Defenestrations

First and most obviously, the South is not a monolith, any more than any other place is. For some reason there seems to be a lot of folks who believe the South is somehow the exception to that rule—it ain’t.

Southern states are some of the most gerrymandered places in fucking existence. We’re so gerrymandered there was a federal law that required federal courts to sign off on the redistricting plans of the states that were the most egregious abt it. There still is, but it’s mostly toothless now. Republicans did that. Republicans are also the ones doing the gerrymandering. Go figure.

All that gerrymandering is the main reason y’all think of the South as red states, as MAGA country, bc the Republicans fiddle w voting district lines so they can keep getting re-elected. This move really puts the “republic” in “republican” bc if we had direct democracy that wouldn’t be possible.

I was born and raised in a small Appalachian city and then spent most of my adult life in a medium-sized Southern city before moving to Houston. All of these places are “blue dots” in seas of red, which for the most part means local governments are made up of moderate Democrats and all the NPR-listening hipsters pat each other on the back for being more intelligent and enlightened than the country folks while they gentrify poor black and brown folks out of their generational homes. The political impact these cities might have on the rest of the state is blunted by the gerrymandering and the Republican candidates who fill rural voters’ heads w fearmongering abt how dangerous and corrupt the godless degenerates of the city are. A few generations ago it was Yankee carpet-baggers that were the problem. And so it goes.

The consequence of living in a place where the government has been nearly continuously occupied by a small group of predominantly white capitalists who are mostly despised and at best tolerated is that leftists down here are radical af. And nowhere has this been more evident to me than Texas. One of the first things I noticed abt Texas political discourse was how far left the left was. Tennessee and North Carolina have a lot more reform-minded folks who still believe there’s some polite, nonviolent way and it’s preferable to anybody getting their hands dirty. It does not shock me that the first anarchists convicted of terrorism were Texan.

I was kinda surprised w how quickly the ppl outraged by Lorenzo’s murder connected the dots and immediately sided w leftists, but I shouldn’t have been. I’m just as propagandized as everybody else to write off the South as a wasteland and a lost cause, and even tho I fight against it, those prejudices and assumptions still come up and nip me in the butt on occasion. But my experience is that Texans tend to be more libertarian than anything else. The Republican Party swung libertarians by talking abt “small government” a lot and bitching abt all the waste caused by the bloated bureaucracy, but they forgot that even a libertarian who voted Republican still has a “fuck the government” streak a mile wide and they’ll turn on you as soon as spit. That’s a big part of what’s happening in Texas rn and it just fills me w delight.

A couple of weeks ago, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered by 🧊 agents in broad daylight, in the neighborhood where I live, just a few blocks from my house. That’s important bc Houston is a massive fucking city. My neighborhood of the East End or Second Ward of Houston is roughly six times the size of downtown Minneapolis. My neighborhood is also a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, where by “predominantly” I mean if you were blindfolded and dropped on one of these streets you could be excused, once the blindfold was removed ofc, for thinking you were in Mexico.

This community came together around Lorenzo and Lorenzo’s family to demand justice, and then the city came together w this community. It has been empowering, inspiring, and uplifting to see such unity. More than 30 leftist and liberal groups have formed a united front around Justice for Lorenzo. Thousands showed up to protest this past Sunday in a park on the other side of town, in a gentrified and relatively well-off neighborhood, in the middle of the World Cup final.

You may have seen Houston’s mayor, John Whitmire, on mainstream media. There’s at least one CNN clip making the rounds on the internet where he’s described as “empassioned.” He ain’t. He consistently, publicly, on the record, chastises protesters for their lack of “decorum.” He claims it’s “not [his] job” to listen to them unless they conduct themselves civilly and w “respect” for his office and the “rules” the city government has restricting the time, place, and manner w which the public is “allowed” to air their grievances. He even has the audacity to accuse protesters of “showing disrespect to the family” of Lorenzo when the man’s sons have spoken at every protest and rally and are lockstep and arm-in-arm w these efforts. Our mayor is a Democrat, btw.

All of this has produced something like mass radicalization. Leftist groups have been flooded w applications, w at least one noting they got more applications within 24 hours of the Sunday action than they have current active members. Folks are waking up to the full implications of this shit, they’re waking up fast, they’re waking up in droves, and they’re ready to fight. These are folks, incidentally, who have signs on their fences that say “Protected by Smith&Wesson” and “We don’t call 911” under an image of a shotgun. Not folks to fuck with, you might say.

There was a city council meeting yesterday and they always have a public comment period, which city council and the mayor evidently think is the time for them to dissociate and check their email or play candy crush or whatever, and when folks came in only wanting to talk abt Lorenzo they tried to be all “ok thank you your time has expired” and the ppl wouldn’t shut up abt it, they cut off the livestream of the proceedings and had the cops escort folks out, through doors w large metal words mounted over them that say “equality” and “justice” and “the people are the city.” Then Whitmire bitches to a local broadcaster abt how these disrespectful hooligans came in and “interrupted” their public comment session, as tho it’s possible for the public to interrupt a public comment session.

This action on Friday is gonna be huge. If you’re not paying attention to what’s happening in Houston yet, make an effort to change that. The movement we’re building is not small, and it’s not going away. These streets are ringing w “EL PUEBLO UNIDO JAMÁS SERÁ VENCIDO.” It’s a beautiful and empowering and hopeful thing to see.

Y’all wanna hear a funny story? Cool. So this was a post the actual real Comal County (TX) Republican Party dropped on their actual real facebook page. I screencapped it bc I figured it wasn’t long for this world, and I was right. They had dirty-deleted it before the sun came up this morning.

At the time I screencapped the post, it had been live for over 12 hours and the comments were full of folks ponying up some variation of “hey wait a second that sounds dope, actually.” Turns out after the US proclaimed victory in the Cold War, its political operatives promptly forgot the first lesson the CIA learned—if you want ppl to hate communism, you have to lie abt it. If you tell the truth, ppl want to learn more, and once they learn more, your Cold War is gonna go straight out the window.

My fellow Americans, I wanna give you something to think abt. The reason y’all don’t understand socialism or communism is bc you think economics and politics are separate, or at least that they should be. They’re not, nor should they be, but what your country has done, from the Cold War onward, is teach that “capitalism” is some sort of natural, default state synonymous w freedom. The “free market” and all the “laws” applying thereto are theories proposed by various philosophers. They are ideas, meaning they are the product of a human’s mind. They’re not concrete, not based in reality.

If you take an introductory political science course, you usually start w a brief history of the discipline itself. It’s then that you learn “political scientists” were originally called “political economists,” and still are in many places, bc a country’s economy is inextricable from that country’s politics.

This was, as you’ve probably guessed, an anti-communist move. If you bring up generations to believe that social issues and economic issues are entirely separate, you essentially prevent any leftist movement from rising at all. You also get ppl who claim they are “socially liberal but economically conservative,” a claim that makes zero sense virtually anywhere else on the planet, but I digress.

This is not a debate topic, by the way. It’s not something upon which “reasonable minds” might differ. When y’all hear “liberal” you think “socially liberal,” you think tolerance, but the main thing liberals tolerate is capitalism—and beyond tolerating it, many of them thrive in it. Liberalism, as a political philosophy, created capitalism. Capitalism is inherently undemocratic, which you know firsthand if you’ve ever held a job. This country, at its founding, was inherently undemocratic, inasmuch as voting and political “rights” were only extended to men who owned land. In a primarily agrarian economy, which America’s was at its founding, land owner was synonymous w capitalist. Land is capital, it still is, you know this if you’ve ever taken out a home equity loan.

So liberals today look at those of us on the left and think we have something in common, bc they’re only looking at social issues, whereas leftists are looking primarily at what liberals would consider “economic” issues. And when a leftist properly points out that liberals are right-wing, a liberal is gonna sprout a thousand points of white-hot rage bc they see conservatives as racist misogynistic homophobes while they are tolerant and accepting and inclusive. But tolerance and acceptance and inclusivity are aspirational values to the liberal—they’ve shown time and time again that they will compromise these values if and when they get in the way of capitalism.

I bring this up bc I see a lot of liberals, online and in meatspace, sliding into leftist spaces thinking they’ll fit in, only to get butthurt as soon as they discover most leftists hate them more than we hate conservatives, bc conservatives aren’t a threat to us in the same way liberals are. Liberals effectively defang leftist movements by flattening them into social movements and then co-opting that social movement. It happened w feminism and w the civil rights movement and w the gay rights movement. In all of these movements, the leading agitators were socialists and communists, but all you learn of them in history class are their social arguments, not their economic ones.

It should come as no surprise that billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are saying and doing anti-democratic things. Capitalism is incompatible w democracy. It is. Capitalism requires poverty, requires a desperate, exploitable workforce. I know Tesla was a liberal darling for a while, that y’all felt betrayed when Elon removed his mask of tolerance and revealed himself as the tyrant he is. But he’s also always been a capitalist darling, so his “turn” is no great shock once you understand that capitalism is inherently undemocratic. This only causes cognitive dissonance to American liberals who also fangirl capitalism.

All these social issues, your identity politics and your culture wars, are just a distraction. You can’t be “equal” socially if you aren’t equal economically, and no, being equal economically does not mean that everyone is poor. It means that no one is poor. It means that no one is forced to work multiple jobs that they hate where they are abused and dehumanized just so they can eat and have a roof over their heads.

If you’re a liberal who’s confused as to why you’re under attack from the left when “we’re on the same side,” just study some economics. Read up on the history of capitalism and understand that it’s not some default state—it’s an idealistic theoretical framework w no basis in reality. From the perspective of the ppl living under it, it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. What it does do is concentrate wealth and resources in the hands of a few who consequently have greater power than any king ever dreamed of. But this is good news! Bc it’s not reality, bc it’s imposed, we can fight it. We don’t have to bargain w it. We don’t have to keep it happy so it won’t squash us. We don’t have to beg for crumbs at its table. We can overturn it, dismantle it, and replace it w something better. The time for your kinder, gentler capitalism, if it ever existed, is long past.

Confronting your fear is likely to piss you off just like someone else pointing out your fear makes you defensive. From the heart of your fear you desperately fling “I’m not scared—you are” and hope it sticks. Know that it’s not your fault, that the system was never designed to work for you, that the system was designed to kill you, at worst. At best, the system is entirely apathetic to your existence. You might start to wonder why tf you bother to uphold something that ain’t doing you any good. Take a brick off the wall.

If someone tells you to be disgusted by something, what they’re really doing is telling you to be afraid of it—afraid of contamination. The system loves the language of contagion bc it uses your fear to increase the distance between you and anything that might cause you to question the system. The system knows your disgust will gradually grow into hate and from that hate new fears will blossom. The system depends on your inability to dissect those fears and understand what put them there and what makes them tick. As you start unpacking, you take down a brick, and another, and another.

The system doesn’t want this. The system depends on your belief that it is natural and right and proper and good. Eventually the brick you take down will be load-bearing. The system will collapse and you’ll finally see the sun. It starts w a simple question, the one adults get pissed at toddlers for asking repeatedly: WHY. Why lays the system bare. Why causes the causeway to crumble and reveals a different path—one that’s a little bit messier but a lot more fun.

I’m not fond of generational politics—I feel like ppl try to say too much w it—but it can be beneficial in understanding trends that do occur on a generational level, as in parents teaching their children based on their understanding of the world and what they’ve experienced. So I wanna talk to my fellow Gen Xers for a moment. Xennials, this likely applies to you too. Everybody else feel free to read along.

Our parents were Baby Boomers, so called bc when WWII was over a bunch of vets came home and started getting busy. This wasn’t (just) bc they came home horny, it was bc folks in America had hope for the future. They were going to college in record numbers, buying houses in record numbers, achieving the so-called American Dream in record numbers, and so on. Our parents were born into that. Their parents had survived at least one if not two world wars and the Great Depression. Their country was selling a particular type of prosperity rooted in consumption so our parents, a lot of them, got to be the first “kids”—little ppl w zero responsibility except to play and learn and grow. Our country created the “middle class” and told them they were in it. Our parents also became the first “teenagers”—young adults w zero responsibility except to play and learn and grow. Our parents, some of them, started to see the cracks in the foundation their country was trying to build, and they pointed to them. The government, largely consisting of ppl their parents’ age, called them hippies and gangsters and criminals, said they had too much time on their hands, said they were “soft.” They had all been taught to fear communism. Not all of them did. Those who didn’t were killed, jailed, and silenced. They came of age in the middle of a war waged by colonial forces against the will of a native ppl and they lost. Their parents despised them for losing.

For most of our adult lives, our parents have run the government for the benefit of capitalists. They raised us, as Gen Xers, to understand that economics and politics are two separate things (spoiler alert: they’re not), bc if we saw them as necessarily intertwined we might start to see the cracks in the foundation they were building, just as they saw the cracks in the foundation their parents were building. Our bogie man was a Commie w vodka breath who would come for us bc he was jealous of our way of life, us w our 24 hours of television and our 24 varieties of sugary breakfast cereal and our 24 million fast food burgers. They rebranded capitalism as freedom and Protestant work ethic as entrepreneurial spirit. The heroes of our grandparents’ generation were government and military leaders; our parents pedestalled CEOs w relentless drive.

The predominant attitude of Gen X was apathy; rebellion was repackaged in sarcastic cynicism. We knew the adults were full of shit; all we could do was snark abt it from the corner of a sneer. The Boomers did not raise a generation of activists and I’ve come to believe this was intentional. Not conscious on an individual level, but intentional on a generational level.

The Boomers are the gift that was promised to their parents in exchange for their sacrifices, and the Boomers made good on that promise. They stand testament to the truth of the American Dream as long as they stand, which is why so many of them can’t seem to fucking retire. They taught us that success comes through hard work and they are incredulous of the reality we face. In their minds, we’ve all had the same opportunities as billionaires (yes, “opportunities” does a lot of heavy lifting, both in discourse and in reality)—the fact we’re not all billionaires must surely come down to some personal fault.

Those of us who have internalized the individualist consumerist mindset of our parents are cursed w guilt when our American Dream does not materialize. We look inward, as we were trained to do. We go to therapy and read self-help books bc we are convinced that fixing ourselves is the key that will crack the padlock on the door to success. Those of us who’ve managed to secure a slice of the American Pie for ourselves remain fraught w insecurity, convinced that if we change even one thing we do, our entire empire will crumble like the sand it’s surely built of.

Our parents raised critical commentators convinced any effort to fight back is essentially futile, that the best we can hope for is that our snarky social media quip goes viral. The few who positioned themselves to inspire hope squandered it. Our parents’ generation destroyed all vestiges of community in the name of fighting the Red Menace and taught us, their kids, that strength meant not needing anybody else, that there was shame in asking for help.

Our parents told us they’d solved all the problems of the world, that the only thing left for us to do was stack paper. And there’s still some of y’all who believe that. Look around—it’s a fucking lie. And you know who sees that really fucking clearly? Your kids.

Just like we knew our parents were full of shit, our kids know we’re full of shit. The difference is our full-of-shittedness is based in powerlessness, and our kids are waking up to the reality that we are not powerless. The powerlessness is a game we were playing to let the capitalists stack paper in the mistaken belief that some of that confetti would rain down on us, all the while blind to the fact that the windows on the billionaires’ lofts are sealed.

This moment is bigger than any of us. We are living in unprecedented times for a reason. The contradiction of capitalism can no longer hold. Y’all wanna act like nothing’s ever gonna change when all the shit you see as natural and permanent hasn’t even existed a hundred fucking years. You have the opportunity to do something really fucking awesome. You have the opportunity to literally save humanity, but you’d rather sit on a couch and heh-heh heh-heh. Think you know it all so you don’t need to listen. Think you work hard so you don’t need to fight. Think nobody ever gave you a hand so you don’t need to reach out to anyone else.

If you own your own home and you’ve never had to worry abt if you’re gonna be able to keep the power on or eat tomorrow, you’re lucky. Not smart, not hard-working, not deserving, not even blessed—fucking lucky. Some of us aren’t content to live in a society where basic human needs are left to a dice roll w weighted dice that will always advantage the system. We don’t want a new dealer, we want to start playing a new game.

And listen—a lot of this ain’t your fault and I’m not saying it is. I went to the same schools you did, watched the same MTV, listened to the same bands. If I can see it, that means you can see it too. The America you were taught to believe in doesn’t exist and it never did. It never stood for the principles you were taught to value and uphold. It’s ok to mourn that—learning Santa Claus isn’t real can be tough, but it wasn’t so tough that you didn’t grow up and tell the same lie to your kids. And you shield a toddler from the truth the same way our parents shielded us from the truth abt America.

Remember: ain’t nothing clean unless a human expended the effort to go clean it. A fashface will tell you animals don’t clean up after themselves but humans do, that this is what separates us and makes us higher. Cleanliness is next to godliness. The humans who live in what they see as squalor are not better than animals. They have the power and the right to control those ppl.

None of that is true, by the way. Animals clean up after themselves, especially if they don’t want a predator to follow them, or if they don’t want their prey to catch wind of them. And their idea of cleanliness is something ideal and unnatural, something that separates them from the Earth, which is dirty. If you’re wondering, that impetus goes alllllllllllllllll the way back to the dawn of this “Western Civilization” that fascists tend to think of as the be-all and end-all of human existence.

You can see it in their images, which are all ai. You can see it in their idealized future, which is always as clean as it is silent on who cleaned it and how they live. You can see it in the demands they make on themselves and each other.

They hate creativity bc it’s messy. They hate the creative process bc it’s messy, bc you have to fuck around and try new shit to see what works, you have to be willing to make something ugly to find its beauty. You ask me, this is the main reason fascist movements always lose—they strive for something unachievable. They imagine themselves gods and then get smacked upside the face w reality. The cognitive dissonance that’s festering in their own minds will eventually explode, and it won’t be pretty when it does.

They look at images like this one and go “eww.” They make jokes abt the diseases you might get. They are afraid of folks who look like this and they mask their fear w disgust. They look down their wrinkled noses as they talk abt eradication and gain power by convincing folks to be afraid of each other. The main thing they’re afraid of is dying, which is the one and only thing everyone as a human must do. The other thing they’re afraid of in the meantime is that they’re not seen as better than other people. They believe in the right to conquer and impose their will on others. Their freedom entails a freedom from, not a freedom to. They can’t imagine a world in which we all embrace each other as siblings, but I can—and I bet you can too.

This is for the folks who think when you equate generativeAI w fascism you’re overstating the truth:

Listen, y’all—I was born and raised and spent all but 3 years of my adult life in the South. Hyperbole is a southerner’s favorite mode of communication. We never met a fish that couldn’t be bigger nor a tale that couldn’t be taller. As Mark Twain once said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

The difference ofc is that this isn’t a “good” story. The reason generativeAI is coming after artists and creatives first is that fascists hate creativity. They despise it. They need to control the vision of the future so they can paint a bleak and fearful picture and get folks to cower behind them, and those of us who still have the compunction to think for ourselves get in the way of that, bc alternate visions of the future sow seeds of doubt and there is no room for doubt in a world of absolutes.

Fascists don’t want you to think for yourself, which makes it p convenient that you have ai to “think” for you. Fascists don’t want you to create for yourself, so they’ve found a tool that will create for you. Fascists especially don’t want you to have any hope, so they’ve engineered a machine to kill it.

The fact that this machine rapidly consumes the life-giving resources of the planet in the process ain’t a bug, y’all—it’s a feature. Divest yourself from dependency on the killing machine, before it’s too late.

Listen to the artists, the visionaries, the dreamers. Hang out in our pockets of hope, that those pockets might overflow and spill out into our communities. The picture fascists want to paint of the future is one full of hate and violence and terror, and they’ve commissioned genAI to produce it. The tech broligarchs, most of whom were raised on post-apocalyptic sci-fi, believe this hellscape is inevitable. They believe they are powerless to prevent it. Thank fuck they are a countable few. It’s not too late for you—not yet.

And you might think “but I’m just one person, what difference does my piddling usage really make” bc you think the point of not using something is to destroy the company that makes the thing and if you can’t do that, well what’s the point. And I’ll tell you, it’s taking a fucking stand that’s the point. You can’t promote the supposed benefits of something that’s doing such monstrous harm—the ledger’s still tilted, the bad far far outweighs the good. You can’t fuck around w this shit without destroying lives in the process, so by using it you’re indicating that you think your laziness is more important than someone else’s fucking existence.

This man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was killed by 🧊 a couple days ago, less than a mile from my house. The sign pictured at his memorial says it all for me: I didn’t know you, but I love you. This neighborhood has been my home for the past three years, and it’s also my favorite place I’ve ever lived. This community has welcomed and embraced me more than I ever thought possible in today’s United States. We are neighbors and we are family. We show up for each other and we showed up last night for Lorenzo and his family.

You ever been to a protest and a block party breaks out? Just how we roll. Nothing but love.

For those abt to cast judgment or ask what he was doing (for the record, driving to fucking work): fuck you. Fuck you for wanting to live in a place where unidentified men can swoop out of an unmarked car and gun you tf down if you don’t do what they say. Fuck you for imagining there’s any sort of nuance in that. And especially fuck you for questioning this man’s immigration status and believing it’s ok for him to fucking die abt that.

Most of the responses said “humans.”

Not fascism. Not racism. Not poverty. Not hunger. Not nuclear weapons. Not bombs. Not pollution. Not data centers. Not billionaires. Not greed.

Humanity. This is the answer the tech broligarchs want ppl to say, by the way. They believe humanity needs to go away too. And it’s indicative of a particular mindset that holds the solution to problems is to punish those responsible for it. All of those worthy candidates for extinction are human problems, caused by humans. Punish the humans.

The problem w this mindset, and we’ve known this for centuries, is that punishment doesn’t work. It doesn’t deter anyone from doing a thing, nor does it fix the problems caused by the doing of the thing. It’s as effective as going on a shopping spree to boost your mood.

If your solution to all the problems in the world is that humanity needs to go, you’re a fascist—an eco-fascist, to be precise. Your remedies are of the scorched-earth genre and you would readily throw the baby out w the bath water to save the bathroom.

I don’t think most of the ppl who gave their knee-jerk response were thinking that deeply and they’d probably be offended that I called them fascists, but that’s only bc they haven’t thought through their actual beliefs enough to recognize the pattern. For most of them, I’m sure, it was a reaction borne out of desperation and profound helplessness. Desperate times call for desperate measures, after all.

Humans have caused a lot of problems in this world, for themselves and for all other living things. But throwing humanity on the sacrificial pyre isn’t the answer. The answer is 42.

I found this image on, of all places, fucking LinkedIn. It was posted in a freelance group I had joined whenever ago. And listen—a job in a capitalist economy is wage slavery. But this is LinkedIn so let’s cut em some slack.

The real message is that writing is real work, done by real humans. It might just be some of the most important work on the planet, bc writing is how we humans communicate w each other across time and distance, we’ve been doing it since forever, since even before the dawn of “time” as a concept. Y’all remember cave paintings.

And so. There’s a reason it’s one of the first “jobs” the tech lords decided to do away with and let ai take over. They might not even be consciously aware of this reason, but they act on it intuitively.

Writing is how we humans communicate w each other across time and distance. When you cede the power to communicate, you’ve isolated yourself and made yourself dependent on whatever you’ve ceded that power to—here, a predict-and-complete algorithm. The problem is that ppl don’t communicate in predictable ways most of the time. If they did, you’d never be surprised or shocked, you’d never be awed by a turn of phrase. They don’t want you to be unpredictable. They want everything to be the same.

Saying that dependency on ai drains folks of basic skills kinda misses the point. I didn’t write all my supervising attorney’s emails for her bc she didn’t know how to do it herself—I did it bc she didn’t like doing it and was in a position where she could just make someone else do the shit she didn’t like to do. There’s a lot of executive-level type folks who can’t be assed to do that kind of shit themselves, just like there’s lots of billionaires who’ve forgotten how to pump gas or think “groceries” is some quaint, old-fashioned word, but nobody bemoans their loss of basic skills.

And every small business that claims they “had to” use genAI bc they “couldn’t afford” a real artist will also claim that raising the minimum wage would destroy their business.

Those folks have never wanted to pay writers fairly for the value they add—genAI just gives them a more efficient way to do that. For all that it’s being forced on consumers without their consent, it’s being sold to business owners (small and large) as a way to maximize their profits without having to deal w messy unpredictable humans. A lot of them who originally fucked around w it are rapidly finding out that it’s a lot more expensive and inefficient than they were led to believe it would be. Ah well, there’s a sucker born every minute.

This photo will be in history books, if those are things we still have 50 years from now. I think it tells you all you need to know abt an ideology that its adherents are willing to don dark-colored clothing and cover their whole ass heads so they can march outside in the blazing sun in 100-degree temperatures. It tells you they’re inherently submissive to authority, willing to damage or even destroy their own bodies if that “authority” tells them to. It tells you that the “authority” to which they bow doesn’t give a fuck abt their health or safety. It tells you these guys aren’t interested in making anyone’s life “better”—on the contrary, they want everyone to suffer, just as they do.

At its inception, the purpose of klan hoods was intimidation. They weren’t hiding their identities bc they feared repercussions—they wanted to force their target audience (Black ppl) to assume that all white ppl might be klan members bc they were unable to isolate those who were. That’s not a motivation that makes any sense today, when everybody and their mother has a camera attached to them, when we can all freely see a countable number of these assholes engaging in assholery while the vast majority of folks are at worst minding their own business. Now, they do it bc they’re scared. They’re afraid that if their identity is known, their lives and livelihoods will be at risk. And they’re terrified bc deep down they know that they deserve to lose their life and livelihood for this bullshit. The true believers recognize their views are unpopular and see that as a sign of the decline of humanity or some shit, which is v American of them. When your Founding Fathers talked abt the “tyranny of the majority,” they were talking abt the same thing. They knew they were oppressing ppl. They knew slavery was wrong. They were just trying to get away w it as long as possible, and y’all still are.