If a Substack falls into cyberspace and nobody reads it, is it really there? What I learned from an X tweet about Pam Bondi that had over 58,000 vists after Gavin Newsom quoted it. By Hal M. Brown

 

Okay, this Sunday afternoon post is an indulgence and a bit of self-promotion. It is about a missed opportunity I had to, putting it bluntly, get more people to subscribe to my Substack. My title here is, of course, a version of the well known philosophical question “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It can be answered differently depending on how one defines sound. It could be a physical event like a tree falling or something you percieve like the message of a Substack.

I am writing this as a follow-up to an addendum I posted on this morning’s Substack under the topic:

This is what I posted:

I just came across this from something I posted on Twitter in August:

I don’t know how Gov. Newsom found it. It was in response to my tweet:

Amazingly over 58,000 people viewed it. I rarely post on X. I never looked at how many people viewed that tweet.

Here are the replies to the X tweet from August.

This may not seem like a lot, but it is probably a record number for anything I ever tweeted.

While I was really pleased so many people saw my image and that Gavin Newsom was one of them, and of course that he saw fit to quote it with his own comment, I wish in retrospect that I’d included this magic link: 

Hal Brown's Substack

I'm a retired psychotherapist who writes about politics.

I have no way of knowing how many, if any, new subcribers, and eventually how many regular readers I would have gotten if I’d done this. After all, of 58,000 people who saw my tweet I’d assume a few of them would have been curious enough to check it out and maybe liked what they saw enough to both subscribe and read what I wrote on a regular basis. Who knows? I may have gotten 10 regular readers, 100, or none. Since many people subscribe to 50, 100, or more Substacks I doubt they read them all.

Looking back, had I known how many people, including Gov. Newsom, would have seen that tweet I would have done a better job with the illustration of Pam Bondi. For one thing I would have used the hat from a real Washington, DC police chief instead of a regular police officers hat.

I might have embellished her jacket with a badge too.

After all, why not? If anyone is full of themselves it is Chief Pam Bondi. If she decided to wear a unform it might look like these:

The Honorable Pamela Jo Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government and who oversees the Department of Justice which includes the FBI, and who also serve as the principal legal advisor to the President of the United States, hasn’t gotten my attention since she visted my (supposedly burning) city of Portland earlier this month and afterwards said “I was in Portland and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Who knows what tomrrow will bring? She competes with Pete Hegseth, who actually has a much larger contingent of people with guns he can order around, for the limelight so it’s anybody’s guess what she’ll do to outdo the guy who can bomb boats in the Caribbean.

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KOIN

KGW

OPB

KATU (Sinclair)

...

Today's political show is Pam Bondi and I give her performance a rave review, By Hal M. Brown

 

There are two basic defintions of the word honorable. One, shown above on the plaque in front of PamBondi is when it is used as a formal title. The other has to do with being an honorable person.

There’s more here. You may or may not believe Bondi is honorable. 

As I watch Pam Bondi put on her partisan Trump praising and Democrat damning show in the Senate Judiciacy Committee hearing I do not see an honorable person.

What a show this has been so far. We had Lindsay Graham, and as I write this Josh Hawley, expressing feigned outrage as they lambast Democrats. “Good God in Heaven, what is happening to this country” Hawley says talking about Democrats.

I’m not suggesting that the Democratic Party senators don’t put on their own performances. After all, they know that these hearings give them exposure not only on MSNBC and CNN but also on Fox News.

Looking at this hearing as a rather long stage show where I’ve been sent as a drama critic to write an article for the Arts Section of a newspaper I have to give Bondi a rave review for her bravura performance. Considering that some of the Senators have been doing this for not just years but for decades Bondi is an ingénue. Consider that her former acting experience was the equivalent of regional theater and she’s only been on the national stage for less than a year.

She came well prepared with attack lines aimed at many of the Democratic senators blaming them for their alleged transgressions. For example “how dare you accuse me of whatever, when you did such and such.”

She is proving as nimble as any accomplished improv performer as she interjects prepared slams and insults.

Compared to her unhinged, sometimes incoherent boss who actually has a (sometimes defaced) star among the more than 2800 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame  , she' deserves an Oscar.

Note: This is a break from my writing about what is happening in my city of Portland. We are all anxiously waiting to see what happens next. My Substack yesterday was about something I haven’t seen covered anywhere else: I had to revise this because on closer look the two people on the left seem to be aiming long range paintball guns like this.

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Bondi's firing of top DOJ ethics official led me to decide it was time to turn my protest flag upside down

 

I was going back and forth about how to display my American flag at protests as I saw more people with their flags upside down signalling that the coutry was in severe distress. The next national protest is Thurday (link).

The photos above show our flags at the No Kings demonstration. You can see someone with their flag upside down.

I wasn’t sure whether enough people understood what the upside down flag meant for me to follow suit.

I wrote about this on April 26th here:

I didn’t want anyone to think I was disrespecting the flag, hence my indecision about how to display it.

I flew it this way at home on Flag Day:

I want to stop MAGA from owning the flag and their flying it as proof that it was them who were the true patriots.

There is no doubt that American democracy is in distress. Historically, at sea flags were inverted as a signal that the ship was in dire need of assistance.

If we’d been on a ship, the ship of state, and it was about to sink and we were trying to call for help by inverting the flag, we’d have already watched our vessel go down and the flag being submerged beneath the waves. We’d be trying to stay afloat in icy waters and we’d soon freeze to death, pun intended. The icebergs in our waters now carry guns.

Readers of this do not need a list of the reasons I say that Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, and all it represents, has been cannonballed by Trump and MAGA.

I am just writing about the final wave which, for me, crashed over the ship of democracy.

We are going to one of the Thursday nationwide protests against the Trump administration which are planned for this Thursday, July 17th, to observe the five year anniversary of the death of John Lewis. We will take our flags (the USA flag above a smaller Pride flag) and signs. 

This HuffPost story was what made me decide to change the position of the flag.

See what Joseph Tirrell posted on LinkedIn in response to being notified that he was fired by clicking here 1

The term ethics is often used interchangeably with morality (see the Britannica). Ethics is typically associated with societal and institutional standards of correct and right conduct. I’ve never seen an American entity called “The Office of Morality.” The Taliban, however, does have a morality police (officially “The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”). It enforces strict interpretations of Islamic law in Afghanistan. They impose regulations on personal behavior, mostly suppressing the rights of women. They often severely punish those who violate their rules.

If we had morality police enforcing the views about how people should treat each other with respect, the old fashioned Golden Rule, Trump who fancies himself to be the golden president, would be severely punished.

In the United States we don’t have a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Instead we have The Department of Justice.

I wonder what a Taliban scholar who believes that their version of a department of justice is enforcing righteous values would say about the values of a country whose own department of justice just fired their top morality official.

A certain irony:

Russian dictators sent their enemies to Siberia where the winter months were nothing to sneeze at (so to speak):

Reference.

Trump and henchman Homan, along with his henchwoman Kristi-cream Noem, are sending their enemies to a hellishly hot Everglades swamp with dime sized mosquitos (reference).

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On Friday, July 11th, I received the below letter from Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

Until Friday evening, I was the senior ethics attorney at the Department of Justice responsible for advising the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General directly on federal employee ethics. I was also responsible for the day-to-day operations of the ethics program across the Department. I led a small, dedicated team of professionals and coordinated the work of some 30 other full-time ethics officials, attorneys, paralegals and other specialists across the Department of Justice, ensuring that the 117,000 Department employees were properly advised on and supported in how to follow the Federal employee ethics rules. 

My career in public service has so far spanned a quarter of a century. I started as a United States Naval Officer, graduating from the ROTC program at the University of Michigan. After a 6-year military career, I earned a law Degree from the Detroit School of Law at Michigan State University. I started at the FBI in 2006 in the Presidential Management Fellows Program. At the FBI, I worked in a variety of offices thanks to the PMF program and eventually I went to work for the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance. From there, I moved to the Departmental Ethics Office at Main Justice as Deputy Director. Finally, in 2023, I was promoted to the Senior Executive Service and the Position of Director of the Ethics Office. 

My public service is not over, and my career as a Federal civil servant is not finished. I took the oath at 18 as a Midshipman to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I have taken that oath at least five more times since then. That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the Constitution when it is easy or convenient. I look forward to finding ways to continue in my personal calling of service to my country. I encouraged anyone who is reading this to do the same. I believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I also believe that Edmund Burke is right and that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."

I received a number of calls and messages of support in the last few days. Thank you to everyone who has reached out. Be well.