Greetings!
As promised, I’m sharing the presentation I delivered at Freedom Fest last month in Las Vegas (I’ve also embedded the audio, in case you’re more in the mood to listen than read).
I was prompted to tackle this topic because it’s increasingly clear that we in the heterodox community face a big problem, and it’s one we rarely discuss or even acknowledge.
We are courageous and insightful people with powerful voices. We’re committed to preserving the way of life that most Americans cherish. We’ve harnessed incredible energy to bring attention to critical issues.
And yet we seem to be hitting a wall. Many people simply aren’t seeing or aren’t concerned by what seems so obvious and alarming to us. We quietly wonder to ourselves: What will it take for them to wake up?
I decided to delve deeper into these issues and deconstruct what’s happening and why. I hope you enjoy!
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Monica Harris – I’m an author, speaker, and
a lawyer. I’m also Executive Director of a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, or FAIR.
This is a relatively new gig for me — I’ve only been in this role for none months. In full disclosure, I’m also completely new to the nonprofit world. I’ve been an entertainment lawyer for more than 20 years, but figured I’d have no trouble stepping into this position.
Why? Because FAIR’s mission and values resonate so strongly with me.
If you’re not familiar with our organization, I’ll give you a quick peek at our website. As you can see, FAIR has a relatively simple and straightforward mission statement: We advocate for the defense and protection of civil liberties under the 1st and 14th Amendments. We support respectful disagreement and viewpoint diversity. FAIR is committed to bridging the divide in our country by overcoming identity politics.
We embrace MLK’s guiding principle that we are all entitled to equal protection under the law — without exception. That we should all be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
I like to think of FAIR as doing the work the ACLU used to do, but no longer does.
This seems like pretty innocuous stuff, right? The kind of common-sense principles all of us would probably assume are non-controversial and even fundamental in a free society in the 21st century.
Well, that’s what I thought, too — until I was about 3 months into my new gig. That’s when I got a reality check. It happened when we were trying to organize a fundraiser in Los Angeles last Fall.
Since running a nonprofit organization isn’t exactly the best choice if you want to make a living wage, I still practice entertainment law on the side. All my clients — and most of my friends and colleagues — are still in L.A.
One of my friends is an event coordinator for one of the city’s largest museums, so I decided to reach out to her for help. I thought she might know some cool venues, maybe get us a deal. Who knows?
But there’s another reason I reached out to my friend: we both have multiracial families.
You see, my friend is white, and her partner is black. I’m black, and my partner is white. We both have biracial children. She wasn’t familiar with FAIR, but I thought of all the people I know, she would be able to appreciate who we are and the work we do.
If you’re in an interracial relationship, you have to believe that we should be seen and treated based on who we are inside, not the color of our skin. Right?
So, here’s what happened.
After asking for her help, I sent her a link to FAIR’s homepage (point to screen). And I wait. The next day, I get am email from her:
“Thank you for thinking of me,” she wrote. “Of course I respect you and appreciate the effort you put into things for which you’re passionate. However, as someone who co-led my organization’s DEI global advisory committee and continues to be very active in the space, FAIR isn’t something that aligns with my working principles at this time.”
Now, I want you to think about that for a moment.
The words on this screen — that every one of us in this room was raised to accept and embrace as core values, foundational values of our country — these words weren’t in alignment with my friend’s “working principles.”
At the time, I was too stunned to even ask her what the misalignment was, and it didn’t seem productive to pursue the issue on email. I just sent her a quick note and politely thanked her for her honesty. But in the back of my mind, the question lingered: What the heck had just happened?
I read the email to my partner, and we spent some time trying to make sense of it. Yes, my friend lived in L.A., and she was a Democrat. And since she had served on her company’s DEI committee she was probably especially sensitive to issues of race.
On the other hand, my friend was raised in a conservative family.
I knew from previous conversations that she didn’t want to defund police. And she thought city officials weren’t doing nearly enough to address the homeless epidemic in Los Angeles. She was smart, level-headed, and had always struck me as someone with common sense.
Yet somehow, FAIR’s mission and values did not align with her “working principles.”
I didn’t think much of the incident at the time because I was new to FAIR. But it didn’t take me long to realize that my friend wasn’t an outlier. This is something we in
FAIR experience all the time.
And it’s not hard to see why.
If my friend had checked FAIR’s Wikipedia entry at the time — which she probably did — she would have learned -- from the very inaccurate description on the site -- that we are a “right- wing” organization and “a key voice amplifying anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” – and that we’re being tracked as a “hate group.”
For the record, I happen to be black and gay –not exactly a prime candidate to run a right-wing, homophobic hate group. So, it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia explains this in its next update.
Anyway, just 3 months ago, our Chapter in Montclair, New Jersey came under a lot of fire after an Op-Ed was published about FAIR in their local paper. The Op-Ed claimed that although “FAIR presents itself as a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights,” it’s raised “significant alarms about its compatibility with the values Montclair holds dear.”
But there’s more. The Op-Ed also stated that “FAIR follows the GOP playbook of using a misleading name for its organization that implies shared community values, then promoting misinformation and/or pseudoscience to confuse and mislead the public.”
Again, what sane and reasonable person would want anything to do with an organization like that?
This past February, a librarian in one of our Canadian chapters wrote an Op-Ed in her local paper about the “hidden censorship” she’s witnessed. She described an environment in libraries that promotes diversity of identity, but not diversity of viewpoint.
Librarians defend books written by authors from “oppressed” groups and books that promote critical social justice, transgender ideology, and decolonization, but very rarely purchase works offering other points of view.
In her Op-Ed, she also mentioned that she had joined FAIR because we are an organization that advocates for library neutrality and intellectual freedom.
Less than a month later, this brave librarian was fired, just 3 years shy of her retirement — not only because she advocated for viewpoint diversity, but also because of her affiliation with FAIR. Because, in the words of one extremely vocal resident, we were just “a very slickly marketed group” that “cloaks” itself in the language of fighting oppression while actually working to promote it.”
So, why am I sharing these experiences with you?
Because I think they highlight a big problem we have in the heterodox community. It’s a problem we don’t often discuss. In fact, it’s a problem we rarely acknowledge. But it’s a problem I think we need to start talking about.
We are an amazing group of people. Our community is filled with some of the brightest minds in the world. We are courageous and passionate with powerful voices. We’re committed to preserving the way of life we cherish and we’ve harnessed incredible energy to bring attention to critical issues.
But if we’re completely honest with ourselves, our brilliant minds, passion and energy aren’t doing the trick, are they?
We’re having trouble reaching people on the other side of a massive divide. And we need to ask ourselves why this is happening. Because unless and until we reach these people, we can’t turn the tide. Unless we reach these people, we can’t save the soul of the country we all love.
Let’s face it: we’re dealing with some pretty big challenges in the heterodox community.
First, we’re working 24/7 to overcome censorship that was once hidden but is now in plain view. We’re learning our government is actively and shamelessly colluding with private actors to circumvent the First Amendment — silencing us if they decide we’re dispensing “misinformation.”
Second, we’re battling algorithms that reward antisocial behavior and people with extreme views. We face a climate of manufactured consent that creates the illusion of consensus. We’re trying to make our voices heard as a desperate and dying legacy media do everything in their power to advance an “approved” narrative.
Those are the obvious problems we face as heterodox thinkers. Now, let’s talk about the not-so- obvious problems. Let’s start with the fact that we spend most of our time preaching to the converted.
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
Every morning you get up, grab a cup of coffee, check your phone (maybe not in that particular order — if you’re like me, you’re probably on your phone long before you’ve had your first cup of coffee).
And for the next 30 min or so, you’re scrolling: checking our inbox to see what people on Substack have written; checking to see which podcasts have dropped; checking your X feed to see what the people you follow are posting.
And everything you read and hear confirms what you already know: the world is going to hell in a dump truck(we’re waaaay past handbaskets). By the time you’ve finished scrolling, you think to yourself, “Thank God I’m not the only one who sees this happening and thinks it’s completely insane!”
The scrolling is exhausting, and it’s infuriating. But it’s also gratifying. It’s a “sanity check” that reminds us that we’re not alone or losing our minds.
But here’s what scrolling in an echo chamber doesn’t do: it doesn’t help us reach people outside our bubble. The people who don’t subscribe to the same Substacks or follow the same people on X. The people who are getting their information from sources that literally put them in a different reality.
And here’s another problem: The thought leaders in our community — who are brilliant, by the way — are generally authors, scholars, or journalists.
They’re diagnostic thinkers who are skilled at identifying problems. Don’t get me wrong, we desperately need these thinker without them, we won’t be able to change anything. But they’re not well-positioned to identify or implement solutions — and that’s not their job.
Identifying and implementing solutions is the job of organizations — like FAIR, FIRE, Braver Angels, and all of the other amazing organizations here at Freedom Fest. We’re trying to raise awareness and push back on narratives, but we’re outmanned by much bigger groups — with seemingly infinite pockets and resources — that are implementing their own “solutions” — advancing their agendas globally on a grand scale.
Sustaining organizations like FAIR, FIRE, and Braver Angels requires money — a lot of it — and I’m sure my colleagues will agree with me when I say that keeping these
organizations running is really, really damn hard. That’s why supporting them is so
very critical now (shameless plug for donations here).
But these aren’t the only problems we face. I don’t have data to prove this, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that our community is dominated by critical thinkers. We are people who don’t necessarily believe what we hear, what we read, or what we’re told.
We’re critical of narratives. We ask hard questions. We don’t follow the herd so we can avoid offending people or making them uncomfortable (in fact, if we see the herd going one direction, we’re likely to head the other way — and if we make people uncomfortable, we know we’re doing something right).
Critical thinking is a blessing because without it we can’t identify problems or craft solutions. But it’s also a curse.
We don’t see the world in black-or-white; we are nuanced thinkers who see shades of gray. So even if we’re identifying the same problems, we’re more likely to have different perspectives on how to fix these problems.
By contrast, most people — and certainly the ones we’re trying to reach — are by
nature orthodox thinkers. That’s not a bad thing, by the way. It’s really the default way for humans to think and move through the world. In many cases, it’s how we’ve survived as a species and protected ourselves. As humans, we feel the need to belong to a group that defends our shared interests.
Orthodox thinkers are more unified in the way they see problems and approach solutions. They move in a herd, and think they like a herd.
Remember the Borg in Star Trek? It’s like being part of a hive mind where a single thought or idea is rapidly replicated throughout the mental ecosystem, and no one pushes back. Resistance is futile.
Let me give you an example.
Heterodox thinkers can agree that DEI is a train wreck, right? But there’s no clear consensus in our community on what to do about DEI.
On the one hand, many of us see value in authentic, holistic diversity that goes beyond race, sex, and gender. We realize the value of casting a wide net to capture the rich tapestry of worldview, ancestry, and class that is the American experience. We also believe in meritocracy and equality of opportunity, not outcome.
So, does that mean we should keep the D but get rid of the E and I? Keep the D and the I but only dump the E? It’s hard to know.
On the other hand, some of us worry that the concept of diversity has been co-opted and become so bastardized that it’s simply too dangerous to pursue at this point. They think we should just kill it and put it out of its misery. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
But if you’re an orthodox thinker? You don’t see any of these nuances. The solution is simple. You keep all 3 letters— no questions asked. Because you believe DEI is the only way to atone for systemic inequality inflicted upon people of
color decades and centuries ago.
Here’s another problem we face: heterodox thinkers rely on logic to make our case and justify our concerns.
We write treatises on Substack and wax philosophical on podcasts. We write books, meticulously laying out arguments grounded in compelling research. Because in order for us to take a position on anything, it must be grounded in reason and evidence.
Maybe you’ve tried to explain to someone why it makes no sense to lock down schools and keep kids at home when they were at infinitesimal risk of getting infected and spreading COVID?
Or maybe you’ve pointed out that it makes no sense to allow transgender and biological women to compete against one another in sports because transgender women have an obvious physical advantage?
Yet how many times, after unspooling your argument — methodically and rationally — has the person you’re talking to looked at you like you’ve sprouted a third arm or a horn on the side of your head?
You know why they look at you that way? Because orthodox thinkers are more likely to respond to emotion than logic. So what moves them?
Guilt. Fear. Compassion.
Guilt convinces them that discriminating against white people is the only way to achieve equality for black people. Their mortal fear of COVID convinces them that sacrificing anything — even the mental and social well-being of future generations — is a trade-off that makes sense. Compassion convinces them that transgender women are somehow more vulnerable and deserving of protection than women who were born female. These are all big challenges we face.
But the biggest problem we face as heterodox thinkers is that the common sense principles we’ve always believed were as natural as the air we breathe — don’t “seem” to be so common anymore.
Whether it’s free speech, universal equality, or women’s rights — the classical liberal values we’ve always assumed all Americans cherished — now seen to be danger. The people we’re trying to reach don’t seem to appreciate our “working principles” anymore.
And I’m not talking about people on the extremes — college students who support Hamas, chant “From the River to the Sea,” and think universities are colonizing institutions; I’m not talking about people who want to decriminalize heroin and give shoplifters a free pass for stealing less than $1000 of merchandise.
I’m talking about decent, hard-working, law-abiding people who happen to lean Left. I’m talking about the family, friends, and colleagues you’ve known for years and maybe all your life — people you’ve always been on the same page with — but who you no longer recognize.
I’m talking about the people who think you’re a racist if you suggest that treating people differently solely based on the color of their skin actually isn’t the best way to address racism.
People who think you’re a conspiracy theorist if you question whether COVID originated in a wet market (instead of the lab that was only 5 miles away from the wet market and, coincidentally, experimented with coronaviruses).
People who think you’re a transphobe if you believe it’s problematic to allow children to remove their genitals and rob themselves of the ability to reproduce.
People who seem, on the most fundamental levels, to no longer seem to care about freedom, democracy, or common decency. People who don’t even seem to love our country anymore.
You’ve probably wondered at some point, Are these people crazy? And if so, have they always been crazy and I just somehow missed it? Or have they changed? Or...maybe I’ve changed?
I don’t think any of these things are true. I think we’re still dealing with the same people — the same family, friends, and colleagues we’ve always known and loved.
I believe that most of the people we disagree with want the same things we do. I believe they cherish the same rightsand share the same values. I believe they love their country as much as we do.
Our biggest problem is that the people we’re trying to reach are more comfortable following narratives from people and institutions they trust. This makes them vulnerable to a phenomenon that is exacerbating the divide in our country. They’re more susceptible to something I call reality distortion. Our biggest problem is that the people we’re trying to reach are living in a distorted reality.
So, what is reality distortion?
Guy Tribble, who was on Apple’s original Macintosh design team, coined the term “reality distortion field” to describe Steve Jobs’s uncanny ability to influence other people with his charm, charisma, and bravado. He saw Jobs masterfully manipulate a “reality distortion field” to make people believe whatever he wanted them to believe about Apple’s brand (and himself).
I think Tribble was onto something, but I also think reality distortion runs much deeper than a tech genius’ ability to manipulate the reality of media, investors, and consumers about iPhones and MacBooks.
AI has made it pretty obvious that we can’t always believe what we see or hear, but I think this phenomenon has actually been going on a lot longer on a much larger scale. I believe our collective reality has been distorted — for longer than we can possibly imagine — and it’s created a world of illusions all around us. What we perceive as reality has been carefully shaped and influenced all our lives.
We just haven’t realized it.
I’ve been writing about these illusions for a while now — in particular, the illusion of division. I believe our collective reality has been distorted — through misinformation and disinformation — to convince us that we’re so very different from one another. In reality — whether we’re black or white, Republican or Democrat, gay, straight or non-binary — we all have much more in common than we’re led to believe.
Our reality can also be shaped by something else: a lack of information.
Our five senses relay information to our brains, which then determines what’s “real” and what isn’t. So, if our brains only receive incomplete information, it will limit our
perception or understanding of the world around us.
There’s a Buddhist parable that explains how this works.
Four blind men came across an elephant, an animal they had never encountered before. Eager to investigate, each man decided to feel a different part of the beast to determine what it looked like.
The first man felt its tusk and discovered the animal was smooth, long, and pointed at the end.
The second man touched its trunk and concluded an elephant was like a giant python.
The third man felt its leg and thought the beast resembled a large, hairy tree stump.
The fourth man explored its tail and decided the elephant was like a thin snake with a brush on the end.
Each man’s description was partially correct, but because each had only touched a single part of the elephant, they had a limited perception of what the entire animal looked like.
Now, let’s give the parable a tweak.
Instead of each man feeling a different part of the elephant, they asked someone they trusted— with 20/20 vision—to describe ALL the parts of the animal to them. If this trusted person accurately relayed every piece of the elephant to the blind men, they would have a perfect understanding of what the animal looked like.
But what if the person describing the elephant was careless and told them about all the animal’s body parts except its tail? Even worse, what if this person didn’t tell them because he didn’t want them to know the elephant had a tail?
The blind men would be confident that they knew what an elephant looked like: a big, hairy, tree stump-like python with a long, smooth, pointy spear at one end. They would have no clue about the thin, hairy snake-like thingattached to its rear.
Their reality would be distorted.
I believe we all have something in common with the blind men in the parable: although we can “see,” we must rely on people we trust to give us information about our world.
We don’t have direct access to all the people, facts, and events that affect our lives, so:
We rely on the media we trust to inform us.
We rely on our government we trust to tell us which laws best serve us and which wars we should fight.
We rely on political parties we trust to tell us which “viable” candidates will best represent us.
We rely on economists we trust to tell us how our economy is doing.
We rely on doctors and other “experts” we trust to tell us what the “science” is.
But if the people we rely on give us incomplete information, we’re like the blind men who have no clue that the elephant has a tail. Our reality will be distorted.
I think this is the situation we’re facing now. The institutions we trust have given us incomplete information about people, events, issues, and policies. They’re not telling us about all the pieces of the elephant.
Our problem is that the people we’re trying to reach are still relying on these trusted sources to keep them informed.
They trust that what they’re looking at is an elephant — even though it’s missing a tail. What does this mean?
It means even though it seems like we’re talking about the same issues and problems, many times we really aren’t. It means we’re not dealing with an ideological divide; we’re dealing with a reality divide.
In May 2020, less than 2 months into the pandemic, an interview with Dr. Knut Wittkowski was posted on YouTube. Dr. Wittkowski was an experienced epidemiologist and former biostatistician at Rockefeller University. In the video, he defended Sweden’s herd immunity approach to the pandemic and advocated against lockdowns.
The video got 1.3 million views on YouTube — and then it was taken down.
It was one of the very first of many acts of censorship against medical professionals that we would see during the pandemic. Acts that would shock many of us in
the heterodox community. But what was even more shocking was that so many
people defended this censorship. How, we wondered, how can any American who cherishes free speechturn a blind eye to blatant efforts to silence medical professionals?
I think I know how.
In September 2021, Gallup and Franklin Templeton conducted a survey and asked this question: “What do you think the chances are that you would have to go to the hospital if you got COVID?” Less than 1/3 of Republicans thought the chances were 50% — but nearly half of Democrats felt the same way. (For the record, the answer was actually between 1% and 5 %).
Why did Democrats have such a warped perception of COVID’s lethality? Because they were far more likely to trust the media, and as Bill Maher eloquently put it, the media scared the shit out of them.
I want you to think about this for a moment.
Imagine that you’re someone who loves free speech with all your heart. You believe it’s one of the most important rights we hold as Americans. But you’ve also been told by people you trust that if you’re infected with a novel, highly contagious virus, you have a 1 in 2 chance of ending up in the hospital and dying. And that’s if you’re young and healthy. If you’re older or have underlying conditions, you probably think COVID is the kiss of death.
Now, if this was the world you were living in during the pandemic — where the wrong contact with the wrong person could mean the difference between life and death — it’s not hard to see why you would do everything possible to keep the virus from spreading.
It’s not hard to understand why you might think it’s appropriate and even necessary to silence doctors who were dispensing misinformation that would allow the virus to keep spreading. If this was the reality you lived in, then you might still cherish free speech — but not if it came at the expense of your life, or the life of someone you loved.
But it’s not just COVID. We’re dealing with other reality distortions.
A few weeks ago, I was at a conference and spoke with a parent who advocated for her local school board to remove a book from the elementary school curriculum that she felt was, to put it mildly, age-inappropriate. Not surprisingly, she was immediately branded a book-banning transphobe. One board member, in particular, was especially aggressive in shaming her.
Of course, I knew this wasn’t an isolated occurrence— I’m sure many of you have heard about incidents like this all over the country. But I’d always wondered, How can any reasonable adult be okay with exposing young children to highly sexualized reading material? This seemed like a perfect opportunity to find out.
“Let me get this straight,” I asked the parent. “The Board member actually read the book? And she was okay with it?”
“Well, that’s where it gets interesting,” the parent told me. “I emailed her and asked, ‘What did you think about the picture on pg 4?’”
“I was fine with it,” the Board member responded.
“And what about the one on pg. 9?” the parent asked.
“I’ve didn’t have a problem with that one, either,” the Board member wrote back. “Okay,” the parent asked her. “What about the picture on pg 12?”
Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that page 12 included graphic images of young boys engaging in various sexual acts and sexual positions many of us weren’t exposed to until we got to college.
The Board member didn’t write back immediately, but the next day, she responded: “Oh my God,” she wrote. “I didn’t read that far.”
This school Board member had been advocating to place a book in the elementary curriculum, even though she wasn’t completely familiar with what was in the book. The book was 25 pages long, but she hadn’t even made it halfway through before deciding it was appropriate for kids —and that anyone who disagreed was a transphobe.
I don’t think this Board member was a “bad” person. She wasn’t a pedophile. She didn’t want to harm kids or “groom” them. She simply believed what she had been told by people she trusted.
Our reality is being distorted, and it’s convincing many Americans to take
positions and support policies they may not fully understand — positions and policies they probably wouldn’t support if they were fully informed.
Positions and policies they wouldn’t support if parts of the elephant weren’t being hidden from them.
Which brings me back to DEI.
Remember the friend I told you about earlier, the one whose “working principles” didn’t align with FAIR’s? Since that conversation, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to a lot more people who feel just as strongly about DEI — except a funny thing happens when I drill down and ask them questions.
In turns out many of the people who support diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t aware that it comes at a cost. They don’t realize that parts of the DEI elephant have been hidden from them. They don’t realize, for example, that DEI:
Encourages schools to create “affinity groups” — to ensure that students focus on making friends with kids of the same race – and places mixed-race kids like my son in an awkward and difficult position.
They don’t realize that DEI encourages schools to segregate black students and white students — so black students can learn in a “safe” environment.
They don’t realize that DEI encourages schools to teach students that punctuality, respect for authority, and math are symbols of white supremacy.
They don’t realize that DEI encourages companies to provide diversity trainings that admonish employees to be “less white,” to complete “white privilege checklists” — so they “undo their whiteness.”
Most of the people who support DEI don’t know any of this. And when I share these facts with them, they’re shocked at first:
“That can’t possibly be happening,” they tell me.
Then, when I share proof with them — maybe in an article they’ve never
seen, buried somewhere on an outlet they trust — their shock turns to alarm: “That’s not what I believe in,” they tell me. “I’m not on board with that.”
We don’t face an ideological divide; we face a reality divide.
And if we’re going to reach the people on the other side of that divide, we need to first understand why we’re not reaching them.
We need to spend more time talking with the people we disagree with them and less time talking at them.
We need to understand that most Americans are good people who just want to do the right thing. We need to assume that most of the people we disagree with are coming from a good place with good intentions.
But we also need to understand that most people aren’t like us, that asking questions genuinely makes them uncomfortable, and that they find it much easier to simply believe what they’ve been told by people they’ve always trusted.
But more than anything, we need to understand that this doesn’t make the people we disagree with bad people who don’t share our values.
Instead of trying to explain why we’re right and they’re wrong, we need to engage with them one-on-one and try to figure out why they believe what they do -- and pinpoint the source of our disconnect.
IN OTHER WORDS: We need to spend more time trying to find out which parts of the elephant they might be missing.
If you’re a heterodox thinker, I know it’s easy to feel depressed now. It’s tempting to think that we don’t have a shot at saving our country because we’re a tribe of 333 million people who no longer hold the same core principles and values, want the same things, or want to see our country thrive.
But I hope what I’ve shared today gives you hope. Because I promise you, we are all so much more alike than we realize. We just can’t see it because there are forces at work that keep us from seeing it.
I believe if we’re patient with one another and have compassion for people who aren’t “wired” the same way we are, then we can ultimately overcome the reality distortion that’s dividing us.
Together, we can save this American Experiment that matters so much to all of us.
This article is such a well-supported exposition of Monica's theory of what ails us and divides us. Very fine particulars supporting macro movemements we all have witnessed. Exacerbating the incomplete picture that (partisan) trusted sources feed their followers is the sound bite/meme/ surface brushing tendencies that social media has encouraged, all of which echo the trusted sources by algorithm. Those bites and TikTok videos have become authoritative for an entire generation, actually more than one generation. That is the brick wall you face. Fast-food activism, complete with processed ingredients that provide lots of pleasure but no real nutrition. Please dont stop trying to break down that wall.
Dear Monica, this is a very insightful article, particularly regarding “reality distortion!” The bottom line is that people either don’t have the time or the inclination to do their own research or get to the bottom of these more complex issues and they totally trust the “experts” that resonate with them. I have found that many of my dear friends are blindly influenced by their section of the elephant and not ready to hear about the other parts! While your mission may seem to be slogging through the jungle of the distorted field, I am heartened that you have a clear understanding of the path ahead and appreciate the hard work you and your fellow trail-blazers are determined to pursue. Thank you! Minds will be opened one by one so I pray for all of us to be patient and remember our common heritage as children of the Divine.