June 29, 2025

Simple

Because I live at the epicenter of the zone that is being flooded, my nervous system is an alternating current of exhaustion and outrage.

There is, very occasionally, a spark of joy. This week, it was stumbling on the movie Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. It’s a rare gem: formally perfect and emotionally kind. If you’ve ever been annoyed by the titular star’s catchy parodies, you’re the audience.

Now, to put on our rubber waders.

My freshman year of college, Dinesh D’Souza brought his minstrel show to Williamstown. After the show, a classmate sitting next to me stood up and effortlessly upstaged the future convict by saying – and I paraphrase:

I prefer your overt racism to the kind I’ve found here at Williams, where people will be nice to your face but harbor just the same, if not worse, prejudice.

Like my former classmate, I, too am grateful that many of the people I’ve met along the way have been very honest these past few weeks.¹

It’s hard to make a complicated thing simple.

But it’s very easy to make a simple thing complicated.

Clever people – well-educated, well-paid, successful – are especially good at making simple things complicated.²

Here’s a list of simple things:

1. The President of the United States is using armed, masked men to hunt down working class brown people on the streets of Los Angeles. Some of the detained have been citizens. Almost all have no criminal record.

   The POTUS is backed by a majority Republican US Congress and a majority Republican-appointed Supreme Court.

2. Outside of Los Angeles, outside of the Latino community, this campaign of terror, which has altered the social contract, is receiving scant coverage from the nation’s elite press. When these events are described, they are framed as “law enforcement”.³

3. Earlier this year the POTUS pardoned 1,500 people tried and convicted of participating in a violent insurrection to overthrow the democratically elected government of the USA.

   Many of those pardoned assaulted police officers and had past criminal convictions for charges including rape, manslaughter, domestic violence and drug trafficking, with some facing ongoing charges for child pornography.

   This week, a whistleblower who served in the first Trump admin made it clear that the White House intends to violate court orders.

   The Republicans, SCOTUS included, have decided there is no law but what this POTUS desires.

   Of course, he is an inveterate criminal.⁴ His lawlessness is a feature not a bug: such is their raw power – which they desire more than legitimacy – that they can install a certified criminal and not a single person can stop them.
   
   Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025:

   I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

4. Ethnic cleansing.

   It’s what Israel has done in Gaza.

   It’s what the Republican Party intends to do with Hispanics – among others – describing our presence in the USA as an “alien invasion.”⁵

   We are welcome to work here, but once our services are rendered, we are free to go back where we come from.⁶

5. This land is for the white man and his chosen servants.⁷

6. The “Great Replacement Theory”:

• Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL): ".@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America"

• Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY, House GOP Conference Chair): "Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington."

• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was asked to denounce the Great Replacement Theory after a white supremacist terrorist attack in Buffalo, NY. Biblically, he declined to do so three times. (May 17, 2022.)

• A dedicated proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, current Vice President JD Vance was asked why he lied about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, as claimed by current President Donald Trump. His response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

7. Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, former aide to Elon Musk: “I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate. Why do we need to have 'Little Havana'“?

   Why do we need to have Catholicism? Why do we need to have Islam? (Frankly, why do we need to have Judaism?)

   When you come to America, you are allowed the official religion: White Christian Nationalism.

8. The lower courts will not be able to stop the President’s use of lawfare to create the ethnonationalist regime the Civil War staved off.

   If “ethnonationalist” has too many syllables for you, I’m sorry to say that “white supremacist settler colonialist” has more.

9. It is an open secret that Elon Musk violated US immigration laws.

   The Trump administration has offered millionaires easy access to papers legal status.⁸ (This is separate from his open sale of favors through crypto.⁹)

   If you are wealthy, the law need not apply to you.¹⁰

   If you are poor, you do not get the benefit of the law.

   

   My upper middle class readers will say to themselves: “We’re safe. We have money.”

   But you now live in a society where your rights flow from your ability to funnel wealth into the hands of the powerful.

   Set aside what assurances you may have in such a society.

   Consider, instead, the fate of someone who doesn’t matter as much.

   If your rights stem from your economic output, should poor women be allowed to have children?

   Should the native-born children of undocumented immigrants be stripped of their citizenship while it’s sold to those wealthy foreigners who can buy it?

10. It is possible that most of the upper middle class will survive unscathed the retconning of the American Constitution as a de jure and not just de facto ethnonationalist charter. (JD Vance gets to keep his Indian wife; Marco Rubio his Cuban lineage; Ginni Thomas her Black husband.)

    But this reprieve will be short lived.

    When we look the other way at the violent banishing of working Americans who could not pay to fix their papers (who were denied the opportunity by Congress, over 20 times during the last 20 years) when we accept that they should be herded like animals, we assent to a state that uses violence to maintain a tiered justice system.

    Yes, the War on Drugs was always this. Yes, Black Lives Matter was a response to this. Yes, the genesis of American racism was precisely to use people’s labor and then throw them away.

    A government that treats poor people like garbage has already degenerated into barbarism.

    If you, personally, are not an animal, your options are simple: renounce this barbarism entirely, unequivocally.

    Renounce your cleverness.

    Renounce your privilege.

    Only then can you clutch the America of liberty and justice for all firmly enough to keep it from being torn away, one brother, sister, mother, father at a time.

Exhibit A

You will be tempted to return to cleverness. “Well, it’s more complicated than that.”

You will be wrong.

Exhibit B

If we assume an average of 40mg of oxycodone per OxyContin pill, and Purdue distributed roughly 2.5 billion pills from 2006-2012, they moved 100 metric tons of pure oxycodone.

Exhibit C

What we know is this agreement would settle all lawsuits against Purdue Pharma, and it would prevent most future lawsuits against the Sacklers. Here's what's interesting. The deal also sets aside up to $800 million for a legal fund that the Sacklers could use in the future if they're sued. And what that means, A, is the cost of any future opioid litigation against the Sacklers would be paid for not by the family but out of this opioid settlement fund. So they're not getting immunity from future lawsuits, but the Sacklers are still going to walk away with a lot of financial protection.

Lest we be made to forget: in America, our rights are endowed by the Creator, not the predatory robber barons who have captured the state, again.