While, admittedly, there are more falsehoods on the Internet than facts, it is still possible for any interested individual to search for a recent news, read about it from multiple sources, and determine the facts or falsehoods in different presentations of that news across different outlets with different agenda, preferably avoiding AI generated material and social media posts in the process. I have done this for everything I have written below, and any previous post on this website or on Facebook or Substack, and will continue doing so for any future post. I will not include any links to the sources that I believe are credible as I am sure not everybody will agree on that and I don’t want to create additional bias. But I strongly encourage every reader of these notes to please fact check every statement for yourselves.

I had a recent post on Facebook about Musk’s departure from DC and DOGE’s accomplishments so far. There, I had also talked about the recent pardons, by the president, of various white collar criminals including one Florida “businessman” who had already pleaded guilty for withholding millions of dollars in employee payroll taxes and using them to finance a luxury life style and yacht purchases. While there was at least some subtlety in the reasons of other similar pardons (although all the pardoned individuals had somehow supported the president’s recent election), the case of the Florida businessman seemed an obvious quid pro quo, days after his mother’s donation of $1 million to the president’s “campaign” at a Mar-a-Lago event. I had mentioned in that post that, had Musk known that the president was going to be pardoning tax cheats and frauds (forgiving millions of dollars of court ordered fines and taxpayers’ money to his fraudster supporters), he probably wouldn’t have spent so much of his time and energy trying to root out fraud and abuse in various government agencies, without actually identifying any fraud that resulted in an indictment (at least so far, and that the public is aware of). Instead, Musk could have just focused on dismantling or otherwise restructuring departments and agencies such as DOL, NLRB, CFPB, USAID, DOT, USDA, EPA, FEC, DOI, DOD, DOJ, SEC, that had open investigations against his companies, to make those investigations go away; possibly the main reason for his more than $250 million contributions to the president’s elections campaign.

After that Facebook post, I received a message from a dear friend and former colleague of mine, along with an advice. Here is the message:

Hey Jaber, how are you? long time! wha’s going on man? Looks like you are taking the politics and political news too seriously these days! who cares at this point? There is nothing anybody can do. So chill out.

I had a long phone conversation with my friend, both to catch up after many years, and to talk a bit about the above message and my post. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in short, I explained that I did not believe that these conversation were about politics. Politics is mostly about policies, that while being subjective and open for debate and personal opinions, have historically been still defined within the framework of the existing laws and the fundamental principals that have shaped the Constitution. The recent conversations, however, are mostly about the facts and respect for the existing laws and the judicial process. These are not things that are subject to debate or majority opinion. A fact is a fact, no matter how many people agree or disagree with it. And a law, as long as it is still active and in the books, and not overridden by other laws, is something that demands respect from everybody, as the justice system is expected to treat all people equally. So, dismissing these conversations by saying that they are political discussions and not very constructive, is misleading at best.

His point, however, was that people are desensitized to the negative news about this administration, while still taking any negative news about the previous administrations very seriously (take Jake Tapper’s recent book for one example). He also believed that there was absolutely nothing that anybody could do to make any changes to how things are happening or will happen in the future, so everybody should just put their head down and focus on their work and family. When I asked him about how he thinks we’ve gotten to this point, his answer was that (with apology to the readers, these are not my words, and I will have my own views explained right below): “A large number of idiots voted for some other idiots.“

I expressed my disagreements with his last statement, also telling him that “now I understand where your feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are coming from.” In my opinion, a correct way of putting his thoughts in his last statement could be “There were a large number of uninformed individuals who, against their own interests, voted for a cheater and fraudster with autocratic aspirations, who then installed his own sycophants around himself with the help of some other hypocrites whom mostly the same uninformed individuals had sent to the Congress.” And there is a big difference between the two statements. You cannot make any election idiot-proof. So, if you really believe everyone who voted in a certain way is an idiot, then yes, there would certainly be no hope of not having other idiots elected to the presidency or Congress in the future. But uninformed individual can be informed, provided that people keep communicating with each other on things that matter the most for the wellbeing of their own and their children and grand children. That requires stepping out of the bubbles that we ourselves or social media have created around us, and listening to sources with verifiable references and solid reasoning. Yes, no single person can probably make any meaningful difference in the current circus that we are witnessing, but everyone can help with the process of keeping communication links open and keeping each other informed of what’s happing.

Don’t take me wrong, I have no delusions about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of these notes. In fact, I am sure that with each Facebook post, I am taking the risk of annoying some, if not most, of my friends. But desperate times require desperate measures, and I do believe that these are desperate times.