had a great 4th of July celebration weekend! 

The History of the Fourth of July - On the fourth of July each year, also known as Independence Day, Americans celebrate this historic event.

Moving on...

Barry Goldwater saw it coming. He said so plainly. Nobody listened.

In November 1994, the man who had spent his life as the intellectual cornerstone of American conservatism picked up the phone and told John Dean exactly what he thought about the direction the Republican Party was headed. "Mark my word," he said, "if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

He had names in mind. Pat Robertson. The Christian Coalition. The Moral Majority orbit that had been methodically colonizing the Republican Party since Jerry Falwell decided God needed a lobbyist. Goldwater had been fighting these people inside his own party for years, and losing. He died in 1998. He didn't live to see how thoroughly he lost.

What Goldwater was describing wasn't Christianity. It wasn't even a coherent political philosophy. It was something more dangerous and more specific: the fusion of evangelical fervor with raw institutional ambition, wrapped in scriptural language to inoculate it against criticism. You can't argue with someone who believes they're doing God's work. That was his point. That was always his point.

Thirty years later, the movement he warned about has a name most Americans still haven't heard. They should learn it.

The Seven Mountain Mandate

The Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM, is a dominionist theological framework that holds that Christians are called not merely to evangelize but to seize control of the seven key institutions of society: family, religion, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. The goal isn't conversion through persuasion. The goal is dominion through occupation. Believers are instructed to place themselves in leadership positions across all seven spheres, reorient those institutions toward biblical principles as the movement defines them, and in doing so hasten the Second Coming of Christ.

The framework traces back to a 1975 meeting between evangelical leaders Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, who sketched out the "seven spheres" concept as a strategy for Christian societal impact. It was popularized more recently by figures like Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson in their 2013 book "Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate." The title is not subtle. Neither is the theology.

The movement is tightly linked with the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic network that has revived the concept of living apostles and prophets who receive direct divine direction for how the faithful should move through these seven mountains. It is organized, it is networked, and it has been quietly seeding itself into American political life for decades while most observers were looking elsewhere.

A 2024 poll found that 41 percent of American Christians have been influenced by or believe in 7MM concepts. That is not a fringe. That is a movement.

The Prosperity Gospel Connection

To understand why Goldwater's label of "capitalist Christianity" is more than rhetorical, you have to understand what prosperity theology actually teaches.

The prosperity gospel holds that God rewards the faithful with material wealth, and conversely that material wealth is evidence of divine favor. Poverty is a spiritual failing. Financial success is a sign of righteousness. The private jet is not hypocrisy. The private jet is testimony.

This is not a marginal position in the 7MM ecosystem. It is central to it. Business is literally one of the seven mountains. Market dominance becomes a spiritual mandate. The accumulation of wealth isn't just permitted -- it's commanded. Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Paula White-Cain: these are not outliers in this world. They are its architects and its celebrities.

Paula White-Cain, of course, served as Donald Trump's personal spiritual advisor and held a formal position in the White House Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives. When she stood in the East Room and declared that "all demonic networks" were broken over opposition to Trump's presidency, she was not performing for the cameras. She was doing exactly what the Seven Mountain Mandate instructs. She was exercising dominion from inside the mountain of government, on behalf of a man she had declared anointed.

That moment deserved far more scrutiny than it received. It got very little.

What This Isn't

It is worth being precise about what Goldwater was not saying, and what critics of 7MM are not saying. This is not an argument against Christianity, or against Christians in public life, or against religious conviction informing political values. People of faith have always participated in American democracy. The abolition movement was drenched in Christian theology. So was the civil rights movement. So is much of the Catholic social justice tradition.

The distinction matters enormously. Christianity as a moral foundation for civic engagement looks like: caring for the poor, opposing injustice, advocating for the vulnerable, accepting the dignity of people who differ from you. These are positions that require engagement with a pluralistic democracy. They require compromise, coalition, and persuasion.

The Seven Mountain Mandate looks like: seizing the institutions so you don't have to persuade anyone. It looks like: placing believers in positions of authority specifically to reorient those institutions away from pluralism. It looks like: describing secular culture as "demonic" and your opponents as agents of Satan. Speaker Mike Johnson is the most visible current example of a politician whose stated worldview is saturated with 7MM and NAR theology. He is second in line to the presidency.

Jesus of Nazareth had quite a lot to say about wealth and power in the Gospels. Very little of it resembled what Kenneth Copeland preaches from his $6.3 million parsonage. The people Goldwater was warning about have constructed a theology that would be unrecognizable to the tradition they claim to represent.

The Party Goldwater Built

There is a bitter irony running through all of this. Barry Goldwater spent his career building an American conservatism based on individual liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the absolute separation of religious authority from state power. He was not a gentle or easy man politically. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds he would later reconsider. He held views that were genuinely hard-edged.

But he also supported gay rights. He supported abortion rights. He believed with ferocity that what happened in your bedroom, in your church, and in your conscience was none of the government's business, and certainly none of Pat Robertson's business. He told the Senate in 1981 that he was "frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are?"

The movement he spent his last years fighting didn't just take over the party he built. It gutted it, hollowed it out, and replaced its principles with a dominionist theology that treats democratic pluralism as an obstacle rather than a value. The MaGA movement is its current political expression, and the overlap between MaGA, NAR, and 7MM is not incidental. It is structural.

Goldwater was a conservative's conservative who understood that the republic runs on compromise and that anyone who won't compromise because God told them not to is not a political actor. They are something else entirely.

He tried to deal with them. He said so himself.

The rest of us are still figuring out how.

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 Man I Warned You About": What William F. Buckley Would Make of Trump and His MaGA Republican Party

I was a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. decades ago. And of Gore Vidal. The opposites of the Right and Left political thinking in their day, respectively. I still watch Buckley's Firing Line, now in the competent hands of Margaret Hoover. I came across the documentary Best of Enemies - Buckley vs Vidal (2015) on Netflix, that I highly recommend, and it got me thinking. It was about their 10-night ABC network airing during the Republican Convention in 1968 in Miami, Florida which I would love to get a chance to view...all 10 episodes. Even though each segment was only 15 minutes druing each night's 90-minute news show.

What would Buckley make of Pres. #47 Donald J Trump today? Not much I thought. So who is Buckley?

William F. Buckley Jr. was the most influential intellectual architect of modern American conservatism. He founded National Review in 1955 as the movement's flagship journal, hosted Firing Line for 33 years as the longest-running public affairs show in television history, and was widely regarded as the most skilled conservative debater of his generation. Erudite, witty, and relentlessly disciplined, he believed conservatism had to be intellectually serious to be politically durable. He was not a populist. He was the man who defined what the American right was supposed to be.

One of his most consequential acts was purging the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, on the grounds that conspiratorial, anti-intellectual populism would destroy conservatism's credibility and marginalize it from mainstream American life. That decision shaped the Republican Party's intellectual identity for decades.

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What He Actually Said About Trump

Around 2000, when Trump briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination, William F. Buckley wrote critically about him, in National Review, characterizing him as a demagogue whose essential appeal was flattering crowds while offering no substantive ideology beyond self-promotion. He identified Trump's narcissism as the core of his political identity. This was not a passing dismissal. Buckley chose his words with precision, and he used them deliberately.

It was in part reprinted in 2016, again in the National Review.

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On MaGA and Populism

The Birch Society purge is the key lens here. MaGA, with its election denialism, conspiracy adjacency, contempt for institutional expertise, and grievance-driven mass politics, would look to Buckley like the Birchers' revenge. He spent decades trying to prevent exactly this kind of movement from capturing the Republican Party. Watching it succeed would have been, for him, a historic failure of conservative nerve.

On Institutions

Buckley was a deeply institutional man. Yale, the CIA, the Church, the Senate, the press. He believed civilization was built on inherited structures that required active defense against both left-wing leveling and right-wing wrecking. Trump's sustained assault on the Justice Department, the electoral system, NATO, and the independent press would not read to Buckley as disruption or strength. It would read as vandalism.

On Trade and Foreign Policy

Buckley was a free trader and a Cold War internationalist who saw the liberal international order as a necessary defense against totalitarianism. Tariff nationalism, America First isolationism, and hostility to alliances would be nearly incomprehensible to him as conservative positions. He would see them as strategic recklessness dressed up as patriotism.

On Style

This matters more than people credit. Buckley believed conservatism should project civilizational confidence, wit, and seriousness. He cared about what the movement looked like to educated people. Trump's rally aesthetic, the vulgarity, the grievance saturation, the contempt for precision and argument, would strike Buckley as not just politically wrong but as an embarrassment to everything he built.

Where It Gets Complicated

Buckley had his own contradictions. His civil rights record was late and troubled. He had an aristocratic streak that could shade into romanticizing hierarchy. And his loathing of the left was bone-deep, which might have made a clean break from the Republican Party psychologically difficult even as he watched it transform into something he didn't recognize.

His most likely posture would have been to call for a conservative reformation from within, probably to diminishing audiences, probably futilely.

---

The Bottom Line

Buckley would almost certainly argue that MaGA is not conservatism at all. It is a personality cult that has occupied conservatism's institutional infrastructure while gutting its intellectual content. He would place himself, however uncomfortably, alongside people like George Will and David Frum who chose principle over party. And he would reserve his sharpest contempt not for Trump, whom he had already diagnosed clearly in 2000, but for the conservative intellectuals and Republican officials who knew better and said nothing.

The movement he built was taken over by the kind of man he spent his career warning about.

He saw it coming a quarter century ago.

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 Addiction of Ignorance, and the Revolution We Should Have Seen Coming

I have definitely written about this before. Many times. 

America has a drug problem nobody wants to talk about honestly. Not fentanyl. Not alcohol. Ignorance. Specifically, the cultivated, deliberate, chosen variety. Selective ignorance. And like any addiction, the longer it goes untreated, the more it takes from you, and the more dangerous the addict becomes to everyone around them. 

What makes it an addiction rather than a simple deficit is the active, continuous work required to maintain it. Psychologists call it motivated reasoning: the cognitive process by which people do not reason toward truth but toward conclusions they have already decided they want. This is not passive. 

People running motivated reasoning are working hard, filtering incoming information, discarding what contradicts the preferred conclusion, amplifying what confirms it. The ignorance in America's current crisis is not a shortage of available information. 

We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. This is a shortage of willingness to receive information that costs something. That is a crucial distinction, and it changes everything about how we diagnose what is happening to us.

We did not stumble into this. We chose it, repeatedly, at every turn where knowing something inconvenient would have cost us comfort, privilege, or the warm bath of tribal belonging. We chose it in churches, in school board meetings, in voting booths, and on social media feeds algorithmically tuned to feed us exactly what we already believed. The addiction metastasized in plain sight.

And it is worth understanding why the social cost of knowing is so high. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established decades ago that human identity is inseparable from group membership. We do not just belong to groups. We are our groups. 

When the group's shared worldview requires the rejection of expertise, accepting expertise becomes an act of betrayal. You do not just change your mind. You lose your people. In communities where the group is the whole of a person's identity and social world, that cost is existential. Ignorance becomes the price of admission, and people pay it willingly, even gratefully, because what they are buying is belonging.

There is a phenomenological dimension here that goes deeper still. Willful unknowing is not a passive state. It is an active, lived experience requiring continuous maintenance. On some level, the person who chooses not to know is aware of the choice. Reality keeps pressing in, and the relief of not engaging it has to be re-administered, reinforced, re-confirmed by the group. That is the addiction structure exactly. The substance is not a chemical. It is the relief of a world simplified to the point where you and your tribe are right, and everyone with credentials and data and uncomfortable questions is the enemy.

I was in high school in the early 1970s when my teacher (I've previously written about my high school Civics and World Problems teacher, the amazing Mrs. Wotton) walked us through what Mao Zedong had done to China with his Cultural Revolution. We sat there, American teenagers, shaking our heads at how stupid those people must be. 

How could an entire society follow a megalomaniac into the deliberate destruction of its own intellectual class? How do you purge universities, persecute doctors, imprison professors, and silence scientists, and have a population that either cheers or says nothing?

We were very smug about that. Very confident it could never happen here.

What we did not understand then, and what the psychology makes clear now, is that Mao's Red Guards were not simply destroying expertise. They were building community through that destruction. The shared rejection of the intellectual class was a bonding ritual. 

The public humiliations, the struggle sessions, the denunciations: all of it created solidarity among participants. You proved your belonging by performing your contempt for knowledge. The crowd that cheers when a professor is fired, when a doctor is silenced, when a library is purged, is not just expressing hatred. It is renewing its membership in the tribe.

Here we are.

Donald Trump did not invent American ignorance. He weaponized it. He handed it a flag, a cross, and a grievance, and told it that everything it didn't understand was the enemy. White Christian nationalism became the operating ideology of a federal government. Not a fringe. Not a protest movement. The government.

The psychological engine underneath that movement has a clinical name: Terror Management Theory, developed from Ernest Becker's foundational work and extended by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. When people feel their mortality, their significance, or their cosmological worldview under threat, they do not open up. They contract. They cling harder to the group identity that gives them meaning and to the enemies that justify their fear. 

White Christian nationalism offers exactly the right package for that psychological state: a cosmology, a tribe, a hierarchy, a villain, and a promise of eternal significance to people who feel they have been made small. Trump did not build that. He found tens of millions of people already running that psychological program and gave them permission to act on it.

Agencies gutted. Scientists fired or sidelined. Educators targeted. Health agencies hollowed out in the middle of a century that has already demonstrated what happens when you let preventable diseases find an opening.

And it is worth knowing that much of this ignorance is not organic. It is manufactured. 

Historian Robert Proctor developed the field of agnotology, the formal study of culturally induced ignorance and doubt, after studying how the tobacco industry spent decades deliberately producing uncertainty about the link between smoking and cancer. 

They did not need people to believe cigarettes were safe. They only needed people to believe the science was unsettled. The same machinery runs today on climate research, vaccine safety, election integrity, and pandemic response. Engineered doubt is not a side effect of the information age. It is a product, developed, funded, and distributed with precision.

We are watching infectious disease rates climb back toward numbers we were told we'd never see again, because a meaningful portion of the population has decided that the people who study disease are the enemy, and the people who spread misinformation about it are the heroes.

We are watching professors lose positions. Researchers lose funding. Federal employees purged for the content of their emails and their perceived politics. Libraries challenged. Curricula sanitized.

And we haven't even gotten to the imprisonments and murders...yet.

I say yet with full awareness of what I'm saying. Because if you had described the current state of American governance to me in 1973 in that high school classroom, I would have told you it sounded exactly like what we were being warned about. 

Except we were being warned about them.

The Soviets. 

The Chinese. Cautionary tales on the other side of the world.

The cautionary tale was always us, waiting to happen.

Ignorance is comfortable. Too comfortable. Selective ignorance is ecstatic. 

You get to keep your prejudices, discard inconvenient facts, belong to a community of the like-minded, and feel righteous about all of it. 

The MaGA movement did not recruit stupid people. It recruited comfortable ones. 

It recruited people who found the drug of chosen ignorance, of selective ignorance, more appealing than the cost of knowing things that challenged their worldview.

Fascism does not need jackboots on day one. 

It needs an addicted population that has practiced, for decades, the discipline of not knowing what it does not want to know. That population is ready-made for whoever arrives with the right story.

It would seem we learned nothing from what we studied. Or we have simply...purposefully...forgotten it.

Worse, we were too arrogant to think we needed to remember it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Purpleism opposes all human irritants. Trump has consumed that space so completely everything now runs through him.
That distortion of daily life is itself a Purpleism issue.
Exhausting.
Malignant Narcissism does that

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 Teacher Who Told Me the Truth and the System That Proves She Was Right - Gerrymandering

There is a specific kind of shock that isn't loud. It doesn't announce itself. It moves through you quietly, like something cold dropping through water, and by the time you know it has happened, your understanding of the world has already shifted and will never quite shift back. I have felt that shock twice in my life before the age of eighteen, and both times it was a classroom that delivered it.

The first time I was seven years old, sitting at a wooden desk in a second-grade classroom approximately half a mile from McChord MAC (Military Airlift Command) Air Force Base in Parkland, a suburb south of Tacoma, Washington, being told that the desk itself would protect me from a nuclear bomb. 

Think, 1950s "Duck and Cover" nonsense.

The second time I was seventeen, spring 1973, sitting in civics class taught by one of the finest teachers I would ever encounter, being told that the political party that wins an election gets to redraw the voting map to help itself win the next one.

Both times, the institution I was sitting inside told me something that was factually untenable. Both times, the adult at the front of the room had no real counter-argument. And both times, I walked out of that room carrying something I had not brought in: the knowledge that the systems I had been raised to trust were capable of something worse than corruption. They were capable of requiring everyone to look directly at the corruption and agree to call it normal.

I want to tell you about Eleanor Wotton. Because she is the reason I am thinking about all of this today.

---

Mrs. Wotton taught social studies, civics, and world problems at Lincoln High School in Tacoma. I had her for world problems in the first half of the 1972-73 school year and for civics in the second half. She was energetic in the way that only genuinely smart and curious people are, not performed enthusiasm, not the theatrical brightness some teachers deploy to keep rooms from going catatonic, but the real thing: a woman who found the world actually interesting and could not entirely conceal her impatience when she suspected you might too.

She was also not an ordinary social studies teacher in her background. 

Somewhere in the years before I knew her, likely the late 1960s, she had worked in some capacity with Chiang Kai-shek, likely in Taiwan where he had lived already for two decades. Chiang, who had lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist government, was by then presiding over the Republic of China from Taipei while the mainland burned under the Cultural Revolution. 

Mao, that regretful bloated monument to self-worship, had by the mid-1960s decided he was less a leader than a cosmological force, enshrining his own thoughts in "Mao's Little Red Book" and distributing it to a nation he was simultaneously destroying, purging intellectuals, crushing dissent, setting China back a generation in the name of raising up "The People." 

The people, as usual in such arrangements, being the last to benefit and the first to suffer. Sound familiar?

It has the distinct smell of something we recognize today. The cult of singular infallibility. The little book replaced by a social media feed. The intellectuals replaced by scientists, journalists, judges. The enemies of the people rebranded but performing the same function. Mao thought he was a god. 

Trumpism doesn't bother with the theology. It just acts like one. 

Not at a remove, not through some academic intermediary, but directly, as part of a commission or advisory group, developing curriculum and programming around world politics and international civics. I did not know this when I sat in her Civics class. I pieced some of it together later from things she said and from what happened the spring of 1973.

My girlfriend at the time and I bought her a poster as an end-of-year gift. It was a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek, smiling broadly, giving what appeared to be the peace sign (likely he intended as a "V" for victory, novelty popularized by some company in a poster). That same two-fingered V that our generation had made the universal emblem of the antiwar movement. For us it was a little irreverent, a little funny, a little affectionate. We found it somewhere, maybe at the Tacoma Mall and thought she would get a kick out of it. We did not fully understand what we were handing her. But she loved it. She was very proud of her work with him and the group that had brought them together. She said that group had developed a game to help teach issues of relevant issues to enhance the world's understanding of our all living in the world together.

A useful point of reference, though not necessarily the model for what Wotton and her commission developed: Risk, the global strategy board game that became a fixture in American households, was invented in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, better known for the classic short film The Red Balloon. 

Originally titled La Conquête du Monde, The Conquest of the World, it was designed to distill the mechanics of global conflict into something a family could play at a kitchen table, strategic enough to reward thinking, simple enough to hinge on a dice roll. What Lamorisse understood, and what made Risk endure, was that the abstraction of world power into game mechanics didn't trivialize geopolitics. 

It made geopolitics legible. A teacher developing curriculum around world politics in the late 1960s, working within the orbit of a government-in-exile watching the mainland convulse under the Cultural Revolution, would have had every reason to think along similar lines: if you want students to understand how nations compete, how alliances form and fracture, how territory translates to power, make them play it out. The game is the lesson.

Other games of the era explored similar terrain: the board game Diplomacy, created in 1954 by Allan Calhamer and famously played by President Kennedy, replaced dice with negotiation and alliance-making to simulate the mechanics of great power competition; and Harold Guetzkow's Inter-Nation Simulation, developed at Northwestern University and published as a classroom kit in 1966, placed students directly in the roles of decision-makers for fictional nations navigating the full architecture of geopolitical conflict. Neither are what Wotton helped develop, but both speak to the moment: the late 1960s belief that if you wanted students to understand how the world actually worked, you made them play it out.

The following year, when I went back to visit her at Lincoln in her classroom, she proudly opened her closet door. There on the inside of the door was Chiang's smiling face, gesturing, right where she would see it every single time she reached for anything in that closet. She was proud of it in a way that was not small. 

She had kept her poster, privately, not as classroom decoration but as something personal. That image, for her, was not a joke. It was layered. It was the man she had worked with, refracted through the exact cultural moment her students were living inside. Two teenagers who had handed her something that connected those two worlds without knowing it, and she had understood that immediately and treasured it.

That tells you who she was.

I had a somewhat troubled school life in my K-12 years, where high school was better but still problematic. I had noticed three teachers I considered our brightest and many did. It was those three who saw me differently and took their time to guide me in ways few other had ever done. Mrs. Van Arnum in 6th grade at Horace Mann Elementary school comes to mind. Mr. Selfors in Mechanical Drawing in 9th grade at Stewart Junior High, was another.

---

The Watergate hearings had been unfolding across the months of our Civics class, and Mrs. Wotton could barely contain herself. She told us we were living through a genuinely historic moment in American civic life, that the mechanisms of democratic accountability were operating in real time, teachable time, visibly, on television, and that we would be watching.

So we watched, in class, on a television she brought in. She folded it into our civics curriculum. This is how it works. This is what the system does when it tries to correct itself. Pay attention.

She was right about that. The hearings were extraordinary. And the belief she was modeling for us, that the system could and would self-correct when sufficiently pressed, was not naive. It was historically grounded. 

Nixon eventually resigned. The process worked, in its grinding, painful, imperfect way.

But there was something else in her curriculum that worked differently on me. Something that did not resolve.

---

The Gerrymandering lesson arrived the way the best lessons do: not as a lecture but as a fact dropped into the room that I could not leave alone.

Mrs. Wotton explained the mechanics of it. The party in power after a census gets to redraw the congressional and state legislative districts. They can configure those districts to concentrate opposing voters into as few districts as possible, or to spread them across many districts so they never constitute a majority in any of them. The result is a map that looks like a democracy and functions like a lock.

I remember absorbing this. I remember the specific quality of the silence in my own head as the implications assembled themselves. I'm seventeen. Not particularly interested in caring about anything. And yet something in me will not let this go.

I raised my hand and said, "So wait. The party that wins gets to redraw the map to make it easier for themselves to win again?"

She said, "Yes, that's essentially correct."

I said, "But that's ridiculous. How's that a balanced democracy? That's...cheating."

She did not argue. She said it has always been that way.

I said it shouldn't be. That should be ended...right now.

She looked at me for a moment with an expression I have never entirely stopped thinking about. It was not the expression of a teacher who has heard a student say something incorrect. It was something closer to the expression of someone who has just heard something they already knew spoken out loud by someone who had no reason to protect themselves from it.

She agreed with me. She said it was a fair point. And then, gently, with the practiced accommodation of someone who has made a long peace with maddening facts, she moved us on.

I sat there stunned, trying to catch up, to move along with the class. 

No one else in the room seemed particularly troubled. My girlfriend, who was smart, either got it in the moment or we worked through it together later. Because I couldn't let it go. The other kids heard it, processed it, and filed it somewhere in the category of things that are unfortunate but are just...there. Mrs. Wotton's acknowledgment that it had always been this way was enough permission to let it rest.

For me it was not enough. 

I spent the rest of that class period only partially present, my seventeen-year-old brain turning the thing over and over. The winning party redraws the map. The winning party redraws the map. I kept expecting to find the angle at which this became acceptable, the principle I was missing that explained why this was actually fine, and I could not find it. Because it isn't there. The logic is exactly as stupid as it looks to a seventeen-year-old who doesn't know enough yet to have learned to look away.

---

This mental explosion had happened before. The nuclear bomb drill was ten years earlier, 1962, second grade, I was seven

The night before, my family had watched a television program about how nuclear weapons work. How the blast expands, sideways. How the heat travels. How the pressure wave moves outward at speeds no shelter of wood or brick or flesh could meaningfully interrupt within the relevant radius.

Ironically the next morning, we had a bomb drill. The teacher told us: OK kids, alarm goes off, now carefully and quickly, get under your desks.

I got under my desk. And then, when she asked if there were questions, as we reseated ourselves, I said I had one.

We went back and forth. I said, this won't protect us. She asked why? She explained that the desk was protective to things falling from the ceiling. I said, but the bomb blast goes sideways and that's part of its destructive power. I explained that, as clearly as a seven-year-old can explain physics. We were also half a mile from McChord AFB. That the desk was made of wood. These facts did not coexist in any meaningful way with her premise. I explained what I had watched the night before, on TV. The definitive source back then.

Obviously flustered, she finally said, at a loss for words: "You're scaring the other children."

Ever noticed how close the word "scaring", "to scare", is...to "scarring", "to scar?"

I looked around. She was right. 

Some of the kids, mostly girls, but some guys, had frightened faces. Others just seemed confused. So I stopped. I dropped it. I was frustrated. Something was wrong about all this. Not because she had answered me. Because I chose, at seven years old, to absorb the cost of the truth rather than make the other children pay it. 

Our teacher was responsible for giving us incorrect information. I didn't think she knew the truth either, only realizing it when I stated it out loud, plainly, clearly. Then she had turned it onto me, I was now the one causing issues, scaring children. Scarring them, perhaps. But mostly I realized as I looked around the class, no, they weren't absorbing what I was trying to say, just...a few.

I walked out of that room that day knowing something I had not known when I walked in. The institution required participation in a fiction. This was something that decades later would become a joke and a shock to the nation when old videos of the rather ridiculous duck-and-cover public service announcements were rediscovered.

The adult in the room that day had no counter-argument. 

The system, whatever system this was, the school, the teachers, the government behind the duck-and-cover program, had decided that the fiction was preferable to the truth, their only fast recourse, and expected everyone to cooperate.

I was seven. I did not have the vocabulary for what I was understanding. But the understanding was real and it was accurate and it has never left me.

---

Mrs. Wotton was one of three teachers in my entire K-12 education who saw me as something other than a problem. The others were my English teacher and my individualized reading teacher. Generally considered at our high school to be our three smartest teachers, our of however many teachers across my formative twelve years of school? Well, there were a few others over the years, but not many.

What I had in common with them, I think, was that I was not bored in their rooms. Not because the material was always easy or always thrilling, but because they were genuinely engaged with ideas, excited about them. And when you are genuinely engaged with ideas you are better at recognizing when someone else is, even when that someone else is wearing the mask of a disinterested seventeen-year-old who acts like he doesn't care.

The symmetry is not coincidental. The students those teachers noticed were the students noticing them. Mrs. Wotton did not miss the gerrymandering moment. She knew exactly what had happened in that exchange. She carried it, I believe, alongside the Chiang Kai-shek poster on the inside of her closet door, as something that had connected, that had meant something, in the way teaching rarely gets to mean something that visibly.

---

Now it is 2026, and I am listening to NPR, and there is a movement of people trying to do what I said should be done in 1973.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi on rising issue of gerrymandering

Nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Independent bodies, structurally removed from the party in power, using neutral geographic and demographic criteria to draw district maps. Not perfect. Nothing in politics is perfect. But meaningfully, structurally different from allowing the winners to design the game board for the next round.

It is working, in the states where it has been implemented. California, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona have all moved in this direction to varying degrees and with varying results, but the underlying principle is sound and the data supports it. 

This, is not a healthy drawn district map. That red tri-formed district on the left, is toxic. Disingenuous. What this does is aid one party over another. What that does is make our country into exactly what we are seeing today. Gridlock. Partisan. Toxic.

A healthier looking map might be this:

Maps drawn without partisan intent produce legislatures that more closely represent the actual distribution of political opinion in the population. This is what democracy is supposed to do.

This, "Win at any or all costs regardless who it harms as long as it's not us" mentality has got to STOP!

The resistance to fixing this is ferocious, particularly from the MaGA Republican movement, which has perfected toxic politics, toxic capitalism, toxic gerrymandering into an instrument of what amounts to minority rule into a kind of "American apartheid": legislatures that vote against policies the majority of constituents support, because the maps were drawn to make the majority structurally irrelevant. 

This is not a side effect. It is the point. It is the feedback loop I identified at seventeen made into a governing philosophy. Win the election, redraw the map, entrench the win, use the entrenchment to win again, use the second win to redraw the map again.

Mrs. Wotton told me it had always been that way. That, was stunning to me. Shocking.

She was right. Both parties have used it when they had the chance. But what we are watching now is something quantitatively different, gerrymandering deployed at a scale and with a precision, aided by computational modeling, that the architects of the practice in previous decades could not have imagined. 

THIS IS PARAMOUNT: technology has made the cheating more efficient without making it any less what it is.

What I said in her class remains what I believe: it should be ended. It is not a moot point. It is one of the central structural pathologies of American democracy, and the fact that it has always been that way is not an argument for its continuation. It is an argument for its urgency.

---

I think about Mrs. Wotton and the closet door. I think about the Generalissimo's smiling face and his fingers held in a V that meant victory to him and peace to us and something private and layered and irreplaceable to her. 

I think about a woman who had worked at the highest levels of international political life and then came back and taught seventeen-year-olds in Tacoma about how the world actually works, with enough honesty to confirm that yes, the cheating is built in, and enough humanity to agree when a student said it should not be.

She was proud of her work with Chiang. She was proud of the poster. And I believe she was proud of the moment in that classroom, the kid who looked at gerrymandering and refused to normalize it.

I was stunned into a kind of cognitive shock that day that I have never entirely recovered from. I don't want to recover from it. The shock is correct.

It's a kind of schema rupture, the specific cognitive shock that occurs when a foundational belief you didn't know you held gets suddenly invalidated. Clinical terms referring to it you might know: cognitive dissonance, disequilibrium, or what trauma theorists call a rupture of the assumptive world.

I didn't know I believed democracy was inherently self-correcting until the moment I discovered it wasn't, and the desk went quiet around me while my seventeen-year-old brain tried to process what had just been said.

We're seeing this play out today with Donald Trump as twice our worst president in history. What he has proven true in his ignorant bull in a China shop orientation, or failed CEO running a nation foolishness is that he is showing us where our democracy has been running pretty well from the beginning so we have not bothered in recent times to take the time and effort to fix what needed to be trimmed or enhanced. 

We have allowed the presidency to become exactly what our Founders feared: a demagogue lacking ethics or knowledge, empathy or historical perspective outside legacy, who would bypass institutions, concentrate power in the executive, and convince the people that he alone could fix it.

The system is as stupid as it looks to someone innocently, objectively seeing it clearly for the first time. The only difference between seventeen and now is that I have fifty more years of watching it compound.

Eleanor Wotton would, I think, not be surprised by any of it.

She would probably just say: it has always been that way.

And I would still say: it shouldn't be.

To that today maybe she would say, then we need to change it.

---

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.