We’ve Mistaken Politics for Identity

0:00So after a quick glance on the comment sections from Facebook and threads and Instagram and Twitter and everywhere else including Newsweek.com. itself reacting to my op-ed and podcast from yesterday, apparently. A lot of folks are now under the impression that I'm a pro-Trump MAGA spokesperson, deep state agent of disinformation. Yes, this level of derp puts a smile on my face because I find it hilarious that people are so incredibly dense. You gotta laugh at something. But it also makes me a little bit sick to my stomach if I let the idea that we're doomed as a society get to me, which is why I choose to laugh.

0:39Now, I can tell that most people who react just read the headline itself and then jump to the comments section and then react to everything else that they see there. This from my op-ed yesterday titled, Trump staged shooting conspiracies need to stop. And automatically, without hesitation, I was immediately branded as a Trump supporter by the conspiracy left because I strongly suggested that Trump and company doesn't have the coordination or skill required to pull off a deception of that magnitude. Because if they did, they wouldn't need that level of deception to begin with. And apparently that just goes over a lot of people's heads somehow, which is baffling and fascinating at the same time.

1:22Because they failed to realize that I was actually criticizing the president. They just assumed that I was defending everything he's ever done because I claimed that he and his administration are simply too incompetent to pull it off and keep it hidden. And that is all it takes to automatically turn me into a Trumper in the eyes of tens of thousands of people. Now, most of this blowback is coming from the conspiracy left, which is a new creature altogether. Even though I have seen many on the anti-Trump side of the conspiracy right suggest the same talking points, Yeah, I would say that roughly 70 % of the people on social media defending the conspiracy theory as truth are conspiracy-minded liberals.

2:02The right-wingers have been just a little bit quieter because many of them, including some of my own connections on social media, think that I was defending Trump. Ha ha! Because they too failed to realize that I was insulting the man. It's fascinating to me how people consume information. Also, there are a lot of folks out there who don't know the difference between an op-ed and a news article, apparently. I can't believe how many people I saw on socials who chastised me for subjective writing as if I were somehow trying to pass it off as objective journalism. It's astounding, really. It is. It's astounding.

2:35That's a great word for it. And it hit me like a bolt of lightning that most of these people weren't even trying to engage. No due diligence. No attempt to understand anything. They read the headline, made an assumption about what I must be all about, and then rubber stamped a response to that version of me in their head. And now tens of thousands of people who had never heard my name before yesterday's op-ed think that I'm MAGA. Wow, what a circus. Generally speaking, people don't respond to what you say. They respond to who they think you are. If I've learned anything in my 20 plus years in broadcasting and podcasting, and this, I believe, is at the core of many of our issues, not just here in the United States, but all of the Western world.

3:24And I'm sure we all do it to some degree. So I can only speak for myself when I say that this is something I'm actively trying to correct in my own life. And this kind of self audit leads me back to the same question that I have for myself every single time. Who do you think you are? It's easily the hardest question I've ever stumbled upon like scores of other before with in after me. There's nothing unique about such a universal mystery. It's the foundation of philosophy itself. It's the same question Socrates was asking when he said the unexamined life isn't worth living. Centuries later, Nietzsche said, become who you are, which sounds inspiring until you realize you don't actually know who that is.

4:07It should be a very difficult question to answer, but for the loudest voices in public discourse, it rarely is because they all think that they know who they are. Just ask one of them sometime. Oh, sure. They'll tell you about their job or their family or the hobbies that they're into. If they're more politically active, they might talk about their race or their gender or about how much they love or hate their country and what religions they follow. Some are going to lean on where they're from, the city, the state, the neighborhood that made them who they are. Others will point to what they've been through, the trauma, the victories, the things they survived.

4:40They'll tell you what they're trying to become or what they used to be before everything changed. Maybe it's the music they listen to or the team that they root for. And if you get them to go on long enough, eventually it all starts to sound less and less about who they are and more like a collection of labels that they've begun to identify with. You're not your house, you're not your car, and you're not your job or your bank account or your race or your gender or your hobbies or your trauma or the music you listen to. What are you really? Who are you really? And how do you answer that question when it comes to politics?

5:15Are you a liberal, a conservative, or an independent libertarian like myself? Just strip it all away for a minute just for a thought exercise. All of the labels, all the experiences, and all of the things that have happened to you that have crafted the role you identify with. Just for a minute, imagine none of it has any meaning whatsoever. What's left after that? Who are you? We as human beings routinely mistake our identity for the story that we've created to make sense of everything else that's happening to us. You are a person. That much we should all be allowed to agree on. But I say let's start it there and end it there as well.

5:53What a human is first is not up for debate. It doesn't matter if you believe we are a spirit having a physical experience or physical beings hallucinating a spiritual one. or something in between that we don't quite have the language to describe. The point is that whatever we are at our core exists before all of those labels, before all of the affiliations, before all of these identities that we manufacture to cope with the absurdities of this life. We've known this, at least in principle, for a long time. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people, men, women, and everything in between are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

6:40Not identical, not in the same way, but equal, in the one place that it actually matters before everything else gets layered on top. And once you understand that, it becomes a lot harder to reduce yourself, or anyone else for that matter, to a meaningless label. Because the more we fixate on these labels, the easier it becomes to sort each other out and divide each other and ultimately dismiss each other. And once that happens, the conversation is over before it even begins. So the question isn't what label fits you best. It's whether you've mistaken the label for who you are in the first place.