Garbage

Garbage (pronounced gahr-bij)

(1) Discarded material (often animal and vegetable matter from food production).

(2) Any matter that is no longer wanted or needed.

(3) Anything contemptibly worthless, inferior, or vile (physical material or, used figuratively, any idea or content (literature, music, film, ideas, theories et al).

(4) Worthless talk; lies; foolishness.

(5) In informal use in architecture & design, unnecessary items added merely for embellishment; garnish.

(6) In the space industry, no non-functional artificial satellites or parts of rockets floating in space (space junk, a genuine and growing problem in near-earth orbit).

(7) In computing, meaningless, invalid or unwanted data.

(8) The bowels of an animal; refuse parts of flesh; offal (obsolete).

(9) In North American slang (of ball sports), an easy shot.

(10) In North American slang (of team sports), as “garbage time”, the period at the end of a timed sporting event that has become a blowout when the outcome of the game has already been decided, and the coaches of one or both teams will often decide to replace their best players with substitutes.

(11) In North American slang, to eviscerate (obsolete).

1400–1450: From the Middle English garbage, garbidge & gabage (discarded parts of butchered fowls; entrails of fowls used for human food).  In the Middle English, garbelage meant “removal of refuse from spices” & garbelure meant “refuse found in spices” while the Old French garbage (also as jarbage) meant “tax on sheaves of grain”.  Quite what were the mechanics of the sense-shifts has never been clear and further to muddy the waters there was also the Old Italian garbuglio (confusion).  All dictionaries thus regard the original form as being of “unknown origin”.  The familiar modern meaning (refuse, filth) has been in use since at least the 1580s, an evolution from the earlier sense of “giblets, refuse of a fowl, waste parts of an animal (head, feet, etc) used for human food).  Etymologists noted it was one of many words to enter English through the vector of the French cooking book and its sense of “waste material, refuse” was influenced by and partly confused with “garble” in its older sense of “remove refuse material from spices” (while Middle English had the derived noun garbelage it seems only ever to have been used to mean “the action of removing refuse (ie not the material itself)).  In modern North American use, “garbage” generally means only “kitchen and vegetable wastes” while “trash” the more common term generally used of “waste; discarded rubbish”.  The alternative spelling garbidge is obsolete (although it does sometimes still appear as a marker of the use of an eye dialect).  Garbage is a noun, verb & adjective, garbaging & garbaged is a verb and garbagelike is an adjective; the noun plural is garbage.

Portrait by Lindsay Lohan constructed entirely from recycled garbage by Jason Mecier (b 1968).  His work is crafted using discarded items and he attempts where possible to use objects in some way associated with his subjects.  Although described by some as mosaics, his technique belongs to the tradition of college.

The derived terms are many and include “garbage can” or “garbage bin” (a receptacle for discarded matter, especially kitchen waste), “garbage bag” (a bag into which certain waste is placed for subsequent (often periodic) collection and disposal), such a bag functioning often as a “bin liner” (a usually plastic disposal bag used to make the disposal process less messy), “garbage day” (or “garbage time”), the day on which a local government or other authority collects the contents of a householder’s garbage bin, left usually kerbside, “garbage collector”, “garbage man”, “garbage lady” & “garbage woman” the employees (“garbos” in Australian slang) who staff the collection process (known (usually humorously) since 1965 also as “garbologists” whose trade is “garbology”, “garbage truck” (A vehicle for the collection and removal of waste, usually a truck with a custom-built apparatus to compact the collected waste), “garbage dump” (the place to which garbage trucks deliver their load), “garbage disposal (unit)” (an electric device installed in a kitchen drain that shred waste before washing it down the drain (known commercially (sometimes capitalized) also as a “garburator” or “garberator”), “garbage bandit” (the wildlife known to raid garbage bins for food).  For the two holding centres used in 1945 to imprison the suspected Nazi war criminals prior to trial, the British used the codename "Camp Dustbin" and the Americans "Camp Ashcan"; both resisted the temptation to use "garbage" or "trash".  In coining derived terms or in idiomatic use, depending on the country, not only are "garbage" & "trash" used interchangeably, elements such as "ash", "rubbish", "dust" etc can also sometimes be substituted.  

In appearing to characterize the supporters of Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) as “garbage”, Joe Biden (b 1942; US president 2021-2025) gave something of a “free kick” to the Trump campaign which wasted no time in focusing on this latest gaffe to divert attention from the joke which triggered the whole “garbagegate” thing.  In mid-October, 2024 US comedian Tony Hinchcliffe (b 1984), whole performing a set as part of the entertainment for a Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, included material in keeping with having “a bit of previous” in the use of jokes regarded variously as anti-Semitic, misogynistic and racist, the most controversial being: “I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico.”  The punch-line was well-received, greeted with much laughter and applause.

Tony Hinchcliffe on stage, Madison Square Garden, New York, October 2024.

It was interesting the comedian used “island of garbage” rather than “island of trash” because, in the US, “trash” is the more commonly used term and one which has a long history of being applied to social & ethnic minorities (white trash, trailer trash etc) which presumably was the intended implication.  The choice may have been influenced by the well-known “Great Pacific garbage patch”, an accumulation of (mostly) plastic and other marine debris in the central Pacific which is believed to cover at least 600,000 square miles (1.5 million km²).  While “…literally a floating island of trash” could have worked, not only would it have been more blatant but the impact of the punch-line depended on the audience summoning the mental image of the Pacific Ocean phenomenon (caused by and essentially circular sea current which is oceanography is called a “gyre”) before learning the reference was actually to Puerto Rico (and by implication, Puerto Ricans).  The racial slur wouldn’t have pleased the Trump campaign professionals who will have explained to their candidate that while it’s important to “feed the base” with messages they like, it doesn’t have to be done that often and certainly not in a way with the potential to alienate an entire sub-set of demographic in which a percentage are known to be the prized “undecided voters”.  There is a significant Puerto Rican population in three of the so-called “battleground states” where the election will be decided.

Still what’s done is done and there was a problem to be managed, but the problem soon vanished after President Biden decided to issue a condemnation of the rally saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”  That statement was reflected in the text of the transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, but the political operatives in the White House press office decided to apply some spin, appending a “psychological apostrophe”, rendering “supporters” as “supporter’s”, explaining for those of us too dim to get it that what Mr Biden meant was that his critique was limited exclusively to the deplorable comedian.  Clearly the White House press office operates in the tradition of “Don’t report what he says, report what he means”, urged on reported by the staff of crazy old Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) during his disastrous 1964 presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969).

President Joe Biden nibbles on a baby dressed as chicken during White House Halloween event, Washington DC, 31 October 2024.

Predictably, the “battle of the transcripts” made things worse rather than better so Mr Mr Biden tweeted his “clarification” on X (formerly known as Twitter): “Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don't reflect who we are as a nation.”  The problem with the tweet was it was coherent and used close to standard English grammar, leading readers immediately to suspect it had been written by someone else, it anyway being widely assumed the president is no longer allowed unsupervised use of any internet-connected device.  Worse still, the apparent disdain of Trump’s supporters did appear to be in the tradition of Democratic Party “elite” opinion of the people they like to call “ordinary Americans”, Barack Obama (b 1961; US president 2009-2017) in 2008 caught belittling small-town Pennsylvanians for being bitter and turning to God, guns and anti-immigrant sentiment to make themselves feel better (he was probably also thinking of pick-up trucks and country & western music too) and crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) during the 2016 campaign infamously described the Trump crowd as “a basket of deplorables”.  Again, it’s really counter-productive to feed an already satiated base if the menu also further alienate some of the undecided.

Crooked Spiro & Tricky Dick: Spiro Agnew (1918–1996; US vice president 1969-1973, left) and Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974, right).

The Republican Party has for over fifty years paid much lip service to defending and acknowledging the dignity of those they claim liberals in general and Democrats in particular disparage as “garbage”, or “deplorable”.  That they did this while driving down their wages didn’t escape attention but one can’t help but admire the way the Republican Party has managed to convince the deplorables repeatedly to vote against their own economic self-interest by dangling before their eyes distractions like the right to own guns, abortion and transgenderism.  Occasionally, there’s even been the odd amusing moment, such as on 11 September 1970 when Spiro Agnew gave a speech designed to appeal to what he called the "forgotten Americans", that group of white, working middle & lower class votes Nixon believe could be converted to the Republican cause because the once blue-collar Democratic Party had abandoned their interests to focus on fashionable, liberal causes such as minority rights.  The tone of the speech (though perhaps not the labored syntax which would be rejected as TLDR (too long, didn’t read) in the social media age) would be familiar to modern audiences used to political figures attacking the news media and was a critique of what later Republicans would label “fake news”.  In attacking the liberals, it also had some fairly tortured alterative flourishes:  

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.  They have formed their own 4-H Club - the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”  “…As long as they have their own association, crooks will flourish.  As long as they have their own television networks, paid for by their own advertisers, they will continue to have their own commentators.  It is time for America to quit catering to the pabulum peddlers and the permissive.  It is time to speak up forcefully for the conservative cause."

Mr Trump lost no time in exploiting the latest in a long line of Mr Biden’s gaffes, turning up to a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin (another battleground state) in a Trump branded Freightliner garbage truck flying an American flag, conducting an impromptu interview in the passenger’s seat decked out in the hi-viz (high-visibility) gear worn by garbagemen.  “How do you like my garbage truck?” he asked reporters.  “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”

Probably the Biden camp was lucky the comedian didn’t use “trash” in his racist joke because had the president mangled his words enough to end up calling the Trumpers “trash” their reaction would likely have been visceral because it would of course have been deconstructed as a clipping of “white trash”.  The slur “white trash” has a long history in the US, first used in the ante-bellum South of the mid-nineteenth century (possibly and certainly concurrently as “poor white trash”), said to be the way black slaves referred to whites of low social status or working in low-level jobs.  It was apparently one of the first of the attempts to find an offensive term for white people, something which in the late twentieth century became something of a linguistic cottage industry and although literally dozens were coined and some have had some brief popularity in popular culture, none seem ever to have achieved critical mass acceptance and, importantly, none seem ever much to have offended the white folks.  Indeed, “white trash”, “white trashery” etc have even been adopted by sub-groups of white society as a kind of class identifier, rather as the infamous N-word has become a term of endearment among African Americans.

Edgar Winter's White Trash Live at the Fillmore (1971) and Edgar Winter's White Trash Recycled (1977).

Edgar Winter (b 1946) formed Edgar Winter’s White Trash in 1971, the name an allusion to the stereotype of “white trash” being most commonly found south of the Mason-Dixon Line because the band was an aggregation of musicians from Louisiana & Texas.  It was an example of a slur being “reclaimed” and “embraced” by a group originally it target.

Even when it’s directed at a whole society, the white people seem to cope.  In 1980, Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015; prime minister of Singapore 1959-1990) felt compelled to issue a statement telling the people of Australia their economy needed significant reforms were the fate of becoming “the poor white trash of Asia” to be avoided.  Mr Lee’s advice was certainly prescient, 1980 being the last “good” year of the “old” Australian economy (things would get worse before they got better) and the reforms would be imposed over the next two decades (especially during the 1980s) but at the time, the mention of “poor white trash” attracted less comment than the implication Australia was “an Asian nation”, the political class dividing into an “Asianist” faction and a group which agreed with the UN (United Nations) that like New Zealand, the place belonged with “Western Europe and others”.

Liberal

Liberal (pronounced lib-ruhl (U) or lib-er-uhl (non U))

(1) Favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs (and in this context a synonym of progressive and antonyms of reactionary.

(2) Noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform (used often with an initial capital letter, something in some cases perhaps influenced by the existence of political parties with the name (where the initial capital is correct)).

(3) Of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.

(4) Favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties (now better described as libertarian now the definitions of “liberal” are so fluid).

(5) As “liberal education”, of or relating to an education that aims to develop general cultural interests and intellectual ability (as distinct from specific vocational training).

(6) Favoring or permitting freedom of action, especially with respect to matters of personal belief or expression.

(7) Of or relating to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.

(8) Free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant, unprejudiced, broad-minded

(9) Open-minded, free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values etc.

(10) Characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts; unstinting, munificent, openhanded, charitable, beneficent; lavish.

(11) Given or supplied freely or abundantly; generous.

(12) Abundant in quantity; lavish.

(13) Not strict or rigorous; not literal (often of translations, interpretations etc).

(14) Of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts.

(15) Of, relating to, or befitting a freeman (now rare).

(16) A person of liberal principles or views, especially in politics or religion.

(17) A member of a “liberal” party in politics (if applied to a part actually named “Liberal”, in some contexts an initial capital should be used).

(18) Unrestrained, licentious (obsolete although the sense seems still to be understood by the Fox News audience).

1350–1400: From the Middle English, from the twelfth century Old French liberal (befitting free people; noble, generous; willing, zealous), from the Latin līberālis (literally “of freedom, pertaining to or befitting a free person” and used also in the sense of “honorable”), the construct being līber (variously “frank, free, open unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious”) + -ālis.  The –alis suffix was from the primitive Indo-European -li-, which later dissimilated into an early version of –āris and there may be some relationship with hel- (to grow); -ālis (neuter -āle) was the third-declension two-termination suffix and was suffixed to (1) nouns or numerals creating adjectives of relationship and (2) adjectives creating adjectives with an intensified meaning.  The suffix -ālis was added (usually, but not exclusively) to a noun or numeral to form an adjective of relationship to that noun. When suffixed to an existing adjective, the effect was to intensify the adjectival meaning, and often to narrow the semantic field.  If the root word ends in -l or -lis, -āris is generally used instead although because of parallel or subsequent evolutions, both have sometimes been applied (eg līneālis & līneāris).  The noun came into use early in the nineteenth century.  The antonym in the sense of “permitting liberty” is “authoritarian” while in the sense of “open to new ideas and change”, it’s “conservative”.  Liberal is a noun & adjective, liberalism, liberalizer, liberalization, liberalist & liberality are nouns, liberalize is a verb and liberally is an adverb; the noun plural is liberals.

The mid-fourteenth century adjective meant “generous” (in the sense of “quantity”) and within decades this has extended to “nobly born, noble, free” and from the late 1300s: “selfless, magnanimous, admirable” although, as a precursor of what would come, by early in the fifteenth century it was used with bad connotations, demoting someone “extravagant, undisciplined or unrestrained”; Someone something of a libertine (in the modern sense) therefore and it was in this sense Don Pedro in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Much Ado About Nothing (1599) spoke of the lustful villain in Act 4, Scene 1:

Why, then are you no maiden, Leonato,
I am sorry you must hear. Upon mine honor,
Myself, my brother, and this grievèd count
Did see her, hear her, at that hour last night
Talk with a ruffian at her chamber window
Who hath indeed, most like a liberal villain,
Confessed the vile encounters they have had
A thousand times in secret.

The evolution in use continued and while in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries “liberal” was used as a term of reproach suggesting “lack of restraint in speech or action”, with the coming of the Enlightenment there was a revival of the positive sense, the word now used also to mean “free from prejudice, tolerant, not bigoted or narrow” and that seems to have emerged in the late 1770s although by the nineteenth century, use often was theological rather than political, a “liberal” church (Unitarians, Universalists et al) one not so bound the rigidities in doctrine & ritual as those said to be “orthodox” (not to be confused with the actual Orthodox Church).  It was also in the nineteenth century that in England the phrase “liberal education” became widely used although what to claimed to described had a tradition in pedagogy dating from Antiquity although the it path to modernity was hardly uninterrupted, various forms of barbarism intervening and in this context it probably is accurate to speak of some periods of the Medieval era as “the Dark Ages”.  There was never anything close to a standard or universal curriculum but theme understood in the nineteenth century was it was the only fitting education for what used to be called “a gentlemen” (a term related in sense development to the Classical Latin liber (a free man)) and contrasted with technical, specialist or vocational training.  Historically, the “liberal arts” inherited from the late Middle Ages were divided into the trivium (grammar, logic & rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music & astronomy).

Much associated with the worst of America’s “corrupting coasts” (New York City & Hollywood), Lindsay Lohan is a classic liberal.

The now familiar use in politics began in the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of the many ripples from the French Revolution (1789) when it was used to suggest a tendency to “favor freedom and democracy” over the long dominant hierarchical systems which characterized feudal European society.  In English, the label was initially applied by opponents to whichever party or politicians championed individual political freedoms and it seems the word often was spoken with a French accent, the implications being that such notions were associated with chaos and ruin; the revolution of 1789 had shocked and frightened the ruling establishment(s) just about everywhere.  However, there seems to have been a fork in the sense development in the US which came from a tradition which of course viewed more approvingly revolutions which swept away tyranny and there, certainly by the 1820s, “liberal” was already being used to mean “favorable to government action to effect social change” and some historians have linked this to the religious sense of “free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions” (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform); this theme has continued to this day.  From the very foundations of the first colonial settlements, in what became the US there has always been a tension between the lure of freedom & democracy and that of religious purity, the notion what was being created was a society ordained by God.

In politics the usual brute-force distinction is of course between “liberals” and “conservatives” and while the nuances and exceptions are legion, it does remain the core template by which politics is reported and it applies to institutions as varied as the Roman curia, the Israeli cabinet, the Church of England and presidential elections in the Islamic republic or Iran; while not entirely accurate, it remains useful.  What is less useful is the noun “liberalism” which in the nineteenth century did have a (more or less) accepted definition but which since has become so contested as to now be one of those words which means what people want it to me in any given time and place.  That the title of the “true inheritor” of liberalism has been claimed groups as diverse as certain neo-Marxists and the now defunct faction of the US Republican Party which used to be called the “Rockefeller Republicans” illustrates the problem.  Also suffering from meaning shifts so severe as to render it a phrase best left to professional historians is “neo-liberal”, first used in 1958 as a reference to French politics and theology but re-purposed late in the twentieth century to describe a doctrine which was a synthesis of laissez-faire economics, deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from anything not essential to national security, law & order and economic efficiency.  Some critics of latter day neo-liberalism call it "an attempt to repeal the twentieth century" which captures the spirit of the debate.

1972 Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49 (left) and 1974 Ford Falcon XB GT Hardtop (right), 1974 RE-PO 500K endurance race, Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia, November 1974.

The fifth round of the 1974 Australian Manufacturers' Championship, the 1974 RE-PO 500K event was run under Group C (Touring Cars) regulations over 106 laps (501 km (311 miles)) and one quirky thing about the race was it being a footnote in Australian political history, both the E49 Charger of Lawrie Nelson (b 1943) and the Falcon GT of Murray Carter (b 1931) carrying “Liberal” signage as part of a paid sponsorship deal arranged by the Liberal Party of Australia.  Carter finished second (like the Liberal Party in that year's federal election (ie, they lost), although then party leader, Sir  Billy Snedden (1926–1987), provided one of the more memorable post election statements when he claimed "We didn't lose, we just didn't win enough votes to win." and he'd today be most remembered for that had it not be for the circumstances of his death which passed into legend.  Carter would later reveal that despite his solid result, the Liberal Party never paid up, the sponsorship deal apparently what later Liberal Party leader John Howard (b 1939; prime minister of Australia 1996-2007) might have called a "non-core promise".  

Death of former Australian Liberal Party leader Sir Billy Snedden.

The Liberal Party was in 1944 founded by Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978; prime-minister of Australia 1939-1941 & 1949-1966) as essentially an “anti-Labor Party” aggregation of various groups and he emphasized at the time and often subsequently that he wanted his creation truly to be a “liberal” and not a “conservative” party; it was to be a “broad church” in which some diversity of opinion was not merely tolerated but encouraged.  Mostly he stuck to that although some would note as the years passed, perhaps he became a little less tolerant.  By 2024, the Liberal Party of Australia has fallen under the control of right-wing fanatics, religious fundamentalists & soft drink salesmen and it doubtful someone like Sir Robert would now want to join the party, even if they’d have him.  The current party leader is Peter Dutton (b 1970; leader of the opposition and leader of the Australian Liberal Party since May 2022) and interestingly, despite many opportunities, Mr Dutton has never denied being a Freemason.

The arrival of political parties called “Liberal Party” & “Conservative Party” (often with modifiers (Liberal Democrats, Liberal Movement etc) created the need for labels which distinguish between the “liberal” and “conservative” factions within each: while all members of a Liberal Party are “big L Liberals” some will be “small c conservatives” and some “small l liberals” which sounds a clumsy was of putting things but it’s well-understood.  Some though noted there were sometimes more similarities than differences, the US writer Ambrose Bierce (1842-circa 1914) in an entry in his Devil's Dictionary (1911) recording: "Conservative (noun), a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."  These days it he might be called a cynical structuralist.  Bierce, a US Civil War (1861-1865) veteran, never lost his sense of adventure and, aged 71, vanished without a trace in one of the great mysteries in American literary history.  The consensus was he probably was shot dead in Mexico and in one of his last letters there’s a hint he regarded such as fat as just an occupational hazard: “Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!”

So, “liberal” being somewhat contested, while the comparative was “more liberal” and the superlative “most liberal”, modified forms appeared including anti-liberal, half-liberal, non-liberal, over-liberal, pre-liberal, pseudo-liberal, quasi-liberal, semi-liberal, uber-liberal, ultra-liberal, arch-liberal, classical-liberal, neoclassical-liberal and, of course, liberal-liberal & conservative-liberal.  In modern use there have been linguistic innovations including latte-liberal (the sort of “middle class” liberal who, stereotypically, orders complicated forms of coffee at the cafés & coffee shops in up-market suburbs, the term very much in the vein of “Bollinger Bolshevik” or “champagne socialist”.  A latte liberal is a variation of the earlier wishy-washy liberal (someone who will express fashionable, liberal views but will not deign to lift a finger to further their cause) with the additional implication they are of the middle class and committed only to the point of "virtue signaling".  The portmanteau word milliberal (the construct being mill(ennial) +‎ (li)beral is a liberal of the millennial generation (those born between 1981-1986).  The term boba-liberal comes from internet-based (notably X, formerly known as Twitter) political discourse (mostly in the US it seems) and is a slur describing a liberal-leaning Asian American with politics or attitudes considered too tepid or whitewashed by other Asian Americans, stereotyped as focusing on superficial gestures over more meaningful actions especially in regards to Asian American activism.  Those who comment on stories on Fox News have also contributed to the lexicon, the portmanteau libtard (the construct being lib(eral) + (re)tard) and the meaning self explanatory, as it is for NazLib, the construct being Naz(i) + Lib(eral).  So, especially in the US, “liberal” is a word which must be handled with care, to some a mere descriptor, to some a compliment and to others an insult.  While there are markers which may indicate which approach to adopt (is one's interlocutor carrying a gun, driving a large pick-up truck, listening to country & western music etc), none are wholly reliable and probably the best way is to work into the conversation a “litmus paper” phrase like “liberal gun laws”.  From the reaction, one's path will be clear.

But although there are some for who it seems a calling, being a liberal is not in the DNA and there have been some who became conservative, just as there are conservatives who converted to liberalism.  Indeed, were the views of many to be assessed, it’d like be found they are various to some degree liberal on some issues and conservative on others, a phenomenon political scientists call “cross-cutting cleavages”.  Political journeys are common and may be endemic to one’s aging (and certainly financial) path, there being many youthful anarchists, socialists and nihilists who have ended up around the boardroom table, very interested in preserving the existing system.  The path from liberalism can also be a thing of blatant opportunism.  It is no criticism of Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) that he re-invented himself as an anti-liberal because that was the way to become POTUS (president of the United States), despite for decades his stated positions on many social issues revealing his liberal instincts.  It’s just the way politics is done.  It’s also the way business is done and it was unfortunate Rupert Murdoch (b 1931) elected to settle in the matter of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News to ensure no more of Fox’s internal documents entered the public domain.  Those which did appear were interesting in that far from Fox’s anti-liberal stance being Mr Murdoch’s ideological crusade, it was more the path to profit and were Fox’s audience to transform into something liberal, there would go Fox News.

Once was liberal: Candace Owens Farmer (née Owens and usually styled “Candace Owens”; b 1989) with "Candace Coffee Mug", one item in a range of Candace merchandise.

Because race remains the central fault-line in US politics, political cartoonists and commentators have never been prepared to have as much fun with the black conservatives as they enjoyed with “gay Republicans”, the latter a breed thought close to non-existent as last as the 1990s.  Black conservatism is to some extent aligned with black Christian religiosity but it’s a creature also of that under-reported demographic, the successful, black middle class, a diverse group but one which appears to have much in common with the priorities of their white counterparts.  In that sense Candace Owens is not wholly typical but she is much more entertaining and here early political consciousness was as a self-declared (though apparently retrospectively) liberal before moving to a nominally conservative stance although whether this was an ideological shift or a pursuit of clicks on the internet (on the model Mr Murdoch values to maximize revenue from Fox News) isn’t clear.  What is clear is Ms Owens knows about the Freemasons, her research into the cult beginning apparently when she “freaked out” after learning Buzz Aldrin (b 1930; who in 1969 was the second man to set foot on the Moon) is a confessed Freemason.  On 30 September, 2024, she discussed the Freemasons on her YouTube channel:

What is Freemasonry?  OK, so during the late Middle Ages, the world was united under the holy Roman Catholic church.  OK?  So if you had any opposition to the church throughout Europe, you were forced to go underground.  Right?  We were a Christian society.  And among the only organized groups that were able to move freely throughout Europe were these guilds of stonemasons, and they would then be, therefore, because they could move freely, hence, Freemasons.  They were able to maintain the meeting halls or lodges in virtually every major city, and the Masons were, essentially, very talented at architecture, and they had a bunch of secret knowledge — sometimes secret knowledge of architecture and of other topics.  And that knowledge was dated back to the times of Egypt. Right?  And it was essential maintaining this knowledge in the construction of European churches and cathedrals.

So one of the things that is well known is that Freemasons were in opposition to the church.  Right? They wanted to crush the church, which is why it is not ironic that the person who founded the Mormon church, as just one example — many of the churches, the very many Protestant faiths that we have — was Joseph Smith and he was a Freemason.  That's a fact, just as one example. Now, you may know some people that are Freemasons and you're going, well, I know this person and he goes to a lodge and he's completely harmless.  Yes. It is a known thing that 97 — like, something like 97% of Freemasons are not in the top tier degree of Freemasonry.  And it is understood that at the top tier degree of Freemasonry, you essentially become one of the makers of the world.

So I'm — just for those of you guys who've never even heard of that, and like I said, I would have been among you. I'm very new to relearning American history through the lens of Freemasonry. Some known Freemasons — George Washington was a Freemason, Thomas Jefferson was a Freemason, Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason, Buzz Aldrin was a Freemason — don't get me started. For those of you that have been listening to this podcast for a long time, you already know where I'm at — or where I'm at when it comes to NASA and the weird satanic chants that they were doing to establish the Apollo program and all the weird stuff that happened leading up to the moon landing. So I freaked out when I learned Buzz Aldrin was a Freemason.  It's not helping my case in believing those moon landings, I'll tell you that for free.  Franklin Roosevelt was another Freemason.

Autographed publicity photo of Buzz Aldrin issued by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) prior to the Apollo 11 Moon mission (16-24 July 1969).

Whether Ms Owens changed her views on matters Masonic after hearing Mr Aldrin had endorsed Mr Trump isn’t known but he issued an unambiguous statement of support, sentiments with which presumably she’d concur.  The former astronaut was especially impressed the Republican candidate had indicated that in a second term he would elevate space exploration as a “policy of high importance again” and that his first administration had “reignited national efforts to get back to the Moon and push on to Mars.”  Beyond that, Mr Aldrin noted: “The Presidency requires clarity in judgement, decisiveness, and calm under pressure that few have a natural ability to manage, or the life experience to successfully undertake. It is a job where decisions are made that routinely involve American lives – some urgently but not without thought.  For me, for the future of our country, to meet enormous challenges, and for the proven policy accomplishments above, I believe we are best served by voting for former President Trump. I wholeheartedly endorse him for President of the United States. Godspeed President Trump, and God Bless the United States of America.”  Masonic votes having the same value as any other, Mr Trump welcomed the support.

Ms Owens had been scheduled to speak at a number of engagements in Australia  & New Zealand but interestingly, in October 2024, the Australian government issued a press statement confirming her visa had been "canceled", based on her "capacity to incite discord", leading immediately to suspicions her silencing had been engineered by the Freemasons.  It’s good we have Ms Owens to warn us about liberals and the Freemasons, an axis of evil neglected by political scientists who tend often to take a structralist approach to the landmarks in the evolution of the use of the term “liberal” which they classify thus:

(1) Classical Liberalism which emerged in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries, was rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment with an emphasis on limited government, a free market (ideas as well as goods & services), individual liberty, freedom of speech, the rule of law and the enforcement of private property rights.  The movement was a reaction to absolute monarchies and state-dominated mercantilist economies.

(2) Social Liberalism (understood as “liberal” in modern US use) was a layer of rather than a fork off classical liberalism but it did accept a greater role for the state in regulating the economy and providing social welfare to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunity.  It was a nineteenth century development to address the excesses of “unbridled” capitalism” and its critique of economic inequality was remarkably similar to that familiar in the twenty-first century.

(3) Neoliberalism as a term first appeared in the late 1950s but in the familiar modern sense it was defined in the era of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; US president 1981-1989) & Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) who embarked on project built around a philosophy which afforded primacy to free markets, deregulation, privatization and a reduction in government spending, often combined with globalization.  Their program simultaneously to restrict the money supply while driving up asset prices had implications which wouldn’t be understood for some decades.  The Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal project was a reaction to the post oil-crisis stagflation (a portmanteau word, the construct being stag(nation) + (in)flation)) and the alleged failure of the welfare state & the orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, named after English economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes) 1883-1946).

(4) Political Liberalism was most famously articulated by US philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) in his book A Theory of Justice (1971), a work nobody much under forty should attempt because few younger than that would have read enough fully to understand the intricacies.  In summary, it does sound remarkably simple because it calls for a pluralist society built on principles of justice and fairness, administered by a system of governance which permits a diversity of viewpoints while maintaining a fair structure of cooperation.  Rawls’ political liberalism draws one in to what soon becomes and intellectual labyrinth; once in, it’s hard to get out but it’s a nice place to spend some time and most rewarding if one can maintain the same train of thought for several weeks.

(5) Cultural Liberalism is not new but from the mid-twentieth century, its range of application expanded as previously oppressed groups began to enjoy a recognition of their rights, initially usually as a result of a change in societal attitudes and later, by a codification of their status in law, the matters addressed including ethnicity, feminism, civil liberties, reproductive rights, religion and the concerns of the LGBTQQIAAOP community.

(6) Liberal Internationalism is an approach to foreign policy (really a formal doctrine in some countries) advocating global cooperation, international institutions, human rights, and the promotion of democracy.  Its core tenants included support for multilateralism, international organizations like the United Nations (UN), global trade and the promotion of liberal democratic governance worldwide.  What is called the “liberal world order” has underpinned the western world since 1945 but its dominance is now being challenged by other systems which have their own methods of operation.

Evil

Evil (pronounced ee-vuhl)

(1) Morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked; morally corrupt.

(2) Harmful; injurious (now rare).

(3) Marked or accompanied by misfortune (now rare; mostly historic).

(4) Having harmful qualities; not good; worthless or deleterious (obsolete).

Pre 900: From the Middle English evel, ivel & uvel (evil) from the Old English yfel, (bad, vicious, ill, wicked) from the Proto-Germanic ubilaz.  Related were the Saterland Frisian eeuwel, the Dutch euvel, the Low German övel & the German übel; it was cognate with the Gothic ubils, the Old High German ubil, the German übel and the Middle Dutch evel and the Irish variation abdal (excessive).  Root has long been thought the primitive Indo-European hupélos (diminutive of hwep) (treat badly) which produced also the Hittite huwappi (to mistreat, harass) and huwappa (evil, badness) but an alternative view is a descent from upélos (evil; (literally "going over or beyond (acceptable limits)")) from the primitive Indo-European upo, up & eup (down, up, over).  Evil is a noun & adjective (some do treat it as a verb), evilness is a noun and evilly an adverb; the noun plural is evils.

Evil (the word) arrived early in English and endured.  In Old English and all the early Teutonic languages except the Scandinavian, it quickly became the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike or disparagement.  Evil was the word Anglo-Saxons used to convey some sense of the bad, cruel, unskillful, defective, harm, crime, misfortune or disease.  The meaning with which we’re most familiar, "extreme moral wickedness" existed since Old English but did not assume predominance until the eighteenth century.  The Latin phrase oculus malus was known in Old English as eage yfel and survives in Modern English as “evil eye”.  Evilchild is attested as an English surname from the thirteenth century and Australian-born Air Chief Marshall Sir Douglas Evill (1892-1971) was head of the Royal Air Force (RAF) delegation to Washington during World War II (1939-1945).  Despite its utility, there’s probably no word in English with as many words of in the same vein without any being actually synonymous.  Consider: destructive, hateful, vile, malicious, vicious, heinous, ugly, bad, nefarious, villainous, corrupt, malefic, malevolent, hideous, wicked, harm, pain, catastrophe, calamity, ill, sinful, iniquitous, depraved, vicious, corrupt, base, iniquity & unrighteousness; all tend in the direction yet none quite matches the darkness of evil although malefic probably come close.  

Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

The word evil served English unambiguously and well for centuries and most, secular and spiritual, knew that some people are just evil.  It was in the later twentieth century, with the sudden proliferation of psychologists, interior decorators, sociologists, criminologists, social workers and basket weavers that an industry developed exploring alternative explanations and causations for what had long been encapsulated in the word evil.  The output was uneven but among the best remembered, certainly for its most evocative phrase, was in the work of German-American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975).  Arendt’s concern, given the scale of the holocaust was: "Can one do evil without being evil?"

Whether the leading Nazis were unusually (or even uniquely) evil or merely individuals who, through a combination of circumstances, came to do awful things has been a question which has for decades interested psychiatrists, political scientists and historians.  Arendt attended the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann (1906-1962), the bureaucrat responsible for transportation of millions of Jews and others to the death camps built to allow the Nazis to commit the industrial-scale mass-murder of the final solution.  Arendt thought Eichmann ordinary and bland, “neither perverted nor sadistic” but instead “terrifyingly normal”, acting only as a diligent civil servant interested in career advancement, his evil deeds done apparently without ever an evil thought in his mind.  Her work was published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).  The work attracted controversy and perhaps that memorable phrase didn’t help.  It captured the popular imagination and even academic critics seemed seduced.  Arendt’s point, inter alia, was that nothing in Eichmann’s life or character suggested that had it not been for the Nazis and the notion of normality they constructed, he’d never have murdered even one person.  The view has its flaws in that there’s much documentation from the era to prove many Nazis, including Eichmann, knew what they were doing was a monstrous crime so a discussion of whether Eichmann was immoral or amoral and whether one implies evil while the other does not does, after Auschwitz, seems a sterile argument.

Evil is where it’s found.

Hannah Arendt's relationship with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) began when she was a nineteen year old student of philosophy and he her professor, married and aged thirty-six.  Influential still in his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism, he will forever be controversial because of his brief flirtation with the Nazis, joining the party and taking an academic appointment under Nazi favor.  He resigned from the post within a year and distanced himself from the party but, despite expressing regrets in private, never publicly repented.  His affair with the Jewish Arendt is perhaps unremarkable because it pre-dated the Third Reich but what has always attracted interest is that their friendship lasted the rest of their lives, documented in their own words in a collection of their correspondence (Letters: 1925-1975, Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger (2003), Ursula Ludz (Editor), Andrew Shields (Translator)).  Cited sometimes as proof that feelings can transcend politics (as if ever there was doubt), the half-century of letters which track the course of a relationship which began as one of lovers and evolved first into friendship and then intellectual congress.  For those who wish to explore contradiction and complexity in human affairs, it's a scintillating read.  Arendt died in 1975, Heidegger surviving her by some six months.

New York Post, November 1999.

In 1999, Rupert Murdoch’s (b 1931) tabloid the New York Post ran one of their on-line polls, providing a list of the usual suspects, asking readers to rate the evil to most evil, so to determine “The 25 most evil people of the last millennium”.  The poll received 19184 responses which revealed some “recency bias” (a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones) in that some US mass-murderers were rated worse than some with more blood on their hands but most commented on was the stellar performance of the two “write-ins”: Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) & crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013), the POTUS coming second and the FLOTUS an impressive sixth, Mr Murdoch’s loyal readers rating both more evil than Saddam Hussein (1937–2006; president of Iraq 1979-2003), Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Dracula or Prince Vlad III of Wallachia (circa 1430-circa 1477); thrice Voivode of Wallachia 1448-circa 1477 or Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV Vasilyevich (1530–1584; Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia 1533-1584 & Tsar of all Russia 1547-1584).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

While fun and presumably an indication of something, on-line polls should not be compared with the opinion polls run by reputable universities or polling organizations, their attraction for editors looking for click-bait being they’re essentially free and provide a result, sometimes within a day, unlike conventional polls which can cost thousands or even millions depending on the sample size and duration of research.  The central problem with on-line polls is that responders are self-selected rather than coming from a cohort determined by a statistical method developed in the wake of the disastrously inaccurate results of a poll “predicting” national voting intentions in the 1936 presidential election.  The 1936 catchment had been skewered towards the upper-income quartile by being restricted to those who answered domestic telephone connections, the devices then rarely installed in lower-income households.  A similar phenomenon of bias is evident in the difference on-line responses to the familiar question: “Who won the presidential debate?”, the divergent results revealing more about the demographic profiles of the audiences of CBS, MSNBC, CNN, ABC & FoxNews than on-stage dynamics on-stage.

Especially among academics in the social sciences, there are many who object to the frequent, almost casual, use of “evil”, applied to figures as diverse as serial killers and those who use the “wrong” pronoun.  Rightly on not, academics can find “complexity” in what appears simple to most and don’t like “evil” because of the simple moral absolutism it implies, the suggestion certain actions or individuals are inherently or objectively wrong.  Academics call this “an over-simplification of complex ethical situations” and they prefer the nuances of moral relativism, which holds that moral judgments can depend on cultural, situational, or personal contexts.  The structuralist-behaviorists (a field still more inhabited than a first glance may suggest) avoid the word because it so lends itself to being a “label” and the argument is that labeling individuals as “evil” can be both an act of dehumanizing and something which reinforces a behavioral predilection, thereby justifying punitive punishment rather than attempting rehabilitation.  Politically, it’s argued, the “evil” label permits authorities to ignore or even deny allegedly causative factors of behavior such as poverty, mental illness, discrimination or prior trauma.

There are also the associative traditions of the word, the linkages to religion and the supernatural an important part of the West’s cultural and literary inheritance but not one universally treated as “intellectually respectable”.  Nihilists of course usually ignore the notion of evil and to the post-modernists it was just another of those “lazy” words which ascribed values of right & wrong which they knew were something wholly subjective, evil as context-dependent as anything else.  Interestingly, in the language of the polarized world of US politics, while the notional “right” (conservatives, MAGA, some of what’s left of the Republican Party) tends to label the notional “left” (liberals, progressives, the radical factions of the Democratic Party) as evil, the left seems to depict their enemies (they’re no longer “opponents”) less as “evil” and more as “stupid”.

The POTUS & the Pope: Francis & Donald Trump (aka the lesser of two evils), the Vatican, May 2017.

Between the pontificates of Pius XI (1857–1939; pope 1922-1939) and  Francis (b 1936; pope since 2013), all that seems to have changed in the Holy See’s world view is that civilization has moved from being threatened by communism, homosexuality and Freemasony to being menaced by Islam, homosexuality and Freemasony.  It therefore piqued the interest of journalists accompanying the pope on his recent 12-day journey across Southeast Asia when they were told by a Vatican press secretary his Holiness would, during the scheduled press conference, discuss the upcoming US presidential election: duly, the scribes assembled in their places on the papal plane. The pope didn’t explicitly tell people for whom they should vote nor even make his preference obvious as Taylor Swift (b 1989) would in her endorsement mobilizing the childless cat lady vote but he did speak in an oracular way, critiquing both Kamala Harris (b 1964; US vice president since 2021) and Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) as “against life”, urging Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils.”  That would have been a good prelude had he gone further but there he stopped: “One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils?  That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know.”

Socks (1989-2009; FCOTUS (First Cat of the United States 1993-2001)) was Chelsea Clinton's (b 1980; FDOTUS (First Daughter of the United States)) cat.  Cartoon by Pat Oliphant, 1996.

The lesser of two evils: Australian-born US political cartoonist Pat Oliphant’s (b 1935) take on the campaign tactics of Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) who was the Democratic Party nominee in the 1996 US presidential election against Republican Bob Dole (1923–2021).  President Clinton won by a wide margin which would have been more handsome still, had there not been a third-party candidate.  Oliphant’s cartoons are now held in the collection of the National Library of Congress.  It’s not unusual for the task presented to voters in US presidential elections to be reduced to finding “the lesser of two evils”.  In 1964 when the Democrats nominated Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) to run against the Republican's Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), the conclusion of many was it was either “a crook or a kook”.  On the day, the lesser of the two evils proved to be crooked old Lyndon who won in a landslide over crazy old Barry.

Francis has some history in criticizing Mr Trump’s handling of immigration but the tone of his language has tended to suggest he’s more disturbed by politicians who support the provision of abortion services although he did make clear he sees both issues in stark moral terms: “To send migrants away, to leave them wherever you want, to leave them… it’s something terrible, there is evil there. To send away a child from the womb of the mother is an assassination, because there is life. We must speak about these things clearly.”  Francis has in the past labelled abortion a “plague” and a “crime” akin to “mafia” behavior, although he did resist suggestions the US bishops should deny Holy Communion to “pro-choice” politicians (which would have included Joe Biden (b 1942; US president 2021-2025), conscious no doubt that accusations of being an “agent of foreign interference” in the US electoral process would be of no benefit.  Despite that, he didn’t seek to prevent the bishops calling abortion is “our preeminent priority” in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the 2024 edition of their quadrennial document on voting.  Some 20% of the US electorate describe themselves as Catholics, their vote in 2020 splitting 52/47% Biden/Trump but that was during the Roe v Wade (1973) era and abortion wasn’t quite the issue it's since become and a majority of the faith in the believe it should be available with only around 10% absolutist right-to-lifers.  Analysts concluded Francis regards Mr Trump as less evil than Ms Harris and will be pleased if his flock votes accordingly; while he refrained from being explicit, he did conclude: “Not voting is ugly.  It is not good.  You must vote.”