It's Been A Lot

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Picture of Horton - my orange spirit animal.

Hey everyone,

I want to apologize for not delivering my Sing Sing and Jeffersonian Marketing Machine posts this week. This audience continues to grow, and your engagement pushes me to write at a pace and regularity that can be both inspiring and exhausting. I also want to acknowledge that, as much as I love doing this work, I’m not financially compensated at a level that makes the effort easier, which adds another layer of difficulty when trying to meet my own expectations.

Right now, the destabilization all around us has made it hard to write the last part of this week. Watching the Democratic Party repeatedly throw young people and minorities under the bus for telling the truth—while elevating the advice of people who helped create this era but were only pushed out of the GOP because of Trump’s aesthetics—is both offensive and uninspiring.

I respect the moral stand some of these exiles are taking, but history still needs to be reckoned with, and the Democrats are actively choosing 1996 over 2025 for reasons we could all speculate on.

We also have to be honest about our history. Several generations have lived in an unprecedented age of ease, comfort, and relative prosperity, even if that prosperity was unevenly distributed. But the dark side of that comfort has been a historical detachment from the fights that made it possible—fights for democracy, economic justice, and social inclusion. And those who live the reality of supremacy, cronyism, and state-sponsored degradation are now forced to live under new, more insidious agendas of repression—ones that attack their ability to educate themselves, critically think, or even feel connected to a democracy that is inevitably cratering.

Like all golden ages, the coin eventually flips—especially when a generation without imagination or motivation is handed stewardship of a world they no longer feel compelled to protect. They squander it out of self-indulgence, cynicism, and snark, mistaking comfort for permanence. We are now progressively looking back on the 1980s and 1990s (and the resulting excesses into the next century) as an era of cable TV excess—an insult to the dreams of inclusion and spiritual substance that defined previous decades, a classic case of papering over America’s minorities to fit a sanitized and palatable image for dominant groups still unwilling to confront the realities of their own impoverished space. From my lived experience, I see this with cities. Instead of reckoning with why going to the baseball game downtown means seeing disproportionately racialized poverty around commercial districts, the mainstream storytellers, narrative makers, and media entities have rewritten the phenomenon into a Disneyrific narrative of self-reliance and moral clarity, rather than a story about strategic hierarchy and intentionally devastating policies.

This Silicon illusion is a tale as old as history itself. America was never immune to history, no matter how much the architects of our current political consensus believed they could hold back the tides of time by resurrecting a digitized Gilded Age 2.0.

The past several years have been brutal, and if I’m to be honest, I sometimes regret getting a master’s in Political Communications. From enduring egregious attacks on my personhood and history—only to be told by the supposed adults in the room that we’re overreacting or need to "deal with it"—to watching the values we were raised to believe in get steamrolled by a reality TV demagogue, it’s been exhausting. And then there are the centrist enablers, who refuse to have an honest conversation about what’s truly at stake—or the historically rooted motivations of hierarchy and power that undergird people’s willingness to stomach unparalleled destabilization.

Maybe it’s easy for me to say all this at 30, and I’m open to that. But I’ve also done a lot of work to engage with different perspectives across the political spectrum, and at the very least, I acknowledge my own blind spots.

Still, the sheer degradation of the past decade—the daily exercise of compartmentalizing right-wing media smears, pushing through grad school in a pandemic, and now witnessing the rehabilitation of a man who led an insurrection to stop a constitutional process—is just too much some days. Often, I wish I weren’t as aware of history and political science as I am.

Right now, my soul is in a quiet stasis of unease and disillusionment.

My environment keeps reinforcing what I already know: meritocracy is a myth, white supremacy is the foundation of America (you can’t argue against that in good faith, you just can’t), and maybe—just maybe—I’ve wasted my time writing and networking all these years.

This is all to say that Sing Sing and Jeffersonian Marketing Machine won’t be coming this week. I’ll try to get back on schedule next week. Thanks for understanding, and I’m sorry for not meeting the moment.

I’m also sorry for bringing such a dark and grim energy on a Friday—our movie day.

But we aren’t living in the 20th century anymore; we’re living in its 21st-century hangover. And, in true American fashion, that means an unsophisticated reckoning with our excesses and the painful realization that we’ve been gullible to marketing, shiny objects, and streamlined ignorance designed to produce expendable labor, not informed citizens of a democracy.

Still, enjoy the weekend.

Plant some seeds as the weather gets friendlier. Go see a movie—one of the last examples of American-led innovation that still brings joy. Visit a national park. Or, if you’re near monuments, stare at them with disillusioned eyes, knowing they represent an elaborate grift—a Pollyannish narrative of exceptionalism and global preeminence, while the fine print suggests racial hierarchy, industrial feudalism, and a pretension for historical erasure. This is especially true when looking at now-restored Confederate monuments and celebrations. That last one may not be the most joyful, but it occupies time.

Anyway, enjoy your locality, and most importantly, your loved ones.

Pray for each other—whether you pray to a certain God or simply find spiritual connection in nature, something that is greater than ourselves.

Much love,

Stew