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 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.

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!

If Corporations Are People, Then Lies Are Crimes Against the Body Politic

Citizens United gave speech to power. It never gave truth to anyone.

Why isn't our Body Politic just as important? 

Isn't it MORE important?

There is a law in the United Kingdom that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly make a false statement about a political candidate's personal character or conduct during an election. It lives inside the Representation of the People Act 1983, Section 106, and it is not theoretical. Candidates have been prosecuted under it. 

Courts have taken it seriously. The British legal tradition holds, without apology, that democracy requires a baseline of factual honesty about the people competing for power. Lie about your opponent's record on policy, fine. That is politics. Lie about who he is, what he did, what she said, what they are, and you have committed an offense against the process itself.

The United States has no such law. It cannot have one, according to the current Supreme Court's reading of the First Amendment. Political speech is the most protected category of expression under American constitutional doctrine, and the Court has repeatedly signaled that the government has almost no power to regulate it based on its truth or falsity. We are, by law, a country where you may lie about your political opponents without limit, so long as the lie does not meet the high bar of defamation, which requires proof of actual malice and damages that are notoriously difficult to establish for public figures.

This was always a flaw in the American system. But it was a manageable flaw, held in check by practical barriers: journalism, peer accountability, the sheer logistics of mass communication. Then came Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided in 2010 by a five-to-four Supreme Court majority, and the flaw became a wound. A wound that has not stopped bleeding since.

The Logic That Ate Itself

Citizens United rests on a foundational claim: that corporations are persons under the First Amendment, and that political spending is a form of speech, and therefore that limiting how much a corporation can spend on political messaging is an unconstitutional restriction on free expression. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. He argued that the government had no business deciding which speakers were worthy of constitutional protection and which were not. To restrict corporate speech, he said, was to create a two-tiered system in which some voices could be silenced by the state.

This reasoning has a seductive internal logic. If you accept the premise that corporations are persons with speech rights, the rest follows. The problem is the premise itself, and the downstream contradiction it creates that nobody in the majority seemed to notice, or chose to acknowledge.

If corporations are people, and corporations compose the body politic through their spending and messaging and political participation, then the body politic is people. Not metaphorically. Legally. Structurally. The architecture of democratic participation that Citizens United helped to build is one in which artificial legal entities, backed by concentrations of wealth that no actual human being commands, flood the political commons with messaging that is subject to no truth standard whatsoever.

The body politic, understood as the aggregate of citizens who form a political community and participate in its governance, has now been reconstituted to include entities that cannot vote, cannot serve, cannot be imprisoned, cannot die, and have no direct stake in the outcome of the society their money shapes. And those entities speak into that political commons with the full protection of the First Amendment, spreading whatever messages serve their financial interests, true or false, fair or fabricated.

The UK looked at this problem and said: lies about candidates are an affront to the democratic process. We criminalize them because the body politic, which is made of actual people with actual lives, deserves to make decisions based on something approaching reality.

The United States, post-Citizens United, has said the opposite, functionally if not explicitly: the body politic is open to all comers, including artificial persons with unlimited resources, and we will not discriminate based on the truthfulness of their messages. The marketplace of ideas will sort it out.

The marketplace of ideas has not sorted it out. It has instead been cornered by the best-funded vendors, who have discovered that lies are cheaper to produce than truths, faster to spread than corrections, and significantly more effective at generating the emotional states that drive political behavior.

The Affront Against the Body Politic

The British legal tradition's language is worth sitting with. Section 106 frames false statements about candidates as an affront against the body politic. Not merely as a harm to the individual candidate, which defamation law would address. As an affront against the collective process of democratic governance. Against the body politic as such.

This is a meaningful distinction. When you lie about a candidate's personal character during an election, you are not merely injuring that person. You are corrupting the information environment in which citizens make decisions. You are polluting the commons. You are committing what amounts to a fraud against the electorate, who are entitled to make their choices based on something resembling reality.

American law does not recognize this category of harm. We have libel and slander, which protect individuals. We have fraud statutes, which protect commercial relationships. We have perjury laws, which protect judicial proceedings. But we have no legal mechanism that says: lying to voters about their candidates is an offense against democracy itself.

Citizens United made this absence catastrophic by removing the practical constraints that had kept it from fully metastasizing. Before 2010, the money that could be spent on political messaging was limited. Political organizations had to identify themselves. Coordination rules created at least some friction between wealthy donors and campaign messaging. None of this was a truth requirement. But it slowed the machine.

After Citizens United, dark money flowed into super PACs. The infrastructure of political lying scaled. A single donor or a single industry could now fund a campaign of disinformation at a level that no opposing voice, however well-funded by normal human standards, could match. The asymmetry between a lie and its correction, which was always present, became overwhelming. A lie can be produced for the cost of a press release. A correction requires research, verification, dissemination, and an audience already disposed to receive it. At scale, with unlimited money behind the lie and none guaranteed for the correction, the lie wins most of the time.

Prescience and Its Discontents

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent in Citizens United that has aged with uncomfortable precision. He argued that the Court's ruling would damage the integrity of elected institutions. He argued that corporations are not members of the political community in any meaningful sense. He argued that the identity of the speaker is relevant to the government's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption.

He was not listened to. He was in the minority.

Justice Stevens was talking about corruption in the financial-influence sense, the familiar concern that money in politics buys favorable policy outcomes. This is real and it is serious. But there is a second form of corruption that the Citizens United framework enabled and that the majority did not adequately weigh: the corruption of the information environment itself.

When unlimited money can be spent on political messaging with no truth requirement attached, the information environment becomes systematically corrupted. Not by any single act of lying, but by the structural incentive that unlimited money creates for producing and amplifying lies that serve the funder's interests. The marketplace of ideas fails not because people are stupid but because the market has been cornered. A monopoly on information is not less dangerous to democracy than a monopoly on voting.

We have built, through a combination of constitutional doctrine and corporate law and the economics of digital media, a system in which the most powerful speakers in the political commons are entities with no democratic accountability, no obligation to truth, and no limit on spending. We call this freedom of speech. The British, with their quaint little criminal statute about lying to voters, might call it something else.

The Flaw That Was Always There

It would be too easy to lay all of this at the feet of Citizens United. The decision accelerated and amplified a problem that was baked into the American approach to political speech from the beginning. The First Amendment's resistance to government regulation of political content has always meant that the United States would not build the kind of legal infrastructure around political truth that other democracies have. The trade-off was made. The idea was that free speech would be self-correcting, that the truth would win in open competition, that democracy would be resilient enough to absorb even vigorous disinformation.

That was not an insane bet to make in 1791, or even in 1950. The information environment was slow enough, local enough, and expensive enough to produce and distribute that the self-correcting mechanisms had time to operate. There were fewer actors, with lower reach, who could spread political lies. The town square had a manageable size. The body politic could, more or less, sort things out.

The digital information environment, post-Citizens United, is not a town square. It is a planetary-scale amplification system with no editorial standards, governed by engagement algorithms that systematically reward the emotionally inflammatory over the factually accurate, accessible to anyone with money and a message, including artificial legal persons with unlimited resources and no stake in the society they are shaping.

The flaw was always there. We chose not to close it because we valued something else: the principle that government should not be in the business of deciding what is true in political discourse. That principle is not without merit. Governments lie too. Governments abuse truth ministries. The instinct to keep the state out of the business of political epistemology has a real history behind it.

But the instinct has produced a structure that, under current conditions, advantages exactly the actors who are most willing to lie and most able to fund the amplification of those lies. The self-correcting market we hoped for has not materialized. What has materialized is a machine for the industrial production of political unreality, protected by the same constitutional guarantees that were meant to keep citizens free.

What Accountability Looks Like, and What It Would Require

The UK model is not a perfect solution. Section 106 applies to false statements about candidates' personal character, not to false statements about policy, or about history, or about the imagined consequences of the opponent's governance. It is limited in scope and has its own ambiguities. Prosecutions under it are relatively rare. It is not a truth machine. It is a specific, bounded legal acknowledgment that certain kinds of political lying are offenses against the democratic process.

What would it require to build something comparable in the United States? At minimum, it would require a different constitutional jurisprudence, one willing to recognize that political communities have a legitimate interest in the factual integrity of electoral discourse. It would require the Court to acknowledge that the body politic, which Citizens United has now constitutionally reconstituted to include artificial persons, is composed at its core of actual human beings who are materially harmed when the information environment in which they make decisions is systematically corrupted.

It would also require a political will that is currently absent, because the actors who benefit most from the current system are the ones most likely to block any attempt to change it. Unlimited money in politics buys, among other things, the political influence to keep unlimited money in politics.

But the contradiction sits there, regardless of whether anyone has the will to resolve it. If corporations are people under the First Amendment, and if those corporate persons now constitute a significant part of the body politic's voice, then the body politic is, legally speaking, people. And the body politic deserves what actual democratic theory has always said it deserves: a political commons in which factual accountability is not optional.

Citizens United gave speech to power. It gave amplification to money. It never gave truth to anyone. And a democracy that cannot distinguish, legally or structurally, between its citizens and its corporations, between speech and disinformation, between political argument and political fraud, is a democracy in the process of hollowing itself out from the inside.

The British have a word for what happens when you lie about a candidate to voters. They call it an offense. We have a word for it too. We call it protected speech. The difference between those two answers is the difference between a democracy that believes it has something worth protecting and one that has decided the protection itself is too dangerous to attempt.

We chose the latter. We are living with the results.

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 Militias We Stopped Talking About

Wishing you and yours a very pleasant Memorial Day!

I hope we're approaching a time when we can celebrate it without the disdain, frustration, embarrassment, and outright abuse our own government has been inflicting on its citizens. We've earned more than this. We've also let our greatness lull us into a false sense of safety, and some are more than happy to fill that void.

It will get better. We will come out of this stronger. And wiser.

A few years ago, illegal paramilitary militias were widely described by federal law enforcement as one of the most serious domestic security threats in the United States. The FBI repeatedly warned about anti-government extremist groups, armed militias, and politically motivated violence. News stories were common. Congressional hearings were held. Arrests made headlines.

Then something curious happened.

We stopped hearing about them.

That silence does not mean the militias disappeared. It means the story changed.

Today I saw a news piece: "War widens as Israeli and US planes pound Iran and Tehran and its proxies hit back"

Iran is attacked by a foreign enemy. Militias respond in defense of their homeland. That is how militias are supposed to function historically.

In the United States, too many private militias have turned inward, seeing their own government as the enemy. Instead of national defense, they reflect a toxic subculture of anti-government extremism.

A militia that prepares to fight its own country is not a defense force. It is something else entirely.

The Quiet Threat

By 2024 and 2025, federal assessments still categorized militia-style extremists under the broader heading of domestic violent extremism, a category that includes anti-government groups and individuals who believe violence against the state is justified.

Security experts continued to warn that domestic extremism posed a greater day-to-day risk than foreign terrorism.

But public attention faded.

Large groups stopped marching as openly. Fewer armed demonstrations made national headlines. The big militia names that dominated the news after January 6 became less visible.

It looked like the problem had gone away.

It hadn't.

From Organizations to Individuals

One major change is structural.

Earlier militia movements often organized in visible groups with leadership hierarchies, training events, and public messaging. Today, the movement is more fragmented.

Instead of large organizations, analysts increasingly describe:

• Small independent cells

• Loosely affiliated networks

• Individuals radicalized online

• Informal local groups

This makes the threat harder to track and easier to overlook.

When there is no central organization, there is nothing obvious for the public to notice.

But decentralized movements can be more unpredictable than organized ones.

Less Attention Does Not Mean Less Risk

Another reason militias faded from the headlines is that government priorities appear to have shifted.

Some federal programs that monitored domestic extremism have been reduced or reorganized. Staffing and resources directed at domestic terrorism investigations have reportedly declined.

This does not necessarily mean the threat is gone.

It means fewer public briefings, fewer press releases, and fewer visible investigations.

In other words, less noise does not equal less danger.

Anti-Government Extremism Remains

The core ideology that drives militia movements has not disappeared.

Militia movements historically form around a belief that the federal government is illegitimate or tyrannical. That worldview still exists and in some cases has spread more widely than before.

Ironically, the less visible militias become, the more their ideas may blend into broader political culture.

Formal organizations may shrink while the mindset survives.

History suggests this pattern is common. Extremist movements often become less visible before they reappear in new forms.

Private militias made sense in the 18th century, when the United States had no real standing army.

They became obsolete once America developed a professional military and especially after the National Guard was created as the official organized militia.

Today the United States already has what the Constitution envisioned: a trained militia under civilian control.

Private militias are not a necessity. They are a leftover idea from a country that no longer exists.

To make it painfully clear to these groups and to Americans at large:

Once the National Guard became the constitutional militia, private militias became unconstitutional. Illegal.

The Constitution authorizes militias under government authority, not private armies acting on their own. This is reflected in the Second Amendment itself:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

For most of American history, the Second Amendment was understood as supporting a well regulated militia under public authority, not independent armed groups. Courts, historians, and legal scholars generally treated it as a civic responsibility tied to national defense.

That interpretation began to change in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, political movements and gun-rights organizations promoted a new interpretation that emphasized an individual right to bear arms independent of militia service. This shift was partly a reaction to social unrest, distrust of government after Vietnam and Watergate, and fears of federal overreach.

Advocacy groups funded research, legal arguments, and public campaigns to promote this view. Over time, the new interpretation moved from political activism into legal theory and eventually into court decisions.

The result was a major historical shift: the Second Amendment increasingly came to be understood as an individual right rather than primarily a framework for a regulated militia.

But the Constitution still provides for militias under government authority. It does not authorize private armies acting on their own initiative.

Then the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind. What happened to him and the NRA? 

When people say “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind,” they’re usually talking about two different things that happened at the same time:

1. A political and ideological shift

2. A leadership and corruption collapse

Both are real — and together they explain what happened.

A New York jury found LaPierre liable for financial mismanagement and misuse of millions of dollars, ordering him to repay large sums. For wealth and power, he weaponized the NRA using and abusing the 2nd Amendment. 

He resigned in 2024 shortly before the trial began.

A court later banned him from NRA leadership for ten years.

This is going on in our government today with toxic conservatism running amuck. 

It is the same pattern that can be seen again today under POTUS 47, Donald Trump...a convicted felon, long associated with criminal investigations, and an increasingly autocratic political figure. He has also been found liable in court for sexual abuse, and further revelations may yet emerge regarding his associations and the Epstein investigations.

We are seeing the presidency used in ways that test constitutional limits, while a Republican-controlled Congress largely falls in line with his agenda rather than acting as an independent check on executive power.

The result is a level of corruption and concentration of power unprecedented in modern American history.

The Real Question

The real question is not whether militias exist.

They do.

The real question is whether we are paying attention.

Only a few years ago, illegal paramilitary groups were described as one of the leading domestic threats facing the United States.

Today, they receive far less attention.

But quiet movements do not necessarily mean peaceful ones.

Sometimes it just means they are preparing.

Something Worth Watching

Illegal militias occupy a strange space in American law and culture. Many states prohibit private paramilitary activity, yet armed groups continue to organize in gray areas of legality.

They do not disappear simply because the news cycle moves on.

If anything, history suggests that movements ignored too long tend to return in unexpected ways.

The militias we stopped talking about may still be there.

And that may be exactly the point.

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 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.

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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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.

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