From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle
Liberty, Liberally Volume I - Issue IV
April, 2021
When You Find Your Self In A Bookstore When I moved to Alaska, the first job I could find was as a nightshift stocker for a corporate grocer. However, after a few months of working that job at night, and planning my musical path by day, I finally landed a job that complimented that sixth of the seven liberal arts. For more than three years after that, I worked at the local Waldenbooks bookstore, starting as a seasonal employee. At first, I didn’t even work inside the store, but out at the calendar kiosk in the walkway of the mall. My job was to talk to strangers, and sell calendars, not even books! I was not quite ‘in the door’, as the saying goes. Still, I was stoked to be near a place filled with books, and I really wanted to be part of that team moving forward. It felt like a dream job for me, at the age of 23. I had done much harder labor in previous years, installing flooring for many years in Mississippi, working at a shipyard building Navy destroyers, so I had a real appreciation for doing something intellectually adjacent. In Alaska, I wanted something different, something that reflected my interests, and that’s what I found on that team of booksellers. One long-time team member, and eventually others, told me that the store manager didn’t keep male employees who were hired during the holiday shopping season. Not because she was sexist, they all told me, but because male employees didn’t like taking orders from their all female team. I knew that I could, so this was encouraging news for me, an aspiring musician who loved words on paper.
White Noise, White Saviors and the Woke-Washed Worldview
Christmas money for my kids’ gifts the following years. Eventually, and sadly, it didn’t matter how great that store performed. The corporation that purchased Waldenbooks, Borders, folded in on itself. Our store continued to boom, but it was not enough the keep that corporate behemoth buoyant. Turns out, our success was because of Pam’s leadership, and her willingness to perhaps appear sexist, in order to keep that team functional and freaking fantastic. She didn’t mind having men on her team, but she wasn’t going to weigh down that team with wasted diplomacy, with a token male, just because her team happened to be all women. She didn’t care that there was an incredible disparity in her store’s hiring practices. She saw the reality of her success, of our success, and she found team members that were willing to read the dust jackets of every new book that went on the shelves. She had a team of people who loved books - really loved them. We all had our special sections in the store, where we were the resident experts. There was no consideration for gender with Pam, only in being a strong and steadfast leader of a team that truly took books to heart. Our ability to help you find a book was incredible. I absolutely loved being part of it, and I’m hit with a wave reminiscing about it now. That bookstore, named after the iconic book, Walden, was the place where I would come to appreciate the independence of the individual in a more profound way.
It felt like fate when the store manager offered me a position going forward into February, after the rush of returns/ exchanges that always came in the first two weeks of the New Year. In fact, I couldn’t have been more at home, by that point, at the very bottom of that hierarchy. Every other member of the team, including the new hires alongside me, were women. I was the only male on the year-round team in all the time I worked there. They always hired some during the seasonal shopping increase, but they never made it onto the yearround crew. For more than three years I worked as part of that team. The rest of the team had all been together for years and years. I was one of the last and newest members of that otherwise all-female team, and never once did I worry about who told me what to do. And true to her word, the store manager was not a sexist for not hiring men. Instead, I learned that she knew what it took to keep her team functional and balanced. I gradually became part of her core team, as many other new hires fell off. She understood the need for authority in a business environment, and as a result, her store regularly measured in the top 5 stores in the whole corporation. I was eventually (3 years later) offered a chance to interview to replace the store manager (who was retiring), along with several other core team members. Most of the team didn’t even want the job due to the added responsibility. I was deeply honored, honestly, that my friends (after three years) were all willing to consider me to lead that team. The longtime store manager, Pam Ockerlander, had ran a tight ship, and it was a pleasure to be part of her awardwinning team. However, while doing that job for those three plus years, I had also been steadfastly pursuing my efforts as a local musician, and I had achieved the financial benchmark that I needed in order to shift over to music as my primary source of income. They all understood, and I continued to work there for a few more months, with greatly reduced hours, and I even came back and helped during a few subsequent seasonal shopping rushes, banking some
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Alaska
The exploitation of the concept of white supremacy by the Loud Crowd is becoming so flagrant and obvious that it is hard to understand why so many woke white people can’t see how inappropriate it is. It’s white saviour-ism on steroids.
‘The Blind Side’, 2009, is often criticized as exemplifying the ‘white savior’ psychosis, which merges bigotry with benevolence. Everything’s not white supremacy. That’s a nonsense notion. But white supremacy is a very serious notion. There really are white supremacists (especially in our prison system where they are able to perpetuate their ideology), and no one can effectively talk about them anymore - thanks to the woke white people who have muddied the waters so that the actual Neo-Nazis and other Totalitarian types are ignored. It’s the worst possible outcome, and it’s all because of the arrogant ignorance of pseudo-social-ScIEnTiSts. They insist that their imagined realities (stitched together like any conspiracy theory would be, with the thread of confirmation bias running throughout), are real and not at all fabrications (and it’s white supremacy to say otherwise). But I promise you, if you read history, you’ll find that so much of this madeup narrative simply isn’t true. And then they’ll tell you that history is white supremacy, too.
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Henry David Thoreau My love for books was edified by that experience. Honestly, I was a bit of a book snob before I started working there. I had my (very strong) preferences, and that job allowed me to see how different books connect with different people over different times in their lives. Books are truly magical that way. It opened me up, like a book, to a larger library of empathy. I learned to appreciate the ‘other’, and I learned thereby that an ‘other’ is just another individual, on another page of life.
These white, woke people will insist that you can’t trust the story of time, as it was written, by millions of heads, hearts and hands, from literally every land - no, that’s white supremacy they’ll say. You’d be better off trusting these highly creative storytellers who literally just thought this up themselves, just recently. The chaotic miscommunication about “whiteness” (whatever that means), “white supremacy” (which means whatever), it’s white noise, in that it diminishes the harsh reality of how scientific racism is the basic building block - the cornerstone even - of the Totalitarian mode of thought. Whether those Totalitarians are Fascist, Communist, Socialist, it doesn’t matter. These strands of Tyrannical control are all predicated upon scientific racism even if they don’t realize it. In fact, Totalitarians purposefully mislead their Korisne Budale (“useful innocents”) through deception, and call that good
I might have been the only long-term male employee of that bookstore, and I might have been one of the last longterm members to join that core team that was sustained for decades before I came along, but I was welcomed like a family member. I didn’t have to change how I felt about women telling me what to do, because books where of the mind, not the body. Somewhere along the way, certainly in the books I’d read, I’d learned that each individual, regardless of sex, creed, race or religion, was a reflection of their own merits, and ought to be treated as such.
We’ve gotten a surprising number of donations from community members at The People’s Paper and Make A Scene Magazine over the years, and recently it’s increased with the publication of Liberty, Liberally.
There is nowhere this reality has been made more clear to me than when I found my self working in a bookstore.
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governance, so it should be expected that their low-level adherents will be ignorant and arrogant about what they’ve been told.
Our Liberal society, based on individual Liberty, presumes we are divine creations - each one of us. It’s a revolutionary idea that has only recently been freed from the chains of tyrannical threat. We are fortunate to be the inheritors of such inherent rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Totalitarians, no matter of Marx or Mussolini, they do not believe in God, although they will exploit your belief in God. Instead, they believe in science, and historically, science has always ALWAYS - included scientific racism… until very recently.
The only difference between the Fascists, Socialists, National Socialists and Marxists is how they divide the people into groups - but they all seek to divide and conquer their own people. One of those evil dictators, via National Socialism in Germany, divided the people into race and ethnic groups, and killed those who resisted. It should come as no surprise that the Jews were the primary (though not only) target of that regime, as the Jews believed in God-given free will, and the value of the individual soul. Totalitarians like Hitler and Marx think that is a dangerous idea, the most dangerous even, and both advocated for the eradication of God from their societies, giving all authority to government.
Instead, they embraced the terribly flawed scientific orthodoxy of their time, absent the moral mandate of love for other individuals.
Included in that orthodoxy, until they were abruptly and ham-handedly excised following the exposure of the evils of the Nazis, were the ideas of scientific racism. The scientific community of that time scrambled to do damage control, after the awful atrocities of their political adherents were made known. They pretended that scientific racism was pseudo-science, when it was actually a central pillar of evolutionary biology… until it wasn’t.
But that doesn’t change that science the rest of it - up until that time was developed with that same scientific racism taken as a given. Even though the scientific establishment has tried to rid itself of the intellectual burden of scientific racism, you might say that the scientific orthodoxy is “systemically racist”. (Don’t deny it, because that proves it. That’s just science.)
It is science that has been the true constant companion of mass murder and oppression. Well, not science itself, but the egos of the godless souls, the woke, white people of those times, who then exploited science to achieve their own godless governmental ideations of power and control. CONTINUES ON PAGE 2
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From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle