Going Out of Their Way

Barry Dredze
5 min readSep 17, 2024
Republican national convention delegates in Milwaukee, WI, July 17, 2024. (Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters)

My fellow Americans. I don’t want to do any harm.

I don’t want to take any shit, either. I just won’t go out of my way to do harm.

That appears to be the battle line of the so-called Culture Wars. The white power Jesus freaks are entirely free to be Jesus freaks. They live their lives in their communities, however, like they were commanded to go out of their way to kick your soul in the balls; because if they don’t, then the rest of us might call them by gender-neutral pronouns and ram our multi-cultural society down their throats.

We the People deal with typically awful reporting on every recent Republican House majority’s ritual debt ceiling drama. Like this ridiculously desperate “both-sides” headline from a Spring 2023 Scripps story, screaming “Lawmakers on Capitol Hill continue blame game as debt ceiling looms” — because god forbid that an informed electorate should understand that, with their Constitutional “power of the purse,” Republican House majorities ALWAYS take the economy hostage, abusing the routine debt ceiling protocol for the sake of their core public policy priority of starving the federal government’s ability to regulate public oversight of private interests down to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub.

The News business will tell us that they can’t “take sides” in political debates, like budget…

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Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.