Stephen Colbert and The Late Show's "Joy Machine" Won. Donald Trump and MAGA's Misery Movement Lost Again.

Racists Hate Juneteenth... Which Is Why It Exists.

You can tell a lot about people by the things that outrage them. As I write this, it’s Juneteenth, and all over America, from neighborhood social media sites all the way to Congress, profoundly bothered white people are engaged in wild histrionics over the fact that our nation acknowledges the event as a holiday. Of course, this anger is a confession of sorts. It’s also an ironic and sad reminder that in the hearts of so many who call this place home, little has changed in 161 years. That’s the entire reason we’re here. Juneteenth marks the day on June 19th, 1865, when Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare the emancipation of all Americans, of every slave now being free. It shouldn’t even have been necessary. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier by President Lincoln. Freedom under the law had arrived, yet because of the geographic fractures created by the war, many strongholds of institutionalized racism existed. Texas was the final area of this nation to surrender to this particular bend of the arc of the moral universe toward racial justice—and someone had to forcefully bring them the news they’d refused to come to terms with: the war was over. Enslaved black people had been free for nearly three years, but this news had been withheld from them by a group of white Americans who did not want them to know that they were free and did not want them to be free. The truth was being held captive by people for whom racial equality was not a destination they wanted us to collectively reach, and so they fought to prevent progress and suspend national renovation. Today, we might look at much of Texas and wonder if any time has actually passed, if the news of freedom ever reached some folks at all. 163 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there are still people there and in Wisconsin and Iowa and Tennessee, and all over this country, who are trying to rewind the clock of national progress to a place where black people’s freedom is not a reality. There remains here an ignorant army of white bigots fighting to return to supposed American “greatness,” where the rights of people of color to live freely and determine their destination and have their voices heard are yet a long way off. White supremacy is still working to ensure that black liberation is not complete. On this collective journey toward a just and fair nation, one where the universal worth of every human being is honored, the disheartening news is that we clearly are not all free yet. But the good news (and it is very good news), is that we are not passive passengers on this trip. Each of us has proximity and agency and the expansive space of our choices. We have our individual wills and our circles of influence and our daily decisions and our social media profiles to usher in the news of equality’s truth. Not only that, but we have our collective voices and our shared resources and our chosen communities to incarnate a place where more people experience the reality of their liberation. 161 years after the events of Juneteenth, in cul-de-sacs, on city streets, and in the halls of Congress, racists are still working tirelessly to silence people of color in the name of saving America, and the rest of us cannot give them an unimpeded path, especially those of us who share their pigmentation. We need to continue marching into the fortified strongholds of racism and to the last holdouts against justice; in our homes and neighborhoods and schools and churches, and then to the polls. We need to declare unequivocally that all people are not yet free and deserve to be free. We need to forcefully confront the perverted theology, poisonous politics, irrational fear, and unacknowledged privilege that maintain this sickening status quo. Until this happens, the cancer of racism will remain, and slavery will not be only in our shameful past, but in our grievous present and our uncertain future. Every human being here deserves to find joy and to be truly free in their shoes and their skin and their heads, and until we see that day, the work of good people remains unfinished. May we be a nation where racists and bigots finally realize they have lost the war for good. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Thanks, Obamas.

Dear Former President Barack Obama and Former First Lady Michelle Obama, History has a way of revealing the truth, eventually. Like the sun gradually coming up over the horizon and burning away the darkness concealing everything around it, the unfolding years chase away the noisy bombast of social media rhetoric, knee-jerk think pieces, and in-the-moment emotion, leaving us with the unvarnished reality of people and their lives. This will be true of you, and your service, and of the mark you have left upon the world, too. Your beautiful, brilliant body of work will testify loudly on your behalf far beyond these days, and in this way, your legacies are secure, both individually and as a couple. But what may be less apparent looking back from the distance of time will be something that is less easily quantifiable: character. Over the past two decades, I’ve watched you. I’ve watched you absorb a billion body blows from your critics—brutal words that run far deeper than policy or platform; monstrous thoughts assembled within poisoned minds long before you served a single day in office. I’ve watched you hounded by the Molotov cocktails of thinly veiled or overt racism claiming to be objective opposition. I’ve watched you and your children attacked with a ferocity and cruelty that defy any sense of decency, and that certainly have no precedent. I’ve watched your birthplace called into question, your personal faith ridiculed, your patriotism mocked, your gender contested, and your very humanity discounted. I’ve watched you endure the incessant, bitter venom of those for whom the color of your skin was always going to be a problem. And through all of it, I’ve watched you be the better humans, always going high despite their sickening depths. In the face of a sustained, spitting, violent, raw-throated hatred, you’ve never responded in kind. You never allowed yourselves to be defined by the bigotry of your enemies, and you never dehumanized them or let them win by becoming them. This, Mr. and Mrs. Obama, is perhaps your greatest legacy: the way you retained your dignity in the midst of the most undignified behavior of your adversaries. The truth is, good, honest people here understand that the White Evangelicals, Republican leaders, and far too many of our white family members, friends, and neighbors were simply never going to be okay with a couple of color leading them and succeeding—and yet you have done both. Two decades later, those same people still strain to bait you into a reciprocating bitterness so that you would fulfill their toxic prophecies of you, while you simply continue to do what you do with nobility, compassion, good humor, and steadfast, unapologetic conviction. You live the tangible love for neighbor that so many of your professed Christian critics preach but rarely model. As a father, I realize that my children are always watching me, always taking cues from the way I treat people, from how I respond to adversity, from how I care for those in pain, from how I face mistreatment. I know that for them, my words will always be secondary to my conduct; that how I live will always trump what I say. This is where I find my deepest gratitude for you both in these days, and I know I’m not alone. There are tens of millions of Americans who feel the way I feel. Today, as much as ever, your unceasing humanity is spurring us on to speak and move and work for the inherent value of all people, regardless of the cost or the wounds or the attacks from those who would deny it. We are chasing equality and justice together, unfettered by the words of our detractors. We are trying to live fiercely yet honorably. We are working to stand upon principles and never upon people. We are seeing the way you continue to live and are moved to live similarly. You are still pointing us to our highest ideas and appealing to our better angels. So, please forgive me if I speak informally right now, and if I use words so often brandished sardonically by your detractors to try and ridicule the work you’ve done and the life you’ve lived and the grace you’ve shown. Without a trace of irony or sarcasm, let me simply say: Thanks, Obamas. CLICK THE PHOTO TO ORDER MY FORTHCOMING CHILDREN’S BOOK! The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Josh Hokit, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, And The MAGA Male Identity Crisis.

At the close of the Trump Administration’s garish, bloated, masturbatory performance art on the White House lawn, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proceeded to punctuate his match by offering a monstrous verbal assault on former First Lady Michelle Obama, targeting her gender. His head wrapped in an American flag and flanked by Joe Rogan, the bottom-feeding patron saint for mediocre white men who’ve failed up in Trump’s America, Hokit expelled a sickening slur that encompasses the racism, misogyny, and queer-phobia the entire MAGA ecosystem runs on. After pretending to vomit on himself (or purposefully doing it), during his weigh-in a day earlier, the 28-year-old proceeded to gleefully regurgitate the kind of reckless, moronic moral sewage that Trump has cultivated and curated over the last ten years, the kind he himself has regularly trafficked in. It was unprovoked, vicious, and embarrassing. And it would be easy to dismiss Hokit as a professional buffoon, a jacked-up, brain-battered, ignorant caricature with no connection to reality, if not for the fact that he’s pretty much a typical MAGA man, without the skin-tight leotard, greased-up pecs, and proximity to a president. Guys like Hokit are everywhere. Have a conversation with any random group of guys still supporting Trump, whether in your neighborhood, a local bar, or online, and you’ll find similar violent contempt for women, for immigrants, for trans people. Sit down with garden-variety America First dudebros, and you’ll likely have a front-row seat to the kind of fragility and aggression that explain precisely why a male loneliness epidemic should exist. That the same performative males who never shut up about protecting children and women are so silent on the Epstein files and still so emotionally tethered to a sexual predator like Donald Trump reminds us how morally adrift they are, how rudderless they have become. Or worse, maybe it reminds us that this is exactly who they are because they willfully choose to be. Either way, it’s a national manhood emergency. The urgent crisis of MAGA masculinity isn’t revealed by a performative clown like Josh Hokit; it’s revealed in the guys who are defending him in comment sections right now. It’s revealed in the dudes who laugh off his abject filth as a supposed “joke” that the oversensitive Left can’t take. It’s revealed in men who spend their days echoing his verbal diarrhea around their wives, girlfriends and children. The toxic manosphere may be headlined by guys like Trump, Rogan, and Hokit, but it’s the massive undercard of tens of millions of perpetually enraged, emotionally unsteady, podcast-addled disciples that should alarm the rest of us. It isn’t just the poisoned minds of the guys at the top that are cause for alarm, but the trickle-down ignorance that has reached our families, friends, co-workers, classmates, church friends, and neighbors Last week, I walked past a few conservative guys in our neighborhood having a typically louder-than-necessary front porch conversation. Normally, when I pass by, I crank up my earbuds to drown out the steady torrent of liquor-lubricated, nonsensical, right-wing talking points sure to be loudly propelled into the ether, but on that night, I heard the word “transgender.” I decided to listen in, knowing that it wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t. There was little to differentiate their words from Hokit’s. They reflected the same uninformed phobia, the same irresponsible slurs, and the same dehumanizing hatred the fighter hurled at Michelle Obama from the White House lawn. Black women will tell you that they are no strangers to slurs like the ones Hokit hurled at the former First Lady. Queer people will confirm that the UFC fighter is not an aberration. This attack isn’t an isolated exception; it’s the consistent party line. And this same tired charade is playing out all over this country right now. MAGA America has created an entire generation of terrified white man-children who are so intimidated by diversity, so threatened by competition, and so convinced that they’re oppressed that they lash out with a violence that has no regard for its repercussions. Conservative men’s lives are riddled with pleas for attention, signaling, overcompensation, and an insatiable need to be reassured. For all their baseless attacks on women they claim are men, they’re the ones with the identity crisis. So, yes, we can see Hokit for what he is: a paid provocateur whose mindless, incendiary comments were intended to incite anger. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that his intended audience is larger and closer than any of us should be comfortable with. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The 60 Million Dollar UFC, White (Trash) House Takeover Should Piss Off Every Decent American

What in the white trash hell was that? How did we get here? I’m not talking about the perfect storm of corruption, toxic religion, and white nationalism that has resulted in the unthinkable ascension to power of one of the most reprehensible, festering sacks of organic matter to ever leave his putrid slime trails on the planet. Greater minds can unpack the complex historical and social explanations for the inexplicable sequel given to the greatest single collective electoral error in our history. What I want to know is how, at the precipice of our two hundred and fiftieth year as a Republic, have we devolved into the disgraceful public urination that took place at our nation’s Capitol. If you took every stereotype of the Ugly American, the most monstrously exaggerated caricatures of us as a people, the absolute worst clichés of this nation at our most base, most ignorant, and most vile, and you fed it into an AI program with the prompt: “Make something truly disgusting.”—this is what you’d have ended up with. We should be the United States of Embarrassment today. There should be nonpartisan vomiting and facepalming all across this nation after witnessing this wasteful, 60-million-dollar, star-spangled, asinine, white supremacist dudebro circle jerk on the lawn of the People’s House, our house. Watching this garish Temu Roman Colosseum cosplay filled with grifters, predators, and criminals should infuriate every single American who has a shred of self-respect or love of country left. In any other iteration of our country, this would not stand. Knowing that their taxes were funding an opulent, violent, phobic birthday party for a cognitively failing serial pedophile would propeled our proud and patriotic forebears into a complete overthrow of those in power. In a time when people have to choose between paying their rent, or affording routine healthcare, when families can’t afford groceries or to fill their gas tanks, when we’re funding foreign genocides and domestic concentration camps, when we’re told we can’t afford to house or feed or care for the most vulnerable—this should make our blood boil. More than that, it should wake us all the hell up: conservative, moderate, or liberal; Democrat, Independent, or Republican; straight or queer, well off or struggling, native born or immigrant, to the reality that we are all being played. The billionaires (and the trillionaire) are mocking us all right now; dismantling the systems and protections designed to care for each of us, ignoring the Constitution, discarding morality, hoarding the wealth that was meant to be shared, devouring our natural resources, turning us against one another—and giving us a sweaty, bloated 60-million-dollar middle finger to us in the process. November should be a reckoning for these narcissistic vampires once and for all, but we shouldn’t wait that long. Last night should be enough. This should be the final straw for every human being who calls this place home, rousing each of us out of whatever apathy, denial, political tribalism, wishful thinking, or American exceptionalism that has kept us on the sidelines. The white trash, classless stupidity on the White House lawn last night was a microcosm of the prolific mockery of America that this President and his accomplices have made for ten years now. These people believe that we’re ignorant, that we’re lazy, that we’re too distracted and soft to give a damn about the fact that they’re fleecing us, that all we need is a the easy high of fireworks and faux patriotism to lull us into inaction. If we allow them to prevail, we’ll have proven them right. Who are we going to be, America? The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Information Poisoning: Knowing Is Killing Our Mental Health, But It Doesn't Have To

Growing up, I was taught that knowledge was power.Lately, I’m beginning to believe differently.On many days, I think it’s hazardous.Right now, knowing is actually part of the problem. We’re all suffering from information poisoning. The more we know about what’s really happening in this country: the depths of our fractures, the audacity of our leaders, and the failing of our systems the greater our sense of despair can become. Our noble efforts to stay informed are locking us into an emotional state of fight, flight, or freeze that isn’t helpful or sustainable; our sober situational awareness is destroying our mental health. I confess to envying people who, by nature or by choice, don’t have a clue what’s going on: people who’ve opted out of knowing anymore. They don’t read the news; they’ve checked out of social media, and they avoid or refuse to believe any information that conflicts with the story they tell themselves of everything being fine. I know that attempting to live inside such a heavily redacted reality is an irresponsible act of privilege, but they seem so happy in their blissful bubble of not-knowing. They rarely feel the dread I experience on a regular basis. They don’t lose a minute of sleep worrying about the stuff that keeps me up at night. They’re never visited by the grief that feels like such a constant companion here in my heart. Some days, I want to be like them; care-free, weightless, and fully unburdened because of all they choose not to know, but that’s how we got here. This current national disaster is the byproduct of millions of people who’ve spent a decade refusing facts or data or truth when those things carried discomfort. The sedatives of denial and distraction do nothing to change the truth. They don’t make us any safer. They don’t decrease the peril our nation is in. They don’t help any of the people who are in danger right now—which is all of them… all of us. The only way through this historic, catastrophic s**t show is to face and confront reality, as ugly and disheartening as it is, and try to change that reality, alongside people who also care deeply because they too understand how sideways it’s all gone. Too much exposure to the scale and velocity of the suffering, and we’ll eventually sink beneath it, physically or emotionally breaking down; too little exposure, and we end up complicit in the damage. The challenge is to live somewhere safely between a constant, complete immersion in the terrors that will surely overwhelm us and completely checking out to avoid the reality of how jacked up everything is. With the relentless sensory media flood around us, we need the discipline and restraint to know the difference between awareness and self-harm. I don’t want to know how bad it is anymore, but I do.I don’t want to grieve the horrible reality anymore, but I do.I don’t want to care anymore, but I do.This may not feel at all good, but it is still a good thing. Some things that may help you stay in balance:- Limit daily media exposure, setting time constraints and certain times of day, and stick to them.- Spend some time each day in silence, nature, rest, exercise, and in community to offset the heavy information you're absorbing.- Try to mark off time first thing in the morning and just before bed so you can begin and end the day grounded and centered on the agency you always have.- When taking in the news, continually ask yourself: what of this is mine to carry and what can I and should I let go of? Knowledge of the urgency of our situation may indeed be a hazard, but it is still one of the most powerful weapons we have in the fight to stay human in inhumane times. Right now, knowing what’s happening will help us know who we want to be in the middle of it. Be encouraged today.What strategies are you using to be selective in the way you take in information and care for your mental health in the process? Let me know in the comments. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]