We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.…
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
~W.E.B. Du Bois
I saw this early this morning.
Paul Gosar, fundraising with white nationalists, again. Same shit, different day.
When a majority of the dude's nine siblings call him a traitor to this country and say he shouldn't be in Congress, maybe they have a point?
And of course, House Republican leadership won't do shit about it.
Of course, I find it interesting that a guy named Nick Fuentes thinks he has any business being a white supremacist or running an event called "White Boy Summer" to start with, but I'm sure I already thought about the implications of all that more than he did. Does this fool not realize that he associates himself with people who'd just as soon shoot him in the back for no better reason than his last name is Fuentes?
But it was the name of his little tour that sparked something in my brain and I spent a good chunk of the morning reading up on the Red Summer of 1919, an orgy of anti-Black violence by white people against Black folks (and in a number of cases, Black retaliation as well) in the middle of both the post-WWI economic downturn and the Great Migration, there were riots in 36 US cities and a couple of rural counties in Arkansas and Kentucky and a firefight between the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th US Cavalry and a posse of white men in Bisbee, Arizona. (For which, as it turns out, the troops went almost entirely unpunished except for a number of those involved being sent back to Fort Huachuca.)
All in all, the nascent FBI and other government agencies were more concerned about the possibility of Communist or Socialist infiltration or Union organizing of the Black people than they were with the criminality and violence against them, which in some cases was planned and very organized.
102 years ago it was a Charleston shooting or a 1/6 every day that summer and nobody who was in power cared.
No, there was not one new thing in the Trump administration's Justice Department. In fact, this is the future conservatives want.
Republicans will, no doubt, try and bring up that the country was run by Democrats at the time, but the truth is Republicans now are closer to Woodrow Wilson than they were to Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan.
A friend of mine said years ago that Republicanism was dead, and most "Conservatives" were basically racist Democrats in the old Segregationist mode. That's what they want, basically.
"Nationalism" is just the label they thought was perhaps the most sanitary.
Over the last couple of weeks I've watched the conservative movement's descent into Anti-Americanism and ravening madness with a mix of anger and shame. I used to be a conservative, I'm a veteran. I was a Republican voter right up until Sarah Palin accepted the Vice Presidential nomination and I knew right then that things were officially fucked up beyond all recognition and there was no saving the situation.
So I got out. It was all I could do. It's only gone downhill from there.
These people are descending into madness, paranoia and racism, and they're positively enraged that they live in a country whose government is making an effort to treat all its people as citizens rather than their personal subjects.
They're planning something, too. That much seems fairly obvious. It won't be either well-planned or well executed, nor will it likely have any basis in reality, but it will happen, like a 21st century equivalent of Caligula sending Roman legions to collect sea shells so that he could claim to have conquered the ocean. But it'll get people killed, don't doubt that. These people are, as I've said before, trying to immanentize some kind of right-wing Eschaton and they're convinced that they're surrounded by heretics and traitors and that all manner of [what they imagine to be] evil forces are conspiring to stop them. In other words, whatever they're going to do is almost certainly based on fantasy rather than reality and that actually makes things even worse.
The rules of war presume competency, for example.
All type of people, Democrats in Congress, Leftist alarmists, members of government agencies and the military and political strategists alike presume we're dealing with people who will act in their own best interests, with some level of rational actors, and honestly they're doing that because, for many, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
We'd best get cracking on doing exactly that.
The truth is, this is going to be like that episode of the Twilight Zone where a bunch of milquetoast midwestern white people, having a cocktail party, hear on the radio that something is about to hit the Earth and they end up fighting over who gets to go in the one kooky neighbor's bomb shelter.
These fucking people, who've so far denounced most elements of government and society, including but not limited to higher education, law enforcement, the military, and whole industries as insufficiently "Conservative" for their purposes, have already voted most of the rest of us off the island.
What they want basically seems to be some kind of tightly controlled agrarian, anti-educational, anti-technological murder-ocracy like Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where everybody's either a serf, a servant of the elites or some kind of a soldier charged with keeping the serfs in line, where schools and universities have been converted to prisons and where anybody can be denounced by anybody for insufficient loyalty to The Party, and handed over to thugs who will beat a confession for "Crimes Against the People" out of whoever is available.
And since they can't, they'll accuse everybody else of trying to do exactly that because these people have all the awareness of a dog licking it's ass in the middle of the street. They are moral bottomless pits, a lot of them are just plain fucking nuts, and one hell of a lot of these people aren't very smart, either.
That doesn't make them less dangerous, it makes them much worse. Like I said, the rules of criminal proceedings, of evidence, of war and the prosecution of war crimes under international law all presume some level of competency.
To compare what they want to the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia is probably inaccurate. They likely would do worse and do it based on dumb shit conspiracy theories and internet woo woo, if they could, but there's a key caveat here.
Except of course, none of this will affect the "Conservative" elites, for whom it'll basically be The Killing Fields but with an Applebee's and a mall.
These are the people who, when COVID-19 was at its worst, wanted life to go on as normal for themselves while the rest of us just died, and who saw the George Floyd protests as an opportunity to kill people.
Adjust your expectations accordingly and stick to them, because it's going to get worse. We're finding out it already was worse, America under Trump came within a knife's edge of Apocalypse and all that stopped it was one General telling these assholes to go fuck themselves.
We could be dealing with the incomprehensible right now.
That cannot be stressed enough.
And the people responsible, or who are close to those who were? They think it's funny and that any attempt to find the truth, get to the bottom of things and restore the system to functionality is a big joke and should be met only with contempt.
You can't reason with that or expect bipartisanship, compromise or good faith from people who have that sort of attitude and worldview. It's these kind of people who have held America back so that the America of today is in some key ways not so different from the America of 102 years ago.
That is, in fact, what a key element of American conservatism is, maybe always was. Racism is the glue that holds their entire movement together, the only thing the wealthy will give to the common person to win them over.
You cannot reason with that or appeal to its better nature.
What can we do?
We wear down that glue until the whole mess falls apart.
We return fighting.
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