Category: Psychology

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you missed Part I with the first four takeaways, please click here. Meanwhile, on to the final two.

 

  1. The Media Needs to Put Trump Under the Same Microscope

So quick to microanalyze every gaffe and instance of slow reaction on the part of Biden, the media now has to look just as carefully at the other old white guy (only 3-1/2 years younger than Biden). Since the debate, prominent media have harped over and over again on Biden’s fitness for office while giving far less attention to Trump’s far worse fitness level. This is something we can change with pressure! Every time you hear about a verified Trump non-lucid moment, every time you discover another one of his authoritarian policy proposals—if you don’t see it covered in the mainstream media you read, write to them and ask why they aren’t covering this important story.

First, let’s look at Trump’s public persona. Then his record as President. And third, his really scary policy plans.

Trump as a Campaigner

  • For starters, Trump also mixes up names. If it’s fair to talk about Biden confusing one person for another, it’s also fair to point out Trump’s repeated instances.
  • Trump has so much difficulty staying awake that he fell asleep repeatedly during the trial that could put him in prison for years. And the man who frequently derided Biden as “Sleepy Joe” may have also fallen asleep during his own Republican National Convention. I watched the video. It sure looked to me that he was sleeping, and it wasn’t during the prayer (as some have claimed). It was actually while the woman speaking was heaping praises on him.
  • Trump’s speeches mix rambling incoherence, total falsehoods, and bloodthirsty claims that he will wreak vengeance and retribution on his numerous enemies. As recently as his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention a few days ago, he was still spewing the proven lie that the 2020 election was stolen—probably because he hates being the loser that he is—a lie that’s been debunked over and over even in the courtrooms of Trump-appointed judges. And even though it made him a laughingstock when he first said it, he returned during his convention speech to his admiration for the fictional villain Hannibal Lecter.
  • Speaking of lies…Trump is a pathological liar on a scale exponentially beyond any other politician I’ve ever heard of. Just during his four years in the Oval Office, Trump was caught in more than 30,000 lies—that’s an average of 21 untruths every day he was in office.

 

Trump’s Record in Office

 

What Trump Wants to Do if He Gets Elected

If you’ve heard accusations that Trump and the Republicans want to bring back fascism, this is what they’re talking about. Here’s a tiny fraction of the antidemocratic policies they’ve proposed:

Over and over, Trump has made it alarmingly clear. He wants to be “a dictator on Day 1.” He wants to roll back the clock on progress in dozens of areas: climate, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights (including reproductive freedom), rights of people of color, of labor, of protestors. He has called for massive deportations of up to 15 million immigrants and mass detention of activists. He has called for Israel to “finish the problem,” implying he’s in favor of Israel exterminating Gaza. And with significant help from more than 100 former Trump administration employees, the Heritage Foundation has released 887 pages of repressive legislative proposals in a document called Project 2025. Trump has tried to pretend he doesn’t know anything about it, because he knows it’s going to be hugely unpopular. He’s been plugging the “kinder, gentler” version adopted as a platform by the Republicans and written with his active involvement—but make no mistake, Project 2025 will be his blueprint if he gets into office again. In fact, Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance wrote a gushing foreword to Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts’ new book. And let’s not forget Trump’s constant cries for revenge and retribution and his open desire to illegally use the military to quash domestic protests.

 

  1. The Democrats Actually Manage to Unite

It’s not a surprise that the sitting vice president of a successful administration is the front-runner. But the immediate unity around her candidacy is a delightful shock. Before Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday, July 21, most pundits I read expected a brutal, damaging struggle for the nomination. But somehow, the party often labeled a “circular firing squad” managed to pull it together and instantly rally around a single candidate. It took her only ONE DAY to gain pledges from 2668 delegates—way more than the 1976 that clinches the nomination. By Monday, July 22, she also already gained the endorsements of Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Victory Fund, and the Latino Victory Fund, eight major unions. Of 47 Democratic US Senators, 212 Democrats in the US House, and 23 Democratic Governors, 42, 186, and 23, respectively, have endorsed her, along with most state party chairs. Fundraising is also record-setting, with over 888,000 individual small donors collectively donating $81 million while megadonors threw in $150 million more, bringing the total to $231 million just one day into her campaign.

A July 1 story on NPR named seven potential Democratic presidential candidates: Harris, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, and J.B. Pritzker. When NPR updated the story Monday, Newsome, Moore, Buttigieg and Shapiro had already endorsed Harris. Later yesterday, Whitmer and Pritzker joined the chorus.

The unexpected unity is a feather in the caps of both Biden and Harris, could motivate disaffected votes unexcited by Biden, and could help to provide a comfortable margin of victory in November—which is absolutely necessary considering Trump already tried to steal one election.

 

  1. What Does this Mean for the Democrats and the 2024 Election?

With all this, I think Biden stepping down can provide some big opportunities for the Democrats. They have a chance to re-engage the progressives they lost over Gaza, push for meaningful gun safety after Trump himself was almost killed by a sniper, push for the same kind of scrutiny of Trump that Biden suffered through, and leave the party in strong, capable, younger hands. Let’s show them we have their backs.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

It’s gratifying to see people who’ve directly experienced her as an active step-parent to commend Kamala Harris’ love and commitment to her step-kids. Her husband Doug Emhoff’s first wife Kerstin said, “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” And Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff also spoke out: “They have good communication between the three of them. They are really a unit, like a three-person parenting squad. It’s really cool.”

They made their remarks in response to the revelation of Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance’s inane 2021 comment, as reported in Time Magazine:

The controversy stems from a 2021 Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, while Vance was running for the Ohio senate seat he later won. “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance, who has a wife and three children, told Carlson. “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of my regular readers messaged me Sunday night to ask if I planned to blog about Biden’s withdrawal. I said yes, but only once I’d figured out which angle to focus on. There are quite a few.

Monday morning, at 5:25 a.m., I had the lightning-bolt insight that I didn’t have to pick just one angle. This is a complex issue with many parts, and I can explore as many of those parts as I want to! So after an unsuccessful attempt to get a bit more sleep, I first sat down at the keyboard at 5:45 a.m., on five hours of sleep, and finally finished the first draft at 9:05 p.m. Then my wife suggested I break it into two pieces. In the clear light of morning, I followed her advice 😉.

Here are the first four:

 

  1. It’s Not About His Age!

There’s nothing magic about passing 80 that makes you suddenly lose all your ability. Pablo Casals was still making beautiful music into his 90s. Pete Seeger was still writing great songs, though he couldn’t sing them very well anymore. Grandma Moses (who didn’t even start painting until her late 70s) and Picasso were still making art. My activist friend, Arky Markham, used her public 100th birthday party to raise funds for her charity, while three years later her friend and mine, Frances Crowe, used HER public 100th birthday party to organize a demonstration for social justice. Her vision was “100 people with 100 signs for 100 causes;” she got 300. Strom Thurmond still displayed his reactionary politics as a US Senator into his 90s and served beyond his hundredth birthday. Though his Wikipedia bio notes that he wasn’t very competent for his last decade, that still means he was an effective senator long past the age Biden would have been at the end of his second term.

 

  1. But Biden’s Decline is Real—And So Is Trump’s

And yet, aging is real. We all age differently. Biden has been increasingly erratic. I believe George Clooney’s statement that the Biden he saw at a June fundraiser was not the strong, competent leader of the State of the Union Address or his more recent speech to NATO but “was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” In an op-ed published in The New York Times on July 17, Clooney writes the Biden he was with last month “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010” or “even the Joe Biden of 2020.”

I was also deeply concerned that Biden himself told a meeting of governors that he doesn’t want to schedule events past 8 p.m. because he needs to get more sleep. Unfortunately for Biden, being president doesn’t get you a lot of sleep. You’re going to be woken up frequently to deal with crises, and your schedule will demand late-night meetings. At least the president doesn’t have to deal with senior night-driving issues and drive there, as some of us do.

Even though his withdrawal was reluctant and belated, Biden has been deservedly lauded for putting his country ahead of his own ambition—something his recent opponent has proven over and over again that he is incapable of doing. Although you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage since the debate, Trump’s mental acuity (never his strongest suit) has also plunged. His speeches have been incoherent for months. As far back as April, Newsweek highlighted a prominent psychologist’s analysis on the David Pakman show that Trump was “faltering.” But for some reason, this story didn’t make many waves in the rest of the media, or in the public consciousness. Trump’s use of violent rhetoric, including plagiarizing Hitler not just once but on numerous occasions, got slightly more attention, but the media didn’t focus on it the way they did on Biden’s debate failure. I’ll go into more detail in Angle #5, in Part II.

 

  1. Deceiving the Populace Did Nobody Any Favors

The campaign should have been open and honest that Biden was declining. And Biden himself should have declared truthfully that even with just one term, he had one of the greatest records of accomplishment of any president in history—getting more done in one term than many presidents accomplish in two, despite never having control over both houses of Congress—and  it was time for him to relax, step back, and let a younger person get a turn to be the knight in shining armor. The ~14 million who voted for Biden in the primary should have been made aware that these flaws were showing up often enough to be worrisome—and they should have been presented with other choices. Challengers should have been given room to ramp up ahead of the primaries so that those 14 million voters would have been involved in choosing his successor.

And Biden’s record really is remarkable. Beyond the obvious big deals like bringing the economy back from the brink, hastening the end of the pandemic through science-based policy, passing infrastructure and recovery acts with a lot of good green stuff, walking his talk on supporting people of color and LGBTQ folks, and being the most labor-friendly president ever, here are 30 accomplishments you may not have heard about that harnessed the administrative power of the federal government to make huge progress on issues ranging from keeping our records private to shifting farming and energy to far greener paths to building stronger relations between countries that are historic enemies (such as Japan and South Korea).

 

  1. Biden Gained Office While Hinting that He Would Only Serve One Term

Recognizing that his age was an issue even in 2020, Biden signaled that he wouldn’t be likely to run again in 2024. While he didn’t come out and promise not to run again, private messaging was leaked to the public back then that strongly implied he would not seek a second term.

Later this week, I’ll post Part II, with more angles to examine, including a big surprise about the Democratic Party. As soon as it goes live, I’ll post a link here. If you post a comment, I’ll tag you when it’s ready.

 

Lifelong activist, author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker Shel Horowitz helps businesses succeed by building in environmental healing and social justice. His award-winning 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Find him at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environmenl, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, media-general, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Along with every other decent human being, I deplore political violence. And as much as I despise his politics AND his character, I wish Donald Trump a speedy recovery from the wound inflicted by a would-be assassin with an assault rifle.

BUT that doesn’t mean we need to stop campaigning. It doesn’t mean we should fail to make the most of the opportunity that this criminal’s attack on another criminal creates. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should slink off with our tails between our legs because the MAGAs tell us “this is not the time!” It’s never the time, according to them.

And it absolutely doesn’t mean we should roll over play dead, and abandon hope just because Biden had a bad night in the recent debate or just because Trump may get sympathy votes for getting shot. Trump (who is only 3-1/2 years younger, by the way) had a bad night too, if you filter against fact-checking. He spewed blustery nonsense for 90 minutes, nearly all of it either blatantly false or totalitarian fantasy.

Here’s what we should be saying at every possible chance:

It’s time for the United States of America to stand behind the value of not getting shot by a random psycho at a school, a movie theater, a supermarket, a religious service, a concert, or anywhere else. And Trump cannot lead that effort. After all, he:

By contrast, President Biden issued a powerful Executive Order promoting gun safety and managed against the odds to gain passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he calls “the most significant bipartisan gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.  The Act provides communities with new tools to combat gun violence, including enhanced gun background checks for individuals under age 21, funding for extreme risk protection orders and other crisis interventions, and increased mental health resources to help children impacted by gun violence heal from the resulting grief and trauma.” If Biden chooses to step down, the Democrat who will challenge Trump in November is also likely to favor sensible gun laws. The Democratic Party as a whole has been advocating common-sense gun safety for many years.

Finally, let’s remember three very important things:

First, just because the MAGA crazies have taken over the Republican Party doesn’t mean they’ve taken over the minds of mainstream Republicans. We see this in the typical 20 percent that Nikki Haley continued to draw even after she suspended her campaign! And I’ve also seen it in my conversations with many Republicans who tell me they don’t like Trump’s character, his lack of understanding of the issues, his massive narcissism, his open racism, his lack of a moral compass, etc. His support is weak even in his own party, in other words. Many could easily defect—as more than 100 prominent Republican have publicly pledged—to RFK, Jr., to the Democrats, to a Republican write-in, to to the Libertarians, or simply leave that space blank on their ballots.

Second, the Republican positions on many issues are wildly out of step with mainstream views. They oppose women’s reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, immigration (even legal immigration), voting rights, rights to protest against repressive governments, environmental protection, labor rights, and more. Both the Republican platform and the truly sinister Project 2025 (written largely by people who worked in Trump’s administration) embrace these extremist proposals—as do, apparently, a majority of the Supreme Court, which recently gutted environmental protection, declared Trump immune from prosecution for “official” acts, and of course, a year ago, overturned Rowe v. Wade—becoming the first Supreme Court to remove a constitutional right. And if that weren’t enough, Trump himself has alienated and insulted many large constituencies—veterans, people with disabilities, women, Palestinians, Muslims, Latin Americans, to name a few—and, starting January 6, 2021, thrown even some of his most loyal supporters like former Attorney General William Barr and former Vice President Mike Pence under the bus.

And third, Trump is not an attractive candidate to swing voters. He is now a 34-count convicted criminal and was found in civil court to have committed sex crimes. His rambling, off-topic speeches and compulsive lying could be evidence of serious mental decline. And of course, both men have a track record. Trump got little done besides his economy-crushing tax cut, while Biden, for all his flaws, has made huge progress on the economy, on recovering from the pandemic, on the environment, and on the US’s position as a world leader. On every issue where Biden has been bad (especially Gaza), Trump is demonstrably worse for progressives.

So let’s get out there and mobilize people to vote Democratic—including spreading the word about the huge negative impact of Trump’s proposals to people who don’t always vote for Democrats. Despite its problems, we still have a democracy worth saving!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today, the United States of America marks the 248th anniversary of its founding. But this, year, I can’t celebrate.

But Monday, on its last day of the term, a bizarre Supreme Court decision essentially returned the country to monarchy. They put one person—the President—above the law, immune from prosecution even for extreme corruption and extreme violence, as long as they were acting in an official capacity.

In a stinging dissent joined by Brown and Kagan, Justice Sotomayor examined the consequences:

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

As Heather Cox Richardson noted, this case is legally known as Trump. v. United States. How apt.

It’s worth reading the original accusations in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that we mark today; many sound amazingly relevant, especially if Trump manages to gain power again.

Like our forbears of 1776, we are once again called to resist tyranny. But today, we know that nonviolent resistance is more effective and longer lasting than armed struggle. And we know more than 200 ways to be nonviolent activists. In the pre-Internet, pre-pandemic era. Gene Sharp identified 198 ways. Many more have been found in recent years. The challenges are figuring out what makes strategic sense against a corrupt Supreme Court, how to organize to prevent a Trump victory, and what to do if he does take power again.

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By Posted on Posted in Consumer Issues, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Yes, it’s true. Thursday’s “debate” was a debacle, an atrocity. And yes, Democrats have a right to indulge in some panic. But a more helpful response is to demand that the mainstream media start covering the real issue in this campaign: That American democracy is under threat by Donald Trump, who was the worst president in history according to experts and who has devolved into a raving lunatic who has openly talked about the totalitarian regime he would impose this time.

For months, much of the mainstream media has consistently painted Biden in a poor light while for the most part refusing to set the same standard in evaluating Trump. A particularly horrific example was the time one of the Washington Post’s newsletters made a chart that compared how old Biden would be at the END of a second term with how old Trump would be at the BEGINNING of a second term. They are only 3-1/2 years apart.

Yet, while the New York Times and Washington Post were going on about the need for Biden to step aside, the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the few voices in the mainstream press saying that Trump, not Biden, is the one who should leave the race. Their reasons are not just the 30+ lies he confidently uttered during the event (you can’t really call it a debate). It’s everything he’s done in the last several years. The man is a felon, a self-admitted sexual predator, an inciter of a treasonous riot, an open bigot, a thuggish bully, and a narcissistic example of Id running amok with no Superego to rein it in. Trump is known for confidently putting out total bullshit—kind of like some AI tools that tell us to eat a rock every day. Trump wanted us to drink chlorine bleach during the pandemic, after all.

While under both the insurrection and incompetence clauses of the Constitution Trump shouldn’t have even been allowed on the ballot, he’s there. And if he leaves, we may not like the results. If, say, Nikki Haley were to replace him as the Republican candidate, she could actually win on the basis that she wouldn’t be as bad as Trump. And she wouldn’t–but she might very likely be as bad as or worse than the second-worst president, George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, as Lawrence O’Donnell points out, the Dems have no viable candidate in reserve. When LBJ left the race much earlier in the cycle, in March, 1968, Humphrey didn’t have enough time to gather accolades or dollars. He also notes that there was pressure on Bill Clinton to withdraw in 1992 and on Trump to do so in 2016, yet both men won. AND he faults the debate moderators for failing to ask important questions like what the heck Trump was doing during those three hours of silence on January 6, 2021, or to probe deeper on Trump’s nonsensical answers and outright lies, including his obvious lack of understanding of what a tariff is.

Seth Abramson says that getting Biden to exit would grant Trump’s deepest wish and wonders why nobody’s asking if this is a good idea, considering how much Trump and his henchmen are talking it up—and he doesn’t see any path to a victory by any other Democrat.

The Dems would start by attacking each other in a “circular firing squad” that only helps the Republicans. Any convention result will leave a wide swath of disaffected voters.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Mind, I’m no fan of Biden. There’s a long list of betrayals of progressives that I’m not at all happy with. But I believe that this race is much less about who we want to be president than whether we want democracy or fascism, and what the Supreme Court will look like. It’s also about who progressives would rather be pressuring, and there’s no question that we’d secure more wins under Biden than Trump.

And Heather Cox Richardson says Trump steamrolled Biden with a technique called the “Gish Gallop”:

It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.

So instead of trying to dump Biden, let’s demand that the media:

  1. Point out every lie either candidate utters
  2. Give some space to Trump’s crazy “word salad” campaign speeches that make absolutely no sense
  3. Examine the consequences of each of his fascist-inspired policy proposals
  4. Fact-check the next debate in REAL TIME.

And let’s remind everyone we know that this election is not about choosing a saint but choosing the better opponent who will enable the most positive change.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Diversity, Ethics: General, Gratitude, language, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The other day, I attended a memorial service for a neighbor. I’m not someone who typically gets offended at memorial services—but one speaker—a son of the deceased—made me feel I was standing underneath an avalanche. He said almost nothing about his mother, but went on and on about the need to accept Jesus and become this man’s kind of “Christian” in order to be spared a literal eternity in actual Hell.

Listening, I grew increasingly upset and furious. He effectively created a second-class citizenship, or worse, for everyone who doesn’t follow his particular brand of religion

I am not a Christian, but I’ve read the Four Gospels. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan? Samaritans were a despised ethnic group among Jews in Roman Palestine 2000 years ago. Jesus’ message was all about acceptance of the good in people, acceptance of diversity, and taking responsibility for your OWN behavior—attributes that seem to be in short supply amongst this man’s self-righteous and vindictive style of religious fundamentalism. I don’t even now how they can even call themselves Christians when their key message mocks and marginalizes Christ’s own virtues. And I was appalled by this man, so smug that he actually said that he would see his parents in Heaven IF they were admitted there; he had no worries about his own fitness to enter the kingdom of love. Jesus would have been just as appalled. He was far more concerned with healing the sick, with undoing the misery of the poor and bereft, than with following religious rituals without following the moral codes underlying them:codes that recognize the worth of every human being.

After the service, I was simmering with rage and felt a need to process with someone who’d been there. I called another neighbor, a friend who welcomed us to the neighborhood 25 years ago. Before I could even say more than “I need to vent about the memorial service,” she named the offensive speaker and told me that she and her husband were equally appalled, and that this man with his ugly prejudices was an outlier in his own family. I felt some closure after our call.

The next day, I mentioned in my daily public Gratitude Journal on Facebook that I was grateful for her support “helping me debrief a very uncomfortable moment in the memorial we both attended yesterday.” I didn’t give any more details than that.

And then the magic happened. I got a Facebook private message from another neighbor, a relative of the deceased. This person is my Facebook friend, but in real life, we barely know each other. Most of our contact has been a quick hello at the annual neighborhood holiday party. She sent me a deeply personal and very welcoming note of apology for the conduct of her relative, appreciation that I had attended, and gratitude for the many cultures and religions who had come together to support her family in this time of grief. We sent a stream of messages back and forth for the next half-hour, and I came away feeling like I had a new friend, even after 25 years of those superficial encounters.

And that was the silver lining—another gateway to abundance—in this cloud of ugly bigotry.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, General Commentary, language, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, Politics, privacy, Psychology, Sexuality and Gender, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , ,

Trigger Warning: This post discusses my history as a survivor of separate instances of rape and sexual coercion.

 

Did Trump cheat on his wife with Stormy Daniels? Yes. Was it an affair? No. Does this matter? Absolutely, and I’ll explain why.

My venerable paper copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged defines affair in this context as “an intense amorous relationship, usually of short duration.” Dictionary.com copies all the Random House definitions verbatim (it’s definition #6). Microsoft Word’s dictionary calls it “a sexual relationship between two people, one or both of whom are married to or in a long-term relationship with someone else.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a sexual relationship, especially a secret one.”

Note that all three definitions include “relationship” and the first says it has to be “intense” and “amorous.”

Daniels’ evening with Trump was not a relationship, and the amorousness went in only one direction. They had met casually and he’d asked her to have dinner with him. She says she accepted because her PR agent said it might be career-building and she did not have sex on her mind. Neither did he appear to at first, until she came back from the bathroom and found him on the bed, down to his undies. At best, it was a first date. At worst, it could be considered sexually harassing behavior.

It was not rape. Unlike the myriad of his other accusers, she never claimed that she didn’t consent. She consistently says that she was reluctant, was not enthusiastic, and felt so ashamed afterward that she was shaking as she got dressed again.

I would consider this interaction a coercive sexual encounter, if for no other reason than because of the power dynamics. One party is a rich and famous man in his late 50s, of towering (and intimidating) physical stature, with a bodyguard on the other side of the door. The other, a woman in her 20s and not overly familiar with the centers of power, is known only in a socially marginalized (though extremely popular) industry that has low credibility with mainstream media and mainstream morality.

He has all the power. And if she still has any illusions that he might help her career, she’s going to get on that bed even if she doesn’t really want to. For her, it was transactional; for him, it may have been notching a conquest or some kind of boost to his fragile ego. I can only speculate on his reasons, because despite the massive evidence, he denies the incident ever took place. 

I survived a rape, grabbed off the street by a stranger and dragged to a stairwell at age 10 or 11 (yes, it happens to boys—more of us than you probably think). I also survived a coercive sexual encounter at age 18 with a creepy 53-year-old man who’d made no secret of his desire to get into my pants. Like Stormy’s encounter with Trump, it was not rape because I was not in a position to withhold consent. And like that notorious encounter, it made me feel like total crap.

I had also, at that point, had a months-long actual affair with a man ten years older than me and several consensual one-nighters.

It’s not hard to tell the difference among these four types of encounters. The affair was mutual. It was delightful. It was a relationship. The consensual one-nighters were fun but did not lead to an ongoing relationship. For some of them, I wished it had continued—but that wasn’t the other person’s agenda.

The coerced encounter was not fun. It was unpleasant but in that moment I saw it as unavoidable. I have far more resources and communication skills these days and would handle it differently now, almost forty years later. While it was disgusting, it didn’t create long-term trauma. But the rape was traumatic, with consequences that lasted many decades and are not completely done yet. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell anyone for several years, and I never told my parents. It remains, after more than 50 years, the worst day of my life.

Neither being raped nor being coerced into sex is anything I would ever characterize as an affair. There is no relationship. There is not even any mutuality.

With this lens, with this history, you can understand why it has upset me since Daniels first went public that so many people who should know better, including many journalists, use the wrong term. Just the first results page from an Ecosia.org (tree-planting search engine) search for “stormy daniels affair” brought hits from the New York Times, BBC, NPR, NBC’s Chicago affiliate, and CNN. Now, with the trial verdict, it’s back in the news and I’m finally ready to call out these journalists. They are making it sound like love was involved, that these were two people who cared about it each other. But they didn’t.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Entrepreneurship, General Commentary, language, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Bob Burg devoted his Daily Impact newsletter this morning to endorsing a concept he found in Robert Greene’s book, The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature: “Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.”

I love the idea of embracing your weirdness—and I’ve basically lived it since my teen years. But I want to add three corollaries:

  1. Present your weirdness in ways that foster, rather than cut off, communication. So, in my case, living in a socially conservative farm community, I’ve chosen not to wear skirts even though I find them very comfortable—because I want my neighbors to understand that while I’m different from them in many ways, we still inhabit the same neighborhood and have more in common than they might think. I made different, more outrageous, choices in other places I lived in. Marrying and having kids, recognizing that my decisions impact other people, was another encouragement to dial it back. But I still publicly label myself as a “marketing heretic,” still post unpopular views in public places, still invite people of all viewpoints to engage with me (as long as they do so civilly). And I can proudly point to many examples where my activism has made the world a better place, both within the business community and in the wider world.
  2. Listen and engage when your weirdness starts to set up barriers. Let people express their discomfort. Strive to uncover their deeper feelings. Find points of agreement and build the discussion out from there.
  3. Bring your weirdness to the table but BE at the table! Participate actively in your community. I spent 9 years on my town’s Long-Range Plan Implementation Committee and have attended almost every Town Meeting for more than 25 years. In the 17 years before that, I was actively involved in the government and social infrastructure of the small city where I was living, both through board service and community organizing and through electoral work. I believe that service de-demonized the way several members of our town Planning Board perceived me. I went from newcomer/troublemaker who had organized the movement that blocked a big, totally inappropriate mountainside housing development to a person whose input was valued and seen as vested in keeping the character of the town.

How do you bring your nonconformity into your work, how do you make it a strength, and how do you engage with people who might feel threatened by it?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,
  • If you have a socially or environmentally conscious business…
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Please read this next paragraph VERY carefully. It’s from today’s Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson (emphasis added):

How religion and authoritarianism have come together in modern America was on display Thursday, when right-wing activist Jack Posobiec opened this weekend’s conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., with the words: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”

This is a major Washington conference of influencers. Take it seriously! That is one of many ways fascism rears its ugly and dangerous head. Trump actually quoting Hitler, repeatedly, without attributing him is another. A series of Supreme Court decisions and new repressive state laws add more heads to this horrible Hydra.

The good news is they can’t do this without our help. Staying home on Election Day helps the wannabe fascists. And since most parts of the US don’t have ranked-choice voting yet, so does voting for a third-party candidate in the general election. Oh, and showing up helps our cause and hurts theirs. Show up to lobby your Members of Congress and your state and local elected officials. Show up in the streets to participate in protests against harmful policies or support demonstrations for those you favor. And show up to vote!

If, as I do, you disagree enough with Biden’s policies that you have a hard time voting for him, show that in the primary. Show up to vote and don’t vote for him. Either leave the president line blank or vote for an alternate candidate. My Primary is March 4 and I will either vote for Dean Phillips, who is slightly left of Biden, or write in Green Party candidate Cornell West.

But I recognize that Biden, barring some major development like a major health crisis, will be the nominee. And even though I live in a reliably Blue state, I recognize that his likely opponent will contest the results if they are anything less than an overwhelming victory for Biden.

And let’s not forget that Trump has promised to be even worse on immigration—and on many issues—than he was during his time as President.

I want that margin to be as big as possible, so come November, I will cast my vote for democracy and against fascism, despite Biden’s betrayal of his campaign promises on issues that include unnecessarily harsh positions on immigration and his relentless support of the brutal regime in Israel and its devastation of Gaza, despite his energy policy that doesn’t do nearly enough to curb fossil fuel and embraces the false narrative that nuclear power is part of the climate solution (I’ve written a book on this; nuclear is a problem, not a solution), and despite many other reservations.

Remember the prophetic words of anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

And speak out! Speak out for the socialists, the trade unionists, and the Jews. Speak out for Arabs and Muslims, for immigrants from anywhere, for people in the LGBTQ community, for those with disabilities, for those who Trump has threatened with retribution that includes rounding up and detaining opponents.

Speak out. For democracy. For decency. Speak out, ultimately, for yourself.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail