An Open Letter to Michael Briggs, PhD

I met Michael Briggs at a Unicoi County Democratic Party meeting. He was, and remains, the chair of the county chapter of the party. He was intelligent and amiable. He left a good impression. At least the first one.

I consider myself to be a more radical-leaning leftist. As such, I’ve always had a difficult time getting along with the centrism of the modern Democratic Party. But in a town of 5,000 people, if I wanted to be involved in local politics, it meant meeting the closest thing I could find to progressive politics in the middle.

My tenure with the party was brief. This was due to a number of factors. Chief among them being I was the youngest person at the table by at least 30 years. Am I saying older people can’t get the job done? Absolutely not. Most of the government is made up of people in this age bracket. But I propose a lack of diversity that is fundamentally harming the party. Everyone at the table was white and of retirement age. Old white people, more colloquially. And I, a less old white person, was not going to tip the scale.

Two events in particular led me to walk away. The first was a political issue that was petty even in light of the environment. A representative from the regional branch of the party came to take photos and talk with the county chapter. A non-county-party member who ran a resource center the representative didn’t like was told to get out of the picture and she flipped the representative off (the only highlight of the affair).

The second event was a discussion pertaining to the opioid epidemic. One member told an anecdote about being able to pick up a non-narcotic prescription on behalf of a third-party without being carded. You might recognize that as being literally nothing. Eventually an educational town hall meeting was discussed and a member proposed inviting a police officer to speak with people struggling with addiction. I don’t know what you know about people that are using, but a cop is the last person to be delivering that message.

But this isn’t an open letter to the Unicoi County Democratic Party. I’ve already written that and it looks a lot like the first half of this one. Michael Briggs and I remained friends on social media following my departure. He spends a lot of time there and basically just reposts progressive flavored Boomerpasta. In the time we have been social media “mutuals” I’ve had two notable altercations with him.

The first of these altercations was during the Trump indictment. He shared the Adam Smith quote “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”. You might recognize Adam Smith for his role in literally destroying the entire world #NotFuckingHyperbole. That bothered me, but what bothered me more was the content of the quote. There’s some layers here that get more personal as they progress. The first is the idea that our legal system does its best to draw a firm line between justice and vengeance. That sounds fawning, so let me be clear our justice system is ass. I’m speaking aspirationally. This speaks to a hypocrisy at the core of our political binary. Democrats are quick to abandon all of their principles and stated ideals if it means getting to stick it to the other guy. Yes, that is also true of Republicans. I hate Republicans and this will go faster if I just say now that every criticism I have against Democrats applies to them as well.

But this also had a more personal resonance with me. My mother struggled with addiction and it lead to her facing the justice system. Mercy kept my mother from sitting in prison for seven years and got her into the rehab program that has kept her clean and sober for over 20 years now. When I explained this to Michael, he had no answer. He just simply ignored me and moved along.

The second altercation is the reason I’m writing this today. Michael Briggs shared a quote that felt a bit off to me. It was a high profile alt-right Twitter account basically saying ‘Don’t DM me if you agree with me, agree with me publicly’. There was a key phrase left out of my paraphrase. He mentioned that the people DMing him were scared of being “canceled”. I do not have time for a conversation about cancel culture, but I know who does. When I looked into the guy for no more than five seconds, I found a slew of homophobic tweets. As Michael is someone that puts on a progressive face publicly, I wanted to let him know. I took a couple screenshots, sent them to him and told him to be careful who he signal boosted.

A few of his friends responded with shock and concern and I explained that the reason I don’t share other people’s content at random is because it is an implicit endorsement. Michael got defensive and countered that I shared images of the other tweets and that he did not. When my charge is that you are endorsing a bigot by uncritically sharing their opinions, ‘but I didn’t share the bad opinions’ is not a defense. I explained that I shared the images with context, something he himself did not do and he blocked me.

So this is my charge and the purpose of the letter. Michael Briggs is an out-of-touch, uncritical, media-illiterate coward who is leading the retirement community of the Unicoi County Democratic Party directly into the grave. Would that were an event worthy of preventing, I might be fucked to do something about it. However, frankly, I cannot be.