This column originally appeared in Kyle Whitmire’s newsletter, Alabamafication. Sign up here to get it in your inbox for free.

If you look back through my work, there are two words you will struggle to find.

Liberal and conservative.

Occasionally, I’ll drop one in an ironic context, but I try not to. Sometimes, I might slip up. Perhaps I should keep a swear jar.

There’s a simple reason I don’t like those words. I don’t think they mean much anymore, if they ever did.

Language works only when people share definitions for things. If I say football and you think of a pineapple, we’re not going to get very far.

Likewise, if we were to ask a Bernie Sanders-loving socialist what liberal and conservative mean and then do the same for a MAGA-hat Trump-voter, their responses would look completely different. And sometimes, folks within those partisan tribes can’t settle on what they mean among each other. They’re false cognates within the same language. This should be obvious to everyone, but we keep using these words and then wonder why our political discourse has gone to hell.

Us and them — that’s what they mean. Only you get to pick which is which.

Our broken language is a symptom of our broken politics and, increasingly, our broken culture, government, society, country, world, etc.

What I want to do with this newsletter, in addition to my regular reporting and commentary, is to explore ways of putting these things back together. I’m tired of us versus them. Of the many things I’ve learned growing up in Alabama is that when we catch ourselves griping about those people we’re very rarely working in our own interests. I want to talk more about all of us.

This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on accountability journalism. Quite the opposite. I want to make certain our public officials are working for all of us. I hope you find something in it that you like, a movement we can all be a part of.

But more importantly, I want this to be a group activity. I want this newsletter to be a place where we can come together and see our world in a new way, one that doesn’t exclude or subordinate anybody.

If you want to fix the world, you start with where it is broken. Let’s get to work.

Katie Britt, Tommy Tuberville and the situational concern for the truth

Something I believe is foundational to All of Us is consistency from our leaders. That counts double when it comes to truth.

Alabama Sen. Katie Britt says she wants the truth about how Joe Biden’s decline was hidden from the public. That’s good. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson seem to have done a good job, but if the U.S. Senate judiciary committee can uncover more, that’s better.

But the consistency isn’t there, especially when we see Britt endorsing someone for governor — someone who, earlier this year, said he didn’t believe Capitol Police were violently attacked on Jan. 6.

The truth matters, all the time. Not just sometimes and for some people.

Read the column here

And then let me know how I did.

THIS WILL BE ON THE TEST

🤯 DNA only exonerates other states’ prisoners. Imagine being held on death row for a crime you didn’t commit. Now, imagine DNA showing someone else did it and that someone else went on to murder again. Now imagine further that the state ignored that evidence and insisted on executing you anyway. That ain’t make believe. That’s Alabama! AL.com reporter Ivana Hrynkiw looks at Alabama’s messy criminal science, beginning with the case of Christopher Barbour, a man held on death row despite solid evidence that another man committed the crime.

Confronted with DNA, Alabama offers theory that ‘defies logic’ to keep man on death row

[AL.com]

🤪 AI slop says, “We Want Bama!’ If Bible-character TikTok influencers weren’t bad enough, AI slop has flooded football fandom, including the Crimson Tide, Michael Casagrande says. But that pic of Jalen’s baby is so cute!

Searching for origin of fake AI Alabama football Facebook posts littering your feed,

[AL.com]

🙄 They Chose Poorly: The Choose Act was supposed to provide a way for students stuck in struggling Alabama public schools to afford better alternatives. Critics predicted it would be a handout for families with children already enrolled in private schools and parents homeschooling their children. When it passed, every story ended with a variation of time will tell. Well, time has had its say and the critics were right. As my colleague Rebecca Griesbach reports, only 22 percent of the first cohort was enrolled in public school.

Alabama hands out $128 million for private school, homeschool support: Who’s getting money?

[AL.com]

WHAT I’M READING: High Conflict

The power and poison of false binaries are always close by. I’ve been re-reading Amanda Ripley’s 2021 work “High Conflict,” which looks at how the human bias toward dichotomous thinking leaves us vulnerable to charlatans who would manipulate us.

If you have read Ripley’s book, please shoot me an email and let me know what you thought of it.