About Self-Evident LLC

In recent decades special interest groups, corporations and wealthy individuals have been increasingly successful at exchanging campaign contributions for supply-side, or ‘trickle-down’ economic policy, through which an enormous amount of wealth has instead trickled up, leaving Americans divided by wealth, health, education and opportunity to a degree not seen since the Gilded Age at the turn of the twentieth century.

Between 1980 and 2015 the share of the total income of Americans realized by the poorest 50% among us declined by nearly half, while the share realized by the wealthiest 1% more than doubled.

Extraordinary though this transfer of wealth has been it’s also something of an elephant in our national living room — plain to see but not widely acknowledged. While our economy is a feature of our daily public discourse, the amount of money that has shifted from the many to a few in the course of a generation is not.

Distracting from this societal sea change has been a purposeful, strategic assault on the consensus reality that’s at the core of United States law, social structure and our overall way of life — general agreement about true and false and right and wrong.

This assault is being led by current and previously elected Republican officials, aided and abetted by so-called Conservative media outlets (what’s ‘Conservative’ about bearing false witness?) and with the results of the 2024 election has been shown to have been supported, or at least accepted, by a majority of Republican voters.

Between this corruption of our election process, confusion caused by the deceit that supports it, and the vast and growing disparity between the haves and have-nots among Americans that has resulted, frustration, fear and polarization have flourished throughout our society. Priced-and-otherwise excluded from the American Dream, more and more are discouraged, resentful and vulnerable to the siren song of fascism: the blaming of various ‘others’ for that which we the people are ultimately responsible and claims of simple solutions for complex problems.

Meanwhile global air and water temperatures are increasing, the polar ice caps and the world’s glaciers melting, and ocean levels rising — all at an accelerating pace. The Amazon Rainforest — the earth’s lungs —is being stripped of its vegetation at an unsustainable rate. The marine life that supports much of the earth’s population is increasingly scarce and their habitat is increasingly polluted.

Human behavior caused these conditions and human behavior can rectify them, by developing and adapting to systems for clean and renewable energy, disposing of our waste in a sustainable manner, and by bringing our election financing, taxation, healthcare, education, and social program policies into line with current reality with the innovation that’s a signature characteristic of our species and a defining force in U.S. history.

False information leads to bad decisions. Our challenges won’t be overcome, nor will our opportunities be realized through deceit and denial. Honest dialogue is needed if our Ship of State is to be set back on its intended course of expanding freedom, equal rights and equal justice under law for all Americans, regardless of sex, race, religion, national origin or political inclination.

Self-Evident’s distress flag designs were created to focus attention on our nation’s foundational principles, juxtaposed with behavior — anyone’s behavior — that undermines efforts to form a more perfect Union.

January 2025