We Are Not the Villains We Were Warned About (Except When We Are)

Mean-girl internet liberals & leftists owe a debt to Louisiana farmer Kaden Cable - and he's only one example of the dopamine-fueled self-sabotage that will cost us the midterms if we don't do better.

There’s something insidious and exhausting that keeps happening on Threads and really, on all of social media - even on Substack, arguably the most literate of social platforms. Let me paint a picture of this trend through a personal lens. I think you’ll recognize it, because chances are good that it’s happened in your own life if you’re even vaguely online.

Back at the start of the year, we lost our health insurance. Yep...two people working in one of the most dangerous professions in America (farming) without health insurance - super safe, right? We got the letter from BCBS of Vermont in December announcing that our premiums would jump over 300% effective January 1 due to expiring ACA subsidies. That number - 300% - hardly felt real. I put my glasses back on to re-read the letter, just to be sure. Where were we supposed to come up with an extra $1300/month, especially in this economy? We sat with the shock for a while, wondering what to do. We both have chronic health conditions that we already couldn’t afford treatment for even with the ACA subsidies. We even had one of the hardest talks we’ve ever had as a married couple - one that still makes me cry just thinking about it: what to do if one of us received a life-threatening injury while doing farm work. Would we rush to the hospital to save the love of our life and incur an unpayable amount of medical debt in the process (whether or not our love pulled through)? Or would we say goodbye then and there, sharing a last moment as the injury caused our loved one to slip away forever, sparing the surviving spouse from a lifetime of indigence and possibly even homelessness but at the worst possible cost? (And if you’re thinking, “So dumb, this is not a concern…just don’t pay the bill”, read this.)

In the end, we both agreed that we would give up anything - even our own lives - to ensure that the other could live a stable and prosperous life...but neither of us was willing to let the other make the same choice. So, we decided, we’ll go to the hospital. We’ll take the debt. Since that talk, “a well-waxed cardboard box and thou” has become our catchphrase to say, “I would give up anything - everything - except you.”

We let our health coverage lapse effective January 1st. We’ve been as careful as we can be since then, but some things - heart medication costs, skipping therapy, passing on a visit to the dermatologist that I know I very much need - have taken a toll already. And an actual emergency? I shudder to imagine the day it happens.

Almost every time I’ve mentioned this online, I’ve gotten some version of the same response from people who claim to share my left-wing politics but simply didn’t bother to take two seconds to look at my profile. “Farmer FAFO stories. We love to see it. Have the day you voted for.” Even some fellow denizens of Threads who self-identify as class-conscious leftists have jumped to the “farmer = MAGA” conclusion. Sure, Marx likely would have called a smallholder farmer like myself a member of the “petty bourgeoisie” but for the purposes of contemporary American class consciousness, and in an era where many farmers are members of one or more oppressed classes, we should know better. We should do better. We should be better. Now, is this MOST people? No. Most of my fellow Threadsians have been very kind and supportive about the health & safety pickle we’re in. But then again, I don’t “look MAGA” - even my tiny circular avatar on Threads looks pretty fucking queer at a glance.

I can’t say the same for Kaden Cable, though - and the story of the unwarranted barrage of attack he’s receiving across the internet over the last 24 hours is what I want to talk about. It’s bad enough that I felt the need to sit at my laptop on a sunny spring day and write this CTA instead of prepping our soil for planting potatoes (which I desperately need to get around to).

This isn’t the worst of it by far, folks. And the number of people jumping on the bandwagon without a second thought makes me want to burn that bandwagon to the ground.

Kaden farms in north Louisiana, in Mike Johnson’s own congressional district - a detail the DNC was deliberate enough to put right in the title of the mini-documentary they released yesterday. After - after - you finish reading this article, go watch it. It’s a few minutes long and it will tell you everything the comment sections chose not to find out before opening their collective mouths.

The documentary covers what Trump’s trade war, his illegal war with Iran, and the gutting of ACA tax credits have done to the Current Farms operation and to Kaden’s family. His monthly premium, like ours, skyrocketed. Fertilizer costs spiked because of the Iran war. Customers have been lost - prosperity has been stolen. Kaden describes being caught between eating costs himself or passing them on, and hating himself either way. He holds it together on camera with the kind of composure you only have after you’ve already processed the fear, grief, and anxiety in private (a feeling I know well, and I’m sure many of us do).

A screenshot from the short documentary, linked above.

He also says this, on camera: “Whenever I hear somebody complain about stuff that Trump did that they don’t like, I ask them if they voted for Trump, and if they say yes, well dude, you got the day that you voted for.”

You don’t say that if you voted for Trump. It’s not a subtle clue.

Kaden’s brother Conrad is also his business partner at Current Farms. Conrad is currently running for Congress in Louisiana’s 4th District as a Democrat, and on a relatively progressive platform - Medicare for All, living wages, overturning Citizens United. His campaign page is linked in the footnotes, and I mean it when I say Conrad is worth your time and your dollars, even if you’re not in Louisiana.

Please go and donate to Conrad’s campaign after you finish reading this article, and please share it far and wide. Thank you.

This is all public information. It was public information yesterday when the pile-on started. The comment sections on Threads, on Raw Story’s Substack note, across platforms whose users pride themselves on being the ones who actually read things - they were wall to wall “FAFO” and “he voted for this.” These folks seem to have run an aesthetic + occupational checklist on Kaden Cable - burly, Southern accent, camo ballcap, farmer - and the verdict came back guilty before anyone bothered with discovery.

I want to be fair about where that reflex comes from, because I don’t think it comes from nowhere - but it having grounding doesn’t make it ok. We have watched, in recent years, a dispiriting number of people turn out to be something other than what they presented as. The political ground shifts fast enough right now that calibrating trust feels genuinely high-stakes, and some of that wariness is earned and appropriate. Healthy skepticism is a reasonable response to getting burned.

But there’s a point where healthy skepticism curdles. It happens when threat fatigue gets bad enough that some of us are no longer able to distinguish between “I’ve learned to pay attention” and “I’ve decided in advance.” We’ve reached a point on the left where purity-testing has become less about actual accountability and more about the emotional relief of having somewhere that feels righteous to put our rage, skepticism, loneliness, and exhaustion…and having our internet peers applaud us for it.

IMHO, that’s not politics (or at least it shouldn’t be) - it’s an existential and cultural crisis wearing politics as a costume. And it makes us worse at the actual work - identifying real enemies; building real coalitions; centering the real voices and real needs of the folks most impacted by the right’s policies; winning real races - because we’re too busy auditing each other’s credentials within the eternal, unforgiving panopticon of the internet to notice who’s actually in the room with us.

Again…this isn’t even the worst of the unwarranted heckling. This is the kind of low-effort bandwagon bull$h!t that will cost us every single person we might have won over to our cause. I’d like to say “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed”…but I am in fact both very mad and very disappointed. And yes, I’ve called out my own followers where I’ve seen them jumping on this bandwagon - I expected much better of them.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party doesn’t have this problem, because they’ve decided that winning matters more than purity. For all their faults (and they are legion), they understand that she who controls elected and appointed seats controls policy, and she who controls policy controls the fate of the people - nay, the world.

While we on the left are busy purity-testing online and eating our own, MAGA is spending actual money - millions and millions of dollars - to smear progressive candidates for the exact kinds of things they know will divide our vote. A PAC aligned with Susan Collins just dropped two million dollars attacking Graham Platner in Maine (article here). Two million dollars, from people who don’t even live there, because they understand that a divided Democratic coalition is worth paying for. They understand that people won’t make time to read the voices of Black Mainers like the amazing Shay Stewart-Bouley; they’ll just skip to the comments section and pop off, serving as fiery liberal accelerant on a convenient MAGA spark. The same kind of people who are attacking Kaden are gleefully tearing down Graham Platner, much to the delight of Susan Collins and all of MAGA. And the content of my own DMs, and even some bold public comments? Let’s not go there. And here we are, some of us providing the same insidious service (by family proxy) for candidates like Kaden’s brother, absolutely free of charge, out of what we seem to believe is principle.

But this kind of bandwagoning and purity testing is not principle…
…it’s dopamine-fueled political self-sabotage with a moral vocabulary.

It makes you feel good, and so you think it is good. It’s intoxicating. It’s affirming.
But you’re being fooled, and that’s kind of the point.
So, congrats - the bad guys are winning ideologically, and you’re well on your way to helping them win at the ballot box.

Conrad Cable is trying to flip Louisiana’s 4th District. Kaden is his brother, his business partner, and the public face of a documentary designed to build exactly the coalition we keep saying we want. What the comment sections on this video did this week wasn’t a sidebar to the political project - it was damage to it. Actual, concrete, potentially lasting damage to a real congressional campaign, done by self-proclaimed liberals and leftists who couldn’t be bothered to watch a four-minute video first.

I am so very, very disappointed in everyone who participated.

So here’s what I think mean-girl internet liberals & leftist owe Kaden Cable, and I’m not going to soften this: a public apology, and a donation to his brother’s campaign. Not a quiet deletion of your bull$h!t - that’s the move of someone who wants the problem to go away without actually fixing anything. If you’re willing to publicly humiliate someone based on a wrong assumption, the correction belongs in the same public space as the original offense. That’s the accountability standard we hold everyone else to. We all keep clamoring for “accountability”, right? Well, it applies to us too, or it doesn’t mean anything.

Watch the short documentary - actually watch it this time.
Read about Conrad’s campaign.

And the next time someone who doesn’t match your mental picture of what a liberal or leftist farmer looks like shows up talking about premiums or fertilizer prices or debt or just trying to keep something alive that deserves to survive, be willing to spend four minutes with them before you decide who they are.
That’s an incredibly low bar - a much lower bar than we’d want cleared before someone decides who we are, right?

Think better.
Do better.
Be better.
Otherwise, this won’t get better.