Things That Make You Go Hmm | Blog#42
People one follows may not be what they seem...
Malcolm P. Johnson blocked me today on Bluesky after we mutually followed each other for about ten or so years here, and on Twitter before that. I can’t say we were great friends or anything like that. He posted enough interesting material at one point for me to click follow.
Since finding him again on Bluesky after I left the other place, I started noticing a certain, um, center-right orthodoxy to his posts. I replied a few times but, I guess, not shrilly enough to get blocked. That is, until today.
When I came on earlier in the day, I noticed in my timeline of mutuals that he made a huge number of Bernie Sanders related posts. Upon closer examination, all the posts were of the type that prompted me to publish an article in Alternet and Salon during the 2016 election cycle when it was abundantly clear that there was an anti-Sanders vibe to most of what the mainstream media was publishing about him.
Like Sanders or not, I think there is one thing everyone agrees on when it comes to Bernie: he is consistent in his logic, no matter how dogged. Often times, Sanders is dogged to his own detriment.
Malcolm Johnson posted a whole series of posts about Sanders being anti-LGBT and anti-Trans until he changed his tune as a counter to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary. He posted other articles from 2015 that were a part of the same things I found objectionable back then and ended up prompting me to find a publisher for this piece:
Why dredge this up now that Trump just took office and is freely doing the imaginable and unimaginable? Why dredge this up at a time when unity and party discipline among the left is an absolute must? We just had an election. The next mid-term isn’t going to start for a while.
Why would what appears to be a political operative start this kind of online stuff at this juncture?
Curiously, Johnson’s social media includes mentions about being 2nd VP of East Area Progressive Democrats,
His social media, over the period of the Democratic primary, also included the title Operations Coordinator, Schiff for Senate. I have no idea whether he’s still connected to Adam Schiff’s apparatus. All members of Congress, in either house, maintain offices in their home state.
Anyway… the bile against Sanders is obviously something he’s been holding onto for some time. Whether or not these posts are in an official capacity, they are a good reminder to always do a quick check of people online that you have never met offline, especially if you are going to pay attention to what they post. Malcolm Johnson both presents himself as affiliated with a progressive organization, and a former operative for the Schiff campaign. Weird.
My views of Sanders’ credo are still pretty much the same, which by all accounts are closer to what a run of the mill European Social Democrat believes (and not actual socialism). In all the time I’ve been aware of Sanders, I have never detected any anti-sentiments about any group of people on his part. If there is anything one can trust Sanders to be, it is being consistently pro-minority rights and against the oppression of anyone and that would include the Trans community.
The last fifteen months’ worth of progressive politics have been dismal, at best. On a personal level, I’ve been disillusioned with progressives’ weddedness to core feminist principles. I wrote a section on Jayapal in a recent post about Biden’s presidency.
That’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this post.
We need to be as careful of our online associations as we now have got to be with our choices of news media. We need to interrogate what we read, what we see, really, and continuously ask ourselves why people and entities are saying this or that at any particular time. Sometimes, we may even be confronted with something that is out of time or place. When we are, a few minutes of sleuthing may well be in order, as it was for me today.
That is all. Keep your heads up and carry on!
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Thanks Rima, good sleuthing