Balance is not 'whataboutism.'

"I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist.

There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, "Why I Won’t Vote," The Nation, October 20, 1956

By J. Basil Dannebohm

In response to a column I recently wrote, a relic from national television media accused me of "whataboutism" for examining an issue from both sides and pointing out the facts -- something his industry should do. The former journalist went so far as to suggest that I was a member of the "MAGA cult."

In fact, I am neither loyal nor beholden to any party.

John Adams once wrote, "There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

I'm not a member of any cult. I don't obsess over the cult of personality -- whether that be political, religious, athletic, or celebrity. I infiltrated and investigated cults and extremist groups, but my days of investigating, much like my days of public service, are well behind me.

While the left can rightly accuse some conservatives of forming a cult around President Trump, let's not forget that many liberals had a similar obsession with Barack Obama -- quite a few still do. Similarly, way too many of them were equally obsessed with Joe Biden and believed he could do no wrong. Never mind the fact that the man was hiding his own Easter eggs well before the midterms.

Those cult followings, combined with the fact that most people are content, dare I say intent, on existing in their social and informational silos, are precisely the reasons the 2024 election took so many by surprise. It's probably one of the reasons the Democratic National Committee chose to bury a report detailing what went wrong during the election.

Though yours truly didn't support Mr. Trump in the 2024 election, I predicted that he would win. That doesn't mean I'm "MAGA." Neither does it suggest that I'm some sort of political soothsayer. Rather, I approached the matter from an independent perspective. I listened to both sides. I observed. I operated with strategy, not emotion. I did what any good journalist should do -- and I'm not even a journalist.

Since then, while the left was applauding Senator Booker's marathon speech, I was pointing out that just days later he was courting Netanyahu while genocide raged on in Palestine. As the media referred to the tax you're paying as "tariff revenue" in their efforts to appease Dear Leader, I continued to highlight the harsh realities of Trump's reckless economic rollercoaster.

I'm not going to be guilted, gaslighted, or bullied into "picking a side."

Even though television journalists owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Ronald Reagan for greenlighting media bias, I don't peddle propaganda. I am a consultant and an opinion columnist, and bias is certainly my prerogative. Yet, unlike most of the mainstream media, I don't attempt to deceive people into believing that opinion is fact. That's yellow journalism and many of today’s journalists are guilty of it. This is precisely why 24-hour cable news networks are being abandoned by viewers in spades.

Libertarian commentator Thomas Woods rightly observed, "There are only two (major) parties today: The Stupid Party and The Evil Party. Once in a while the two parties get together to do something that is both stupid and evil, and that's called Bipartisanship."

When one clutches their pearls and tries to convince me their preferred party has moral high ground, I level their arguments with receipts, often dating back decades.

As Noam Chomsky said in an interview on February 20th, 1990, "There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party."

In his book, "Capitalist Parties," Eugene Debs writes, "The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties … they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor."

I wholeheartedly agree with Matt Taibbi's observation in his article entitled, "Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism" (Rolling Stone, June 13, 2017), "The true divide in the population has never been between Republicans and Democrats, but between haves and have-nots."

While some people are inebriated by hyperpartisan Kool-Aid, I've heard carefully scripted, albeit tired arguments from both sides and will continue to approach my consulting, columns, and life from the middle. Like roughly 45% of Americans (an increase of 2% from 2024), I am an Independent and I refuse to get dragged down partisan rabbit holes.