Four days ago, for a variety of reasons, I posted a farewell message to my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/timsnews) after nine years of dedicating my blood, sweat, and tears to keeping it going well, and doing so with no real compensation.
There were several private personal issues that played into the decision of how I need to allocate my time and effort going forward, but those were all secondary to the fact that at the beginning of 2016, this page was reaching nearly half a million individual users a day. Now, with nearly twice as many followers as then, it barely reaches 5,000 a week. This is a direct result of Facebook’s (now Meta’s) algorithms intentionally quashing the voice of progressive and/or humanist advocates.
As a result of all of this, and other changes to how the Facebook user interface works, the page has evolved a few times over the years, going from a place of user engaged discussion and debate of meaningful issues, to me just posting brief commentary on specific news links, and the few people that still engaged doing so simply by clicking a generalized emoticon reaction button instead of processing their thoughts on the issue for a meaningful response.
Since posting that message, quite a few people who have never openly engaged before let me know publicly and privately how much the page has meant to them, that meant a lot.
Also, several extremely major news stories broke each validating much of my efforts here over the last few years.
Trump’s Chief of Staff published a new book exposing that Trump tested positive for COVID 3 days prior to his live debate with Biden in 2020. Meaning that he was “patient zero” for the Super Spreader event celebrating his appointment of Amy Cohen Barrett to the Supreme Court and several other events that week, all of which he attended unmasked while hugging the guests. It also shows that his crowding Biden’s personal space during the debate was an intentional and malicious effort attempting to infect Biden. And every one of his immediate family members and staff, unmasked in the audience, were doing something similar. After backlash from Trump, the author, said in a news interview that his own book was “Fake News.”
A former ranking member of the DOJ choose to plead the 5th in front of a Congressional committee rather than answer questions that would expose his own criminal involvement in the January 6th insurrection. This has been handed over to the current AG for Contempt of Congress charges.
Meanwhile a Supreme Court bench sent the signal that it fully intends to strip women of what remaining personal health autonomy they already have, and in the process set the new precedent for states to completely disregard any and all federal laws and regulations they choose.
You might remember Trump in his debate with Hillary Clinton declaring that he would fill the bench with judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade. And here we are.
Despite the fact that during his confirmation to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh convinced Sen. Susan Collins that he thought a woman’s right to an abortion was “settled law” calling the court cases affirming it “precedent on precedent” that could not be casually overturned. And during her own confirmation, Amy Coney Barrett told senators that laws could not be undone simply by personal beliefs, including her own.
In both cases Senators like Susan Collins choose to believe their lies under oath, rather than see the reality of their previous rulings and opinions and op-ed papers, and Trump’s stated intent and confirm them anyway.
As a result, we now have a Supreme Court bench, one third of which, was appointed by a man who attempted to lead a violent overthrow of our government, actively reinterpreting Constitutional law and legal precedent from a fascist White Nationalist perspective.
The legal team Trump assembled to wage his “Stop the Steal” court battles has turned on each other so deeply that they’re publicly exposing each others crimes, and all are now under investigation. They also lost a major ruling in Michigan as a result of these frivolous lawsuits. And outlets like Fox News and NewsMax are tearing themselves apart trying to figure out who they’re supposed to support and who they’re supposed to attack.
During this brief four day span, we also learned that the mother of the latest school shooting wrote an open later in 2016 to Trump thanking him for giving her the right to bear arms. The weapon the boy used was only purchased by the father four days before the methodical and deliberate massacre. This was a direct result of the incessant #StochasticTerrorism efforts from Trump and his supporters. The young man is now being charged as an adult with murder and terrorism charges. His parents are both being charged with involuntary manslaughter as well.
And over the years, each and every one of those things was predicted by the posts on this page, and then discussed again as they were happening in real time. This, along with your heartfelt responses, further validated my work and effort here and helped me come to a realization.
I started the Facebook page and this blog site for me, they were a place for me to process my thoughts on important and difficult issues, which over the years evolved into an attempt to combat willful ignorance by keeping myself and others informed. One of the key ways I found to do that was to expose the aspects of our #culturalinertia that were holding us back as a society offering suggestions on how we need to shift them in the proper direction. At the same time writing about it and informing others became a form of personal therapy to work through my own “Moral Injury.” If you don’t know what that is, you should. I strongly believe that we as a collective society are all suffering from this shared PTSD. Learn more here: https://www.ptsd.va.gov/…/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp=
So, I realize now, I need to keep doing my writing and sharing it with anyone that I can reach, which means instead of shutting the page down, it is time for it to evolve once again.
I will keep this page open, along with my Twitter page @timelytopics. Of late, I have been over-posting to Facebook and under-posting to Twitter. To solve both those issues, instead of posting so many different news articles with their own separate lead in comments, I will be writing a couple cumulative blog entries on this WordPress page https://tims-news.com/ and posting the links to these social media accounts, you can follow on whichever of the three platforms you prefer.
These blog entries will be more similar in structure to the postings I have shared with you recently from Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, and I will allow more of my personal writing voice to be present in my commentary on the issues (as all of my blog posts have done) than my postings here normally have contained. Expect to find a lot more humor and sarcasm embedded that those of you that don’t know me personally are accustomed to from me.
If you appreciate the work and effort, and are willing to make a donation to cover the expenses of the news subscriptions I use to keep the information here flowing, you can do so at either PayPal: paypal.me/timelytopics or Venmo: timelytopics@gmail.com