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The opposite of propaganda is not free speech. It is journalism.

The story of the last generation of media or so is that increasing free speech has not produced more journalism than we had before. Journalism, after all, takes work, time, money, ethics, and expertise, which platforms and algorithms can never provide. They have, instead, created an avalanche of propaganda. They have created the kind of conditions such that the majority of what folks in the US consume in 2026 wouldn’t have been allowed to reach a mass audience in the 1990s. They have created a culture that is every bit as propagandized as you might find in a more authoritarian country, the kind that the US looks down on for not embracing its culture of free speech. If anything, more free speech actually created less journalism, as local newsrooms around the country laid off staff or closed when the competition became an endless scroll of user-optimized propaganda. We’re not at the start of that story. We’re late in the mourning process.

Now, democracy is an information processing machine. When the information ecosystem is working pretty well, you can’t beat it for creating policies that benefit the most people. But when the ecosystem is broken, you may as well be working in an authoritarian state. And that, it appears, is the way things are resolving for the US. If you’re familiar with authoritarian states at all, you’ll know that they come in a variety of flavors — some are more or less competent, some value public welfare to a greater or lesser degree, some are investing in the future while others are investing in little besides their own repression. There’s range and evolution there. The end of a democracy is just the start of a different kind of story.

US democracy, of course, is not necessarily a bellwether for the rest of the world. There are countries with a better information culture, for now, than the US, despite some of the same technologies. But they have to recognize what works about their countries — and about robustly-funded public media particularly — if that’s going to stay the case. They have to take the warning they’re watching seriously, and invest in the robust journalistic culture that makes democracy viable — even if that means “cracking down on free speech,” as the right would have it.

One Thing I Learned: Yes, God, Yes

At the film’s climax, we expect our heroine to confess to her Catholic cohort. She’s supposed to own the scene before leaving it. That is, to abandon her religion, she must first master and then dissect its precepts on a stage where her mastery can be tested.

She doesn’t. She doesn’t owe them that stupid energy. We don’t have to overmaster the architects of bullshit systems just for permission to leave a bullshit system. It’s a rinky-dink game they play with us, requiring superhuman grace and intelligence to move beyond their control. Flawed, weak, inattentive humans can still be smarter than their overlords, and they deserve to get out, too.

It reminds me of a lot of bullshit systems that demand overwhelming attention, patience, and sacrifice to unman their weak and pissy claims at authority.

One Thing I Learned: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Saintliness is quite sterile; or, the dead buy forgiveness cheap.

What it means to forgive, apparently, can mean quite different things to different people.

In a justice-based theory of forgiveness, contrition must be expressed in a way that persuades that the wrongdoer fully grasps the depth of their wrong, and an act of restitution must be made that at least gestures towards the scope of the healing that is required. That is, forgiveness is not a unilateral act, it is cooperative. When this is undertaken, it permits the wronged party to rationally assume that the wrongdoer has legitimately reformed, and can be trusted in a reconstituted relationship.

When this is not undertaken, the wronged party can devoutly say, “Oh, I forgive,” but they cannot truly say they trust the wrongdoer not to repeat the offense with themselves or another that they hold dear. They cannot subject themselves or others to the risk of the same harm with a spirit of intimacy and vulnerability. The act of magnanimity may look good on the cover of a magazine, but it is hollow if it cannot be linked to a reconstituted relationship. It is as much as to say, you are no longer the object of my anger, because I am above being hurt by you.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood gets around this, of course, by killing off the sinner in a hurry. It’s bargain basement prices for forgiveness when you’re not going to be around to hurt people in the future.

One Thing I Learned: Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

The adolescent perspective is not unique in harboring childish thoughts. It is unique in its incapacity to sort, compartmentalize, or subordinate them. Our thirteen-year old hero deals with tragedy and revenge in a head that cannot quite order the gravity of these things above its childhood crushes, its star trek fandom, its boyhood escapes. The hierarchy of these priorities fluctuates almost charmingly throughout the novel. The tragedy, then, is completed when adulthood seizes center stage, and the child cannot give it full berth. The child, in the final pages of the novel, struggles to allow adulthood the space and attention it requires, and falls apart in its final self-defeating attempt at escape.

Coming-of-age is marked by an original sin. If the child doesn’t hurt someone in a way that shocks them, that makes them first realize and recoil from their own power, then they haven’t really come of age at all. It is the first regret that makes us adults. It is Cain looking dumbly over his brother and moaning.

A long time coming, this audiobook is finally out:

At the last lick of a heat stroke summer, a broke ex-stockbroker secluded in the Georgia boonies succumbs to his neuroses, sets fire to his house, and drives into town to shoot six holes through the front window of his internet service provider’s regional outlet. Leroy Spasmo has been waiting for this moment for years, cultivating dependencies on alt media, stewing in conspiracy theories, and deepening a grand resentment for the family that left him, and the world that left him behind.

His defiant video message, recorded drunk with pistol in hand before the store window, goes viral on the internet. In a flourish of inspiration, he paints a worldview of government mind control, social disintegration, and a Helsinki Hijink led by nefarious Swedish agents. But is he a joke to the powers that be, or a prophet to their peons?

Released in audio-only and read by the author, this absurdist satire of democratic misadventures in the post-truth era comes from Cherry Hill Press in 2021. It is available from Cherry Hill and on Audible.

I’m thrilled to say that Cherry Hill Publishing and I just signed some very important documents to confirm that “Bablyon Unbound!”, my satire on a downwardly mobile former stockbroker who becomes the leader of an internet cult, is going to come out as an audiobook this fall. I’ll be reading the audio.

Much love and thanks to O’Connor Literary Agency for believing.

More to come on this in the coming days.