“”Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same…”
Sonnet 76, William Shakespeare
The list arrives in your feed already finished. Ten numbered beliefs, each one beginning with “I believe,” none of them written by the person who posted it.
Somewhere upstream sits an author nobody can name. Downstream sit ten thousand people who now claim the sentences as their own convictions, having contributed not a single keystroke to the effort.
I spent twenty years taking statements. The first thing you learn is the difference between what a witness saw and what a witness heard somebody say. The second thing you learn is how fast the second one degrades.
A statement passed hand to hand, unsourced and unchallenged, is worth exactly what you paid for it. This list costs nothing to hold, which is the entire point of the design.
Look at how each plank is built. Each one fuses a premise nobody argues with to a conclusion the premise does not support. You nod at the first half and swallow the second. That is not persuasion. It is a pablum for the weak-minded.
The planks
One. America should never depend on another country for energy, protection, or supply.
Fine as a slogan. As policy, it describes autarky, and the countries pursuing it are not ones anybody wants to emulate. We are the largest oil and gas producer on the planet, and we still trade, because trade is cheaper than doing everything ourselves. We do not have the cobalt. We do not have the rare earths in commercial quantity. Semiconductor fabrication took Taiwan forty years and $100 billion to perfect. As for depending on nobody for protection, every cop who ever keyed a mic and asked for backup understands the alternative. Alliances are force multipliers. Independence and isolation are not synonyms, and the plank hides one inside the other.
Two. You cannot pour from an empty cup.
A metaphor is not an argument, and this one smuggles in a claim the author never defends: the claim of a fixed quantity of national care, drawn down by every dollar spent abroad. Foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of federal spending. Zero it out tomorrow, and the cup does not measurably refill. Worse, the logic has no floor. Whoever wields “our own people first” gets to decide who counts as ours, and the same sentence works just as well against the poor in Providence as against the poor in Port-au-Prince.
Three. Only citizens vote; ID required, secure elections.
Voting by noncitizens has been a federal crime since 1996. Stating existing law as a personal conviction is not a position; it is a weather report. The real questions sit one layer down, and the plank refuses to go there: which IDs count, who lacks them, what a cure period looks like, and how you audit a result. Those questions have answers, and the answers are empirical rather than devotional. A creed cannot handle them, so it stops at the applause line.
Four. No foreign aid until every veteran is cared for.
The VA budget runs somewhere north of $300 billion. Foreign aid runs a fraction of it. No one in Congress has ever proposed the trade, so the plank opposes a policy no one supports. Notice also the condition: every veteran. That threshold can never be met, which makes it a permanent excuse rather than a standard. I heard the same structure on the street a thousand times. Why are you writing me a ticket when there are murderers out there? The answer, then and now, is that the government does more than one thing at a time.
Five. Immigrants strengthen America when they come legally, and breaking the law first disqualifies you.
Improper entry is a misdemeanor. Overstaying a visa, which accounts for a large share of the undocumented population, is a civil violation and not a crime at all. Presenting yourself at a port of entry to claim asylum is lawful, full stop. So the “first act” indictment misfires on much of the population it targets. And here is where a police career cuts against the plank instead of for it: we do not define a human being permanently by his least serious offense. Anybody who worked patrol and believed otherwise made a poor cop. Meanwhile, the legal line the plank celebrates runs for decades for some applicants, which turns “come legally” into “do not come” in a nicer suit.
Six. Marry who you want; judgment belongs to God.
The most generous plank in the list, and still hedged twice. “Your lifestyle” and “not mine to judge” arrive in the same breath, one hand offering, the other filing an objection for the record. Worth remembering, the right described here was not granted by consensus. It was won over the objections of people arguing precisely the points made in planks seven and eight.
Seven and eight. Here the list stops describing and starts legislating, and it does so without noticing. “Men are men and women are women” presents itself as biology while doing definitional work, and the definition determines the outcome. Then comes the enforcement problem, which the plank leaves entirely to someone else. Bathrooms require a mechanism. Who checks? On what evidence? Under what authority? What happens to the short-haired woman with a jaw somebody dislikes? I have executed warrants and testified about probable cause, and I can tell you that a rule with no workable enforcement is not a rule; it is a wish with a penalty attached.
Plank eight then asserts schools teach children they were born in the wrong body. No curriculum is cited, because no curriculum says it. And “education, not indoctrination” collapses the moment you ask who decides. Every faction in this fight believes its own version of American history is the neutral one and the other side’s is propaganda. A list unwilling to name a single specific standard has no claim on the word education.
Set six against seven. Your life is not mine to judge, except here, where I will judge it and put it in writing.
Nine. America faces a mental health crisis.
True, universally agreed, and completely free. The plank names no funding, no parity enforcement, no clinician shortage, no Medicaid, no involuntary commitment standard, and nothing anyone could vote against. A belief costing nothing is not a belief.
It is a mood.
Ten. Guns are not the problem; gun control only infringes on rights, and background checks are necessary.
Read those three clauses again. A background check is gun control. The plank refutes itself inside a single paragraph, and the author never noticed, because nobody wrote it so much as assembled it from things heard elsewhere.
The second half fares worse. “Keep firearms from the mentally ill” runs directly into plank nine. You cannot spend one sentence urging people to seek treatment and then, in the next, make treatment a disqualifier. The federal prohibitor turns on adjudication and commitment, not diagnosis, for exactly this reason. And the people carrying the crisis in plank nine are far likelier to be shot than to shoot anyone.
As for people rather than guns, I worked narcotics and ran an investigative division. Instrumentality decides outcomes. The same rage produces a bruise, a stab wound, or a funeral depending entirely on what sits within reach.
The copying
Which brings me back to the real subject. Every plank above can be argued. Some deserve a serious hearing. Number three points at a legitimate interest in election integrity. Number nine names a genuine emergency. Number one contains a real supply-chain problem buried under a bad slogan.
None of that is what happened here. Nobody argued anything. Somebody read ten sentences, felt the click of recognition, and reposted the whole slab. The list is engineered for exactly that.
It never specifies a bill, a number, an agency, or a trade-off, because specifics create disagreement, and disagreement kills progress. Its function is not to convince you. Its function is to let you flag your side at zero cost and zero risk and to let the next person do the same.
Convictions do not work that way. A conviction has edges. It costs you something. It excludes an ally somewhere, and you can say where it came from and what would change your mind. Ten borrowed sentences deliver none of that, and pasting them into your own feed does not transfer ownership.
Write your own. Get some of your points wrong. I would rather read ten sentences you thought through badly than ten you copied well.
Here’s the list if you’ve somehow managed to avoid being bombarded by it. I left it as is, although the temptation to edit it for grammar was compelling. It is usually prefaced by even more uninspired dialogue about how “you can disagree with these statements, but it is what I believe.”
No, it isn’t; you copied that as well.
- 1. I believe America should never depend on another country for energy, protection, or basic supply and demand. We are strongest when we build, produce, and protect things right here in the USA.
- 2. I believe America must put itself first. We cannot pour from an empty cup. Our country should prioritize our own people before trying to save the world.
- 3. I believe only legal citizens have the right to vote. You must have a valid ID to vote. I also believe in a secure election process.
- 4. I believe no foreign aid should be given until every veteran at home is taken care of.
- 5. I believe immigrants make America stronger — when they come legally. If your first act in this country is breaking the law, you aren’t an upstanding citizen.
- 6. You can marry who you want. I may agree or disagree with your lifestyle, but your life is not mine to judge, I leave that to God Almighty.
- 7. I believe men are men and women are women. Surgery or hormone don’t change that. Men should use men’s bathrooms, and women should use women’s bathrooms.
- 8. I believe schools are for education, not indoctrination. Kids should learn math, history, reading, and science – not political propaganda. They should not be taught they were “born in the wrong body” or pushed into gender delusion.
- 9. I believe America is in a mental health crisis. Mental health care is real, it matters, and it desperately needs to be addressed.
- 10. I believe guns aren’t the problem – people are. Gun control only infringes on constitutional rights. But I also believe in common sense: background checks are necessary to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Joe Broadmeadow retired as a captain from the East Providence Police Department after twenty years of service, having commanded the Investigative Services Division and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. Since founding JEBWizard Creative Media in 2019, he has written crime fiction, the Josh Williams and Hawk Bennett series, and co-authored true crime, YA fantasy, and literary fiction, bringing an investigator’s evidentiary eye to both his novels and his opinion writing. A 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, a grandfather, and a Cumberland High School graduate with deep roots in the town, he attended Providence College and lives in Rhode Island, or wherever his travels take him.
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