The Labyrinth of Lies
When Cruelty is the Point, Empathy Becomes a Sin
"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power."
Stokely Carmichael
Last week was rough.
Again.
The news cycle slowly spirals out of control and it is becoming more and more difficult to keep up with everything. Yes, of course, that’s the point of the blitzkrieg of the Executive Orders to overwhelm everyone to the point of exhaustion. To make sure that no one is capable of knowing what is actually happening to us, to our country, to our world.
Besides politics it was a tough week personally, with the proverbial cherry on top of anxiously awaiting results of the ultrasound for our ten year old doggo1.
Whew.
I should be resting. Especially since today, the only day this week when I did not get my autoimmune to fuck with me, I woke up into a panic attack. Not something I recommend to anyone.
There was more this week on the personal front, and I was already thinking about writing it when I saw Thomas Zimmer’s skeet: “The insurrectionists have seized power. They are purging their enemies. Does the broader public have a sense of how extraordinary this moment is? One of the key challenges since the start of the Trump era has been how to communicate effectively to the American public that something other than “politics as usual” is going on, that the threat to democracy and constitutional government is real, that urgency is needed in response.”
My knee jerk reaction response was to say: “Broader? Even your "engaged" voters have little idea. I spoke with two friends over the past week who are both very successful intelligent immigrant women. Both feel that nothing bad or horrible is happening and that everyone is overreacting. These are people who try to stay engaged!!”
Thomas continues: “It’s really unfair to expect people to break through their routines, as is necessary in a situation of democratic crisis, if the political leaders and institutions we ask them to trust shy away from doing their part – if they instead cling to “normalcy,” signal compliance, and model appeasement.”
Is it unfair? Yes, it is. Our political leaders, our institutions have completely failed us and instead of resisting the onslaught of fascism, they helped to enable it. So we have no one to rely on for help besides ourselves. It is unfair but it is really the only choice left.
That’s the continental divide between the two friends I spoke with and myself. It is the same divide that I am sure we all have experienced to some degree. It is the same divide that we will likely continue to experience as the world around us will keep burning, straining our friendships, families, relationships.
It took me a couple of days to decide to write this essay. Earlier today I wrote on BlueSky that writing this essay may cost me the few remaining friends and acquittances. If that’s the case, so be it.
Last night, after one too many glasses of wine with my much better hal,f in the midst of a house that looks like the Russian army has just retreated, we talked about this topic. In the end, the divide is not about politics or policy, it’s about morality, it’s about humanity.
In the age of cruelty being the point, empathy truly becomes a sin.
There should be no compromising on humanity and morality. We all have to make a choice. The cliche meme that the road to fascism is full of people who were told not to overreact, has become a little too real.
Last week I logged into one of my social media account for what I thought would be the last time. My goal was to triple-check that I have saved all of the content from the account. The very first post I saw, was from a friend, referencing the then recent Elon’s Nazi salute. The very first comment under the post was from a guy I did not know who compared Elon’s salute to gestures from Kamala Harris, Barrack Obama and others. To my shame, I clicked to read the rest of the comments. In anger of seeing a plethora of similar comments, I publicly replied essentially calling my friend out for being friends with Nazis. Immediately after, I deleted my entire account.
As the Fates would have it, one person I responded to, but not the one who actually triggered my Nazi comment, was my friend’s close friend. After a few text messages and scheduling conflicts, my friend and I met for lunch. Once the small talk was over, we turned to politics. My friend’s friend, apparently lost it because of my commentary about Nazis2. However, without going into all the personal details, what really got to me was my friend’s surprise at my mention that after the first 10 days of this regime, we are wondering when it would be the right time to move to Europe. I’ll repeat myself, here’s an incredibly successful woman who went through immigration, who is a devout Jew, who is fiercely independent, who thought she is politically engaged and yet did not know or understand the depth of impact of the EOs, etc. I felt deja vu to 2016 and hearing how we are all overreacting with doom and gloom. In the present she was sitting across from me and looking at me in complete disbelief, if not openly wondering if I lost my marbles.
A few days later, speaking with another friend, I was stunned at their reaction to how I perceive the current reality. It was essentially another case of deja vu. Both of my friends thought that all of the EOs, are just a bluster, with no teeth or the real-life impact. I tried to explain how government websites are being taken down, and millions of people, including both of my friends and their families, are at risk of losing their legal status, including the US citizenship. To say the least.
What gets lost is not just the details but that we are witnessing a real-time dismantling of the US government. You know why these folks are able to so openly break the law?? This is the consequence of not holding people accountable. Because they have been doing it for years and we let them get away with it.
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."
Hannah Arendt
The train is way past the Coup d'état station, and is rapidly approaching Full Functional Fascist Dictatorship end of the line with the administration is filled with self-avowed fascists and Nazis who are about to consolidate power whilst causing as much socioeconomic havoc as possible because they simply do not fucking care. Trump’s "you want me to go swimming?" response to the question whether he is planning on visiting the crash site from the tragic collision the night before is an umpteenth reminder that none of these people have any idea what empathy is. They are a bunch of spoiled immoral, contemptible arseholes who only care about their status.
It is true on two levels.
We allowed people who plotted and organized the coup against our country to get away with it.
We allowed people to get away with enabling and normalizing racism, misogyny, homophobia, white supremacy, transphobia, Islamophobia… we allowed them to weaponize antisemitism to the point where it is openly a tool for and of fascism.
What started on January 6, 2021, it is now in a full swing.
The mainstream media is not calling it a coup for the same reasons they won’t call a Musk or Trump a Nazi:
They care about clicks more than truth or journalistic integrity.
They are complicit.
What we are witnessing does not match the aesthetics of what they think a coup or fascism should look like.
Will Stancil writes:
Our media refuses to connect the dots. So if Trump does ten illegal things on a day to seize control of the government, they have ten little stories about how he stretched the law, instead of one big story about how he’s attempting a coup d’etat The reason for this is that they’re so terrified of bringing the slightest bit of editorial judgement lest they get accused of bias, so they’ll report “Trump goes into bank with a gun” and “Trump comes out of a bank with bags of money” but never “Trump robbed a bank,” because that’s a judgement call
Will is of course, right, however, this is beyond attempts to avoid accusations of bias.
The media are fully complicit and have been for a while. Jeff Sharlet writes, “Just as I read rightwing & fascist texts as a journalist trying to understand views I loathe, I read centrism. So I read today's NYT oped from a Bill Clinton adviser cheerily declaring that the path forward is a candidate like Clinton who'll focus on "the middle class" & attack the left. Again.” NYT publishing a piece on how a Bill Clinton type candidate is needed is the last thing that we actually need. Clinton, along with Tony Blair completely perverted the idea of progressivism by declaring themselves as the liberal progressives, the wolves in sheep’s closing. It might have been my own neoliberal upbringing that I’ve been trying to get rid of through the process of personal decolonization but that was the last straw in terms of the existence of organized and active movement on the Left.
If Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas are perceived as the progressives, we are much further to the right than anyone imagined. Even with the most pro-labor policies, Biden’s administration can be described as the last grasp of the neocolonialism.
The theme of decolonization highlighted by year old genocidal reign of terror in Gaza, echoes what Clint Smith says, when he writes that “Black Lives Matter fundamentally broke these people’s brains. They couldn’t bear the idea that they might have to tell a different story about this country and thus tell a different story about themselves. They hated it, and now they are using everything they have to never feel that way again.”
A few months ago when I explored my own antifascist stance I wrote that perhaps the most stark example of how far the 4th Estate has failed us, is the interview given to by the Executive Editor of the New York Times, Joe Kahn. What bothers me the most while reading the interview, is this sense among the so-called centrists that by the summer of 2020, “woke” radicalism had been allowed to go too far. The centrists see it as their mission to turn the tide. More terrifying is that the very same pervasive idea has captured large swaths of the bourgeoisies, the self-described centrist middle class who suddenly realized that they are not socially liberal or politically centrist and those on the left scare them more than those on the right.
Kahn denounces the “excesses of the period,” meaning the spread of “woke” ideas and too much anti-Trumpism inside and outside the NYT. “A period of peak cultural angst,” he calls it. This is precisely the spirit that was fueling the elite centrist support for the crackdown on college protesters in the spring of last year: an acute anxiety that things have gone too far, that these “woke radicals” who were given too much rope during the Trump era, urgently need to be reined in.
The mass protests in the summer of 2020 loom almost as large in the elite centrist minds as in the imagination of the fascist far-right, where it’s become dogma to regard the protests as the “extreme Left” assault on “real” America. Even if that entails legitimizing, enabling, and making a common cause with fascism.
In the age of cruelty being the point, empathy truly becomes a sin.
One of the conversations I referenced earlier, brought up the topic of last year’s student protests. To avoid a discussion on why I believe that Zionism has evolved into a purely antisemitic fascist movement, I said that regardless of where one might stand on the issues, the way universities and local governments approached and addressed these protests, is no different than fascism.
Remember, Trump is not the root cause, he is a symptom of the fascist onslaught. He is not even the driving force, rather a sad looking puppet in need of too much makeup and control. No, it’s not Elon who is in control either. He is another marionette. You may want to look at the Kremlin if you want to see those who really are in charge. Yet Trump is convenient and obscenely perfect for the role he has been casted for. Sort of Baron Harkonnen from Temu. He explains that he knows "diversity" is to blame for the recent plane crash in DC, because he has "common sense." There is no more pretense, they are directly blaming the death of innocents on women and people of color. Dannagal G. Young writes, “instead of saying DEI, why don’t these officials say what they mean: We will blame everything bad that ever happens (wildfires, plane crashes, floods) on the presence of Black & Brown people & women in govt agencies. This is what happens when you celebrate “common sense” and you tap into your not-so-latent racism and misogyny. Your common sense will always tell you: musta been because of brown folks and chicks. Evidence be damned.”
The DEI isn’t just about race. It’s about gender, disability, age and so many other things as well. Your employer not being able to fire you because you got pregnant, or discriminate against you because you need a wheelchair, or because you’re a woman or a person of color or transgender or not het, THAT what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion actually means.
When “they” say DEI, “they” mean the people whom the current administration is trying to deport and/or take rights away from. When “they” say DEI, “they” mean CIVIL RIGHTS.
There are aviators, who I personally know, who told me that they are certain it was the fault of the helicopter pilot. Largely because of the tsunami of mis- and dis-information. Or so I assume. Next morning I sent a text message to the father of the helicopter pilot, telling him that there are no fucking words that can explain how sorry I feel when I heard what happened. As we now know, it was a system failure to notify the pilot of the incoming plane. I never want to imagine how it felt as my friend took the call from Mar-a-lago, knowing fully well that everything he would hear would be devoid of truth, empathy, humanity.
The cruelty of losing your child and having to speak to the person I personally hold responsible for the death of a young man, who happens to be a full-blown narcissistic Nazi dictator wanna be. I want to believe that if it was me, I would refuse to take the call. Yes, I said that “I want to believe,” as I can’t imagine.
In the age of cruelty being the point, empathy truly becomes a sin.
What I can imagine, because it is happening in front of our eyes, regardless of whether people want to believe it or choose to pretend that it’s business as usual, is the real-time demolition of the American Constitution and the proverbial American Dream:
Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis.
Elie Mystal is right that this is how they’re gonna do the abortion pill ban.
Trump announces one of the largest concentration camps ever. Mind you, this concentration camp is older than some of the folks running the fascist junta.
OpenAI Strikes Deal With US Government to Use Its AI for Nuclear Weapon Security3.
Catherine Rampell is keeping a running list of disappearing federal data.
It is not a coincidence that first victims across the board are the transgender people. Check out the focus of the Nazi purge on “deviancy.” Draw the parallels with the current changes and it makes it clear that targeting trans folk is an early sign of fascism.
One of my own biggest freak outs was over the Patriotic Education EO. If you have grown up in the West or anywhere in the world outside of true totalitarian regimes, please reach out to your immigrant friends who great up in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, China, etc. and ask them about their intimate experience with the patriotic education. I could write multiple fucking essays on the upcoming brainwashing of the American children.
Forget about “woke” and “CRT.” This new patriotic education will be the greatest whitewashing of historical facts ever. What will be worse, are the loyalty tests and Pavlik Morozovs that will sprung up all over the country. This may need to be an entirely separate essay, but as much as I intellectually understand the issues with the culture of Pavlik Morozovs, I can’t help feeling that it’s not white and black and there’s a lot of grays.
Yes, I know I am lying to myself. I will perform exorcism on my own inner Pavlik.
However, this remind me of a recent skeet I read about how The Day After fucked up the entire generation of kids growing up in the US in the 80s. Yup, the GenXers who gave Trump the victory. My personal experience with similar propaganda was Come and See which is probably why I am so uncompromising towards fascism.
Kat Tenbarge writes:
“Unfortunately the stuff that most people are consuming online to distract themselves from politics (or because they don’t care about politics at all or think politics are going swimmingly) is also a covert pipeline designed to make them more conservative. Lifestyle, entertainment, pop culture, etc.
This has been the conservative end game for years, to take over the main communication platforms, entertainment industry, pop culture, etc. The internet and social media in particular gave them the infrastructure to do it and their opposition didn’t understand or care to stop it in time.
When you examine the average person, the type who probably isn’t on Bluesky (which is most people), they are likely pretty politically illiterate and repulsed by the idea of politics. The average person prefers pop culture. For years, that was a semi-liberal pipeline. Now it’s a conservative one.
Conservatives, especially the ones in media, innately understand this and have been working for years to sway the majority of the internet toward their interests, turning familiar pop culture properties into battlegrounds they can win. It’s all political, but few people watching understand that.
To win and fight back politically, there has to be a movement to simultaneously meet people where their interests lie. Pop culture. Athletics. Mass entertainment. It’s a hard battle in a capitalist system that ultimately favors the status quo (just like pure politics itself)
Conservatives aren’t geniuses who managed to upend the status quo like they’d have you believe. Their whole victimhood complex is a farce. They were easily able to play to people’s pre-existing conservative biases which were always there. Progress fights an uphill battle, always, their fight is easy.
This is precisely why I am becoming a luddite. This is why I have lost all faith in the journalism and mainstream media a long time ago. If you have lost your faith in the 4th Estate or simply want to get access to journalism that still has integrity and did not sell out for clicks, check out my note on substack that lists independent unbiased journalists:
as well as a few experts on things that are critically important now.
However, there is little faith left in me for all those who are self-ascribed as centrist or liberal. I admire people like Amy Brown who are willing to help with messaging and PR pro bono,
but while I agree that people are looking for solutions, they are also completely in the dark, filled with propaganda, mis- and dis-information. I am not a politician, at least not yet and unlike Trump I will not claim to have the most beautiful common sense in the world. I do know that the elected Democratic officials Congress can vote no on everything instead of being Vichy Dems.
Come the fuck on!
Arguably the worst and most definitely the least educated US Senator ever, held up close to 500 military promotions all by himself. Forgive me, but if the Florida resident illegally and unconstitutionally representing Alabama in the Senate can do that, what we are seeing from the Democrats is appeasement and corroboration.
Ben Ehrenreich remembers Bertolt Brecht’s “when the crimes pile up, they become invisible […] When the suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.”
The United States Constitution is written, as it clearly states, on behalf of "we the people of the United States."
We are the sovereign.
Not Trump. Not Musk. Not Vance. Not Bannon. Not Putin. Not Netanyahu.
I may no longer be a naive teenager, but I still naively believe that when it comes to fascism and Nazis there are no ifs or buts, there are only two sides, there is no gray. When you see a Nazi salute, there is only one correct response - to call it for what it is and condemn it in the strongest words possible. I can’t ask people to one of sudden sell their Tesla, but I sure as hell can and will judge them as Nazis if they buy one now.
Either you are on the side of humanity, empathy and decency… or you are, well yes, a Nazi.
Pick a side.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. Commitment is an act, not a word. Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
Jean-Paul Sartre
All the bad blood work he had over the last month is just because he is getting old. I’ll take that over his cancer returning.
Incidentally, this was the first time I realized that my friend’s BFF was one of those people I was addressing. Till then, I had no idea.
I am sorry but this is literally how Skynet gained power!
I am more than happy to update with your suggestions. Also, please share the link to the note, we all need to be more and better informed.