Conservatives Believe That Critical Race Theory Will Eat Our Children (Part 1)

Today, Thursday, in Florida (motto: "America's laboratory of backwards ass fucknuttery"), the state Board of Education voted that, when it comes to American history, "Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country." Now that doesn't sound unreasonable. In fact, it sounds downright progressive. 

But this is Florida, which is led by screeching shitbird Ron DeSantis and the BOE is filled with craven lackeys who will suck whatever conservative scrotums are dangled in their ignorant faces. So, of course, they dickishly added to the rule for public schools, "Examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with State Board approved standards include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons. Instruction may not utilize material from the 1619 Project." Now, as these things go, that's not actually a terrible definition of critical race theory. Obviously, though, to the scrotum suckers on the BOE, acknowledging the reality of racism's role in the development of this country is a bad thing. 

However, here's one other thing they added: "Instruction must include the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments." You see the problem here? The U.S. Constitution, which must be taught, contained the Three-Fifths Compromise, where slaves were counted as only, you know, 60% of a person for the sake of congressional representation. That's racism fucking embedded in the fucking founding document of the fucking country. I'm not even sure how the fuck you would teach about slavery or the civil rights movement without discussing how American society and the legal system were all about reifying white supremacy and shitting on Blacks and other non-whites.

In a goddamn PowerPoint presentation at today's DOE meeting, the blithering cockheads who support this asserted, "The amended rule will protect students from being influenced or indoctrinated to think a certain way" and "The classroom is not an appropriate place for any adult to espouse their personal beliefs and ideologies." And if you're like me, your brain is twisting itself into a ball of psychotic rage over the hypocrisy of forcing teachers to lie about American history and then claiming that it's not imposing an ideology on or indoctrinating students. 

You want your mind to complete break down? This amended rule "Ensures our students receive classroom instruction that is both factual and objective and that significant historical events are not intentionally or unintentionally distorted," as the PowerPoint from the Bowels of Ignorant Hell reads. 

Teachers' unions and groups were quick to point out that nowhere in Florida public schools is critical race theory taught. Why? Because it's a motherfucking academic theory that you might learn when you're a goddamn graduate student. You might as well say, "Stop teaching Derrida to second-graders, you bastards." But critical race theory has become shorthand for "teaching students the truth we're trying to hide from them" or, to put it in GOP-speak, "liberals hate America." As DeSantis put it, those who espouse critical race theory are "teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other," which is just fucking dumb and incendiary, and dumb motherfuckers gobble it up like it's kibble from Donald Trump's ass. 

Honestly, so much of this is bound up in an attack on the 1619 Project because it says, "Fuck your bullshit history whitewash," and that scares the shit out of white people. Jesus fuck, so many white people can't even give up Columbus, that genocidal maniac. Tell them that they benefited from centuries of white oppression of other races (which seems pretty fuckin' obvious), and they're gonna explode with idiot rage. Too fucking bad. Facts are facts and grown-ups accept that shit. Children get mad at reality they can't change.

But, hey, exploiting the rubes is all the Republican Party has anymore. So we're getting laws and rules passed in Tennessee, Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, all banning critical race theory and all reacting to a supposed crisis that is completely fucking nonexistent. How nonexistent? In Loudoun County, Virginia, at a school board meeting this week, parents were freaking the fuck out over critical race theory and it didn't fucking matter that the superintendent kept saying that it's not being taught. But because the school system came up with an "equity plan" based on an assessment of the racial climate at the district's schools, and because shitstains in conservative media say that "equity" is the same as telling white kids that they're pieces of garbage, the parents lost their goddamn minds. By the way, Loudoun County isn't some rural, poor district. It's a rich suburb of Washington, DC, one that has a fucked-up racial history, but it proves that rubes and racists exist at all income levels. 

While part of what's going on here is that screeching about critical race theory distracts from the fucking failures of the GOP in so many places, it's actually a great deal more than that. It is the vile heart of modern conservatism in action. More on that next week. 

The Sinking of the Bipartisanship Manchin

It's a pretty great joke that Senator Joe Manchin, putative Democrat, has pulled on the country and, especially, on the people of his state, West Virginia. It's honestly irrelevant at this point whether Manchin actually believes the shit he's shoveling about the need "to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love," as he wrote in his laughably dumb opinion piece for the Charleston Gazette-Mail newspaper (motto: "We're trying so damn hard to save you idiots, but you keep voting for the people who poison our goddamn water and keep you hooked on opioids. Did you even read our reporting? Fuck."). 

But what matters is that he has created a lovely myth about Democrats and Republicans working together that makes absolutely no sense on a basic logical level. That's the joke. All over the country, Republicans, without the votes of Democrats, are making it harder, sometimes ludicrously so, for Democrats to vote, especially non-white Democrats. They are doing that to assure Republican (and, let's be honest, white) control of not just the states, but of the federal government, especially the presidency. Manchin says that he opposes the For the People Act, which, while not the greatest piece of legislation, would restore some semblance of sanity to the nation's voting laws, despite cosponsoring it in 2019. And he says that it's because Republicans oppose it that he can't support it. You got that?

However, and continue to follow this shitstream of consciousness here, but he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which essentially unfucks what John Roberts' Supreme Court fucked by ripping the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act) because one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, supports it, and that he thinks he can get more Republicans on board, which, of course, he hasn't and he won't, at least not 10 of those depraved fucks. And why would they vote for it? They benefit from the extravagantly fucked new laws being masturbated into full release by the nutzoid state legislatures. It's like telling the Nazis in 1941, "Hey, we won't defend our allies if you don't say it's cool to do so." It's fucking embarrassingly laughable. 

But Manchin doesn't give a fuck. He's reached that lazy point in his late career where he's had his lips pressed to corporate asses for so long that he can't breathe without Wall Street farts in his face. The man is rich, and his chances of getting reelected again are spiraling into the Trumpian paradise that West Virginia is. There's no sense in acting like he can somehow make Republicans give up their complete intransigence, which they've had since Barack Obama was elected. So it's just what he fucking knows. And it sure smells kind of racist.

It's so goddamned frustrating because we can sit here and say, "Well, why can't leadership lean on him? Why can't he be stripped of committee assignments? Why are Democrats so feckless?" And the answer is that we fucking need Manchin, galling as that is, because without him, Republicans control the Senate, and that way lies madness. I could go a long fucking time without hearing Lindsey Graham squawking about how unfair it is to help poor people and migrants or holding Hunter Biden/Burisma hearings from now until 2024 as the chair of a committee, like it's Benghazi times Monica Lewinsky levels of outrage.

Meanwhile, we have Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who always looks like he just found his wife's big, black dildos, not just saying that he wants to block President Biden's agenda, but, as he said today, that he doesn't support the John Lewis Voting Rights act because "There's no threat to the voting rights law. It's against the law to discriminate in voting based on race already. And so I think it's unnecessary." In other words, democracy can just suck his pruney balls. 

But the other joke of the whole fucking thing is that even as Manchin stays a Democrat, without his vote, it will be almost impossible to get anything passed, whether it's through reconciliation or a majority-vote Senate. If Manchin balks on using reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bill, then it's fucked, even though that's allowed by the goddamn rules he supposedly worships. Get rid of the filibuster, and, yeah, it's entirely possible that Republicans might vote for something when they're forced to vote for it. But it's also entirely possible that some Democrats get skittish about progressive shit because they believe fuckery like the Wall Street Journal saying that Manchin's a fucking genius and is playing chess and is saving Democrats' majorities because people don't want progressive legislation, even though that legislation has supermajority support in polls. 

By the way, you know what else is massively popular? The For the People Act. You know where it's massively popular? Fucking West Virginia. 

I don't know how to make Manchin have his come-to-Jesus moment, but I think it's more likely to get Romney or Murkowski or, hell, even Bill Cassidy to come on board for infrastructure and thus pleasure Manchin. It'll be half-assed compared to what a unified Democratic vote could have gotten, so that's extra fucking special. But on voting rights? If bipartisanship were a boat named for Manchin, that fucker is going down, but it's gonna drag a whole lot of us down with it.

There's supposedly a ghost in West Virginia called "Screaming Jenny," and her story is a tragic metaphor for so much. Back in the 1800s, the railroad left abandoned storage sheds along its line, and in the town of Harper's Ferry, poor people would live in those sheds. One of them in the late 1800s was a kind women named Jenny. She had no family, and she fell on hard times and had to leave her home and live in the shed. In the cold winter, she kept a fire going in her shed, and, legend goes, one night sparks from the fire ignited her skirt and set her aflame. In a panic, she ran out onto the train tracks towards the station, seeking help, but she was screaming and engulfed in flames and didn't know that the train was bearing down on her. Yep, the train hit poor Jenny and finished the job the fire had started. The train stopped, and the conductor and others found her still burning, mangled body. They doused the flames, and she was buried in a pauper's grave. A month later, another train was coming into Harper's Ferry when the engineer slammed on the brakes upon seeing a figure that looked like a person on fire. When he looked for a body, none was found. The stationmaster told the engineer about Jenny, figuring that her ghost must have returned. Even today, engineers claim they still see the flaming, screaming Jenny on the anniversary of her death.

Your metaphor mileage may vary, but in my most despairing moments, I kind of feel like Democrats are Jenny, forced into the shed, catching on fire, and running madly into doom. And the worse part is that we had hoped going into 2021 that we'd be putting the GOP into the ground. 

A Couple of Observations on the Republican War on Democracy

Observation 1: Most religions have a great tautological scam going: Faith means believing in God, Jesus, Allah, or another invisible sky wizard even in the absence of evidence. Oh, sure, you can say that your book of faith that was written centuries ago by drunk monks proves some things, but it doesn't, any more than comic books prove the existence of superheroes. And maybe you can point to a miracle or two, but even those are mostly easily debunked. Despite there being no tangible, demonstrative proof that the aforementioned sky wizard is real, people are still willing to fight each other over which sky wizard is bigger and more magical or to use their sky wizard to justify barbaric cruelties.

Yet, as stupid as all that seems, it makes more sense than the millions of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Why? Because you also can't prove that God doesn't exist (yeah, yeah, proving a negative, I know), and that's what gives the faithful cover for their faith. When it comes to the Big Lie, the proof that it wasn't stolen, that there was virtually no voter fraud, that Joe Biden won fair and square and it really wasn't all that close overall doesn't matter at all. Facts, observable and verified and supported by everyone with any authority and/or expertise, are beside the point. Faith in the absence of evidence is one thing. Faith in the face of evidence that clearly demonstrates your faith is a lie is, to put it mildly, fucking frightening and fucking madness. 

That's what makes this whole fight against the Cult of the Big Lie so frustrating. It's not like the evidence of a legitimate election is even open for interpretation. To disagree about it is like arguing with someone who looks at an ocean and says it's dry sand. At some point pretty quickly, you wanna say, "Okay, motherfucker, step on in," while you hope they don't drag you with them because they're gonna insist they're walking on solid ground until they drown. 

As I've said before, you can't argue with someone who refuses to accept that reality is real. They are, for lack of a more articulate term, sick. Perhaps even actually mentally ill. I don't say that lightly. What else can you say about people who believe a fantasy to the point that they are willing to commit violence over it? The thing is that one day the most fervent are going to want their belief to be put into action. And I think that the full danger is that Democrats are not just underestimating how much Republicanism is about rigging democracy, but they are not getting just how many legitimately sick people there are.

In other words, we are dealing with a Trump-induced hysteria, one that plays into every fear that conservatives, both the craven opportunists and the true believers, have warned their followers about for years, one that takes all their fears of non-whites and socialists (whatever the fuck they think that means) and abortions and non-Christians (because that fucking sky wizard is always in the mix) and LGBTQ people and wraps it in a big package with QAnon bow that says, "Of course they had to destroy the one man who was going to save us all." And, of course, in the face of that, a coup is horribly logical to keep that fantasy of white Christian supremacy alive.

You're not going to solve any of this by trying to play nice. It's not possible. It's the quickest path to letting these fuckers take over without a fight. 

Observation 2: If things were reversed, and one day it's pretty likely they will be, and Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, and Democrats were blocking the GOP's agenda that they got elected on from being passed in the Senate, the filibuster would be shitcanned in a heartbeat. Hell, even if Democrats weren't blocking anything, the GOP would shitcan it because that's what dicks do, and the Republican Party right now is just a bag of dicks, more dickish than they've ever been in my lifetime, quite frankly, probably because they used to keeps their dicks in their pants and pretend they were doing things for some demonstrably real reason. Now? Fuck it. They've just got 'em whipped out and they're wavin' them around, daring you to tell 'em to put 'em away.

Yes, it's technically majority control, even if Republicans represent a significantly smaller part of the population, especially in the Senate, than Democrats, and even if the President only wins the electoral college and not the popular vote. Even in that terrifying moment, some on the left are optimists. The elimination of the filibuster would force Republicans to actually vote down bills that are popular. Although, more likely, a GOP Majority Leader just wouldn't bring them up for a vote at all, like what was done during the Obama administration by Mitch McConnell, who has the expression of someone who knows he sharted himself but is hoping there's no leakage.

Even more likely, a GOP congressional majority with a GOP president would immediately pass laws that would shape how the nation votes and assure that Democrats can't win a majority again. Those kinds of laws might include giving state legislatures the right to overturn elections or making it easier for them to do so. It might include stringent i.d. laws and restrictions on how and when people can vote and when they can register and so much more. If you don't believe that fucking up voting would be top of a Republican majority agenda, you have been asleep for the last six years. 

And while this is, yes, about Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema's bizarre (and perhaps even suspicious) insistence on preserving the filibuster, which isn't in the Constitution, it's mostly about how far Republicans continue to radicalize, from obstruction to destruction. To tie these both together, I think another huge danger is that Republicans have accepted that they have to do this or unleash a tide of violence. They have no beliefs except staying in power, so, fuck it, take the easiest, shittiest path to it. And once you decide to go down that path, fuck it. You may as well go enthusiastically. And these motherfuckers are skipping gleefully towards an authoritarian future.

A Poem for Memorial Day

Singing Out

by Jan Barry

How big would the war
Memorial wall be
If it listed all the names
Of soldiers who died of suicide ¬–
Able, Baker, Charlie…
Jacob David George
Three tours in Afghanistan
Jeffrey Lucey
Marine vet of Iraq invasion
Theodore S. Westhusing
Col., US Army
Who wrote in Iraq
“Death before being dishonored”

I couldn’t write about
The first Vietnam vet I knew
Who killed himself –
I couldn’t write about him
I couldn’t write his obit
Because newspaper policy prohibited
Reporting suicides
I didn’t know what to do
With that—that—that—muzzling

The second vet I knew
Who killed himself
Was found with a copy
Of one of my writings
In his wallet –
We cannot protect our buddies
We cannot protect our friends
With words alone

We need to change
Our apocalyptic, hellacious
Hell-bent, death-dealing culture –
Our flag flapping, sword saluting
Sworn to secrecy
Stiff upper lip, suck it up
He-man, iron man military mindset

We need to transform
The “death before dishonor”
Code seeded in our souls –
To singing out for life,
For a lifetime
Singing out
To challenge, to change
Our dancing with death

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

Republicans Are the Extremists, and They Want to Blow Up the Joint

Last week, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin "I hope Trump keeps my balls on ice so they can be reattached some day" McCarthy gave a press conference that was a distillation of everything the GOP is right now. Indeed, in many ways, it was a succinct summary of the Republican strategy since at least Ronald Reagan, if not Barry Goldwater. The best way to describe it would be "barbaric nihilism masked as patriotism and piety." Or maybe "A pile of bullshit with a hypocrisy sauce dripped on top that they expect their voters to gleefully gobble up." 

McCarthy dragged out the old hits that Trump Republicans have revived. Much like Donald Trump's brain, the GOP's development was arrested in the 1980s, which is why McCarthy can say with a straight face, "Socialism never practice what it preaches. That is why I’m alarmed when Democrats use Socialist rhetoric and push Socialist policies." 

Every time a conservative launches into some old song about supposed leftist extremists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders, I just think, "You dumb motherfuckers wouldn’t know how to deal with real left-wing extremists. You think drum-circle kids with Antifa tattoos and Bernie memes are radical? The fuck are you talking about? Health care-for-all is no more socialist than roads and fire departments. Those are public goods. You think a higher tax rate on the rich is some kind communist plot? You couldn’t fucking take some genuine motherfucking wealth redistributionists who will strip the rich people of their money and property at the end of gun, if necessary. We’re talking people who would fucking blow up Trump Tower. We're talking environmental warriors and armed Marxists ready to bring capital to its knees. But you know what? On the left, we don’t give those real radicals the keys to the party. The right fucking elects its extremists. Its racists. Its conspiracy nuts. Its gun nuts. They’re running the joint now. We have to bargain with terrorists when we try to reason with Republicans. Fuck you."

I'm not making this shit up. It's not just Cro-Magnon Barbie doll Marjorie Taylor Greene and her antisemitic grunts while waving a spear and screaming at the moon for murdering the sun. She and a few other hysterical shit babies just sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense whining about "the creeping left-wing extremism in the U.S. military." What's the evidence of this? Is it an attempt to steal military equipment to attack Wall Street? No, it's that soldiers might have to watch a video with a lesbian couple and their kids. Or they might have to do some diversity training. This is their response to an investigation into right-wing extremism in the military, which is not about teaching soldiers not to be racist, but is about violent motherfuckers joining things like, oh, hey, a coup against the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Clark County, Nevada (where Las Vegas and 75% of the state's population are), is desperately trying to prevent a takeover by the Proud Boys, those Nazis-without-the training who have become so ubiquitous at GOP events that, really, the line between the two groups really doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean Republicans want that relationship out in the open by electing them to leadership positions. "Jesus," county officials must be thinking, "keep the crazies in the cellar. Don't let 'em run free and fuck it up for the rest of us."

Getting back to McCarthy, just look at this shit he babbled on about. He said, "Democrats want to control what we read, what we teach our children and deny our history" while Republican legislatures are passing laws that literally control what is taught and what is read when it comes to history.  He said, "Democrats want to censure free speech and restrict debate through political correctness" while stripping the incredibly shitty Liz Cheney of her leadership because what she said about Trump and the election was not heterodox enough for the GOP terrorists. He said, "Democrats want to redistribute taxpayers’ hard-earned money from those who work to those who choose not to" while refusing to raise the minimum wage and after having cut taxes on the wealthiest, taking money from the hard-working poor to fund the wealthy.

It's not hypocrisy. It's utter bullshit, and it's bullshit that's meant to keep the Tucker Carlson-watching shit gobblers satisfied. Terrorists thrive on lies and duping the easily fooled. It's how they succeed. And they do it all to please Donald Trump, who is their Osama bin Laden, not satisfied until he brings the whole goddamn joint down.

The point here is that Democrats need to stop pretending that these savages can be reasoned with. Every time Joe Manchin meets with Republican senators, he is giving aid and comfort to a group of mad bombers who want to push the country backwards, who will undermine the things we believe are foundational to the nation, like democracy and freedom of expression and more. We can't treat terrorists like they're honorable or reasonable negotiators. 

I'm Losing My Capacity for Empathy Thanks to People Who Refuse to Get Vaccinated

I want to see things through other people's eyes. I really do. I want to understand why they believe the fucked-up things they do. Those of us who truly understand the MAGA crowd, who have attempted to put their barbarism and belligerence in some kind of context that makes sense, who have considered their "economic anxiety" and their manipulation by nutzoid media and mad evangelicalism, we know that it all comes down to racism, whether they wanna admit it or not. And in moments of empathy, I get that they are victims as much as they are perpetrators, that decades of GOP fuckery in gutting and dumbing down the education system, not to mention an unending stream of lies spit at them from politicians and alleged "news" outlets, not to mention generations of ignorance being passed down as wisdom, the ultimate in bullshit taking the place of rational thought, that all of this has an effect on their brains, contorting them into a grotesque version of an engaged citizen, one that couldn't give a fuck about the society as a whole, just themselves and their group of fellow racists. 

I never said I liked them. I just said I can find empathy, having grown up among the very same people.

But when a young white man I was talking to this week told me, "I'm not getting vaccinated," I lost my capacity for empathy. I asked why, and he said that he didn't trust the vaccine because of how quickly it was developed. When I did my usual rap about how it's actually taken 20 years of work to get to this point where the vaccine could be developed, he said, "I know. I've heard. I just don't trust it."

I said, "Oh, someone's been watching YouTube too much."

"No," he said. "I don't watch that stuff. And I'm not conservative. I don't even watch the news." To be fair, when someone tells me "I don't watch the news," I just think that means they get their news from idiots around them rather than a news source, but, hey, might not be worse than Fox. 

"Then I don't understand," I responded. "You're a smart person" (he is) "so you should know the science."

"I just don't trust it," he said. I left it there. And that was the moment I thought, "Fuck it. Get sick. I'm vaccinated. I'm covered."

Yeah, I know there are legit medical reasons why some can't get vaccinated. And, of course, there are kids under 12, who can't get it yet. But otherwise, I just don't give a fuck about your queasiness. I don't give a fuck about your worry that scientists have played fast and loose this time. I just don't fucking care. Your misgivings are bullshit. And your feelings don't fucking matter to me. And they shouldn't matter to anyone. 

Because, see, what you're saying by not getting vaccinated when you can is that you don't give a fuck about anyone else. Yeah, the chance of death is still pretty low, but the chance of long-term damage to your health in even mild cases of COVID is not quite as low, with a greater chance to die in general because you had it.  But it's not that you can get it. It's that you can give it to someone else. 

And I don't fuckin' care that you know someone who tested positive of COVID after getting vaccinated. Get back to me when you've heard about thousands of people getting badly sick or dying. Because that's what the vaccine prevents, also.

I'm fucking exhausted with the vaccine refuseniks. I'm especially exhausted with Republican refuseniks because their goddamn president, the one that made this whole situation so much worse, still brays like a drunk jackass at a cheap petting zoo about how he personally ejaculated the vaccine for everyone. Which is it, GOP? If you love Trump so much, why not take his cold, hard injection? 

The same thing goes for masking. I stopped wearing a mask outdoors except in crowded places a few months ago, even before I was vaccinated, because the science said I could. Most of the time, I wear a mask just to make others feel comfortable, even in places that don't still require it around here. I'd bet that the majority of people who wear masks indoors in places like Texas or Iowa or Florida are vaccinated. I get that. I have empathy there. We just went through some scary shit that's still going on. I understand that you might be really freaked the fuck out. But there's gonna come a day where I think, "Yeah, I'm done wearing a mask if I don't have to." Probably on a day that hits 90 degrees. At some point, you either trust the vaccine or you don't. I'm Modernaed up, motherfuckers. 

Of course, the refuseniks are gonna be total lying twatmites about mask-wearing, demanding that they be able to go without, even if the science says they shouldn't. Some of them have started saying the snarky, transphobic "I identify as vaccinated." To which you can only say: Okay, you dumb bitches, then when are you going to transition to vaccinated? By the way, you can get a t-shirt that says that shit. In fact, there's a whole line of anti-vax tees because of course there are. 

Look, we're never going back to "normal." The pre-COVID normal doesn't exist anymore. For instance, I learned that I can wear a mask at the house of my friends who have cats, to which I am savagely allergic (please don't tell me what to try - I have). But the mask allows me to hang out, shoot the shit, do some edibles, even pet the cat. I'm not going back to normal: my eyes watering, stuffed nose, face freaking out. And my face is like the world in general. We're figuring out how to negotiate this post-pandemic world, trying to figure out what works for us. 

And the assholes who won't get vaccinated are making it that much fucking harder. 

How Public Schools Failed Black and White Students in the South By Hiding the Truth

Ever since I heard about the Opelousas massacre of 1868, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Also called the St. Landry or St. Landry Parish massacre, I asked friends of mine who, like me, grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana and were educated by public schools there. None of them had heard of it, including one who is a historian, although not of that particular subject. And that ignorance disturbs me on a very deep and personal level.

The first time I became aware of it was when I clicked on a tweet from the Equal Justice Initiative, an amazing civil rights organization based in Alabama. It featured a film by Jim Batt and Kim Boekbinder on the history of Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, when Blacks, mostly freed slaves, were terrorized in the South even as the U.S. government attempted to secure their rights and safety before abandoning them in 1877. The short film, narrated by Tera DuVernay (Ava's sister) and with illustrations by Molly Crabapple, was focusing on the rampant violence against Blacks when it brought up how, in Opelousas, Louisiana, in September 1868, an estimated 200 Black people were killed by white mobs over the course of a couple of weeks. 

I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. What the hell did she say? Opelousas massacre? That's a town about 17 miles from my family's house. Why had I never heard of this? After watching the rest of the film (which you should), I went to the "Reconstruction in America" report put out by EJI, which is all about how rampaging whites lynched thousands of Black people during Reconstruction. And on page 60, there it was, a story about how whites, enraged at the thought of Blacks voting, beat a white abolitionist writer and ran him out of town and then, to stop them from voting, mobs of white people, including the Knights of the White Camellia (basically the KKK), went on the days-long killing spree. The stark result of the violence was that in the 1868 election, in St. Landry Parish, which had a population of 14,000, 3000 of whom belonged to the Knights, not a single vote was cast for Republican Ulysses S. Grant. Louisiana had the worst violence in the South during Reconstruction, and the Opelousas or St. Landry massacre was "Reconstruction's deadliest episode of violence."

There's a story I've told a bunch of times: In eighth-grade, in my middle school in south Louisiana, the social studies subject was the history of the state. Our teacher was Mrs. Broussard, a middle-aged white woman with a Cajun accent who always wore floral print dresses to class. She carried herself like she was going to a cotillion after school. The class was about a third Black students, two-thirds white. Now, that was a long, long time ago, and I think the subject of the day was immigration to Louisiana from Ireland and Italy. I may be foggy about that, but I distinctly remember one lesson from Mrs. Broussard. She told us, "I'd have rather been a slave than an immigrant back then because if you were a slave, all you had to do was obey Massa and you got meals and a place to sleep." And most of the class, Black and white, agreed. Unfortunately, I couldn't join them because, see, I had watched Roots a year or two before. I saw what they did to Kunta Kinte and Kizzy, and it had blown my mind wide open about the savagery of slavery. It had filled in huge gaps that we simply weren't taught in any of our history classes and wouldn't be taught to me until I went to college.

And now, I was furious that we hadn't been taught about the Opelousas massacre in my Louisiana history class. It wasn't like it was hidden in its time: The violence was the subject of congressional hearings, and it was reported around the country. The entirety of Louisiana's racist history is breathtakingly awful. But this was just up the road. It wasn't 100 miles away like the Colfax massacre, where up to 150 Black people were killed in 1873, or the St. Bernard Parish massacre, where up to 100 were killed in October 1868, or others, and all of which we should have been taught, too. This wasn't abstract, either. Families around me were descended from the whites of St. Landry Parish

I'm thinking about this for a couple of reasons. Obviously, the first one is the bizarre way in which conservative politicians and media figures are attacking "critical race theory," which nearly every one of them gets wrong, and the 1619 Project, the incredible act of journalism and research edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones that reconfigures American history around the original sin of slavery in this land and its legacy. The Project's impact has been astonishing, with some public schools creating new curricula around it, and that has scared the hell out of white conservatives. So now we have states and localities making laws saying things like the one in Texas that states that teachers can't teach that "one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” And, of course, that's all up for interpretation, which means that if someone makes white people feel bad by talking about all the massacres and oppression of non-white people, it would violate the law. Why would you bother courting that kind of trouble? 

The other reason I'm thinking about all of this is an article from Michael Harriot in The Root where he excavates the history textbooks taught to various Republican senators who are screeching about critical race theory (or their perversion and hypersimplification of it) and the 1619 Project. Interestingly, many of the textbooks are state history ones, and, unsurprisingly, they whitewash the reality of slavery. As Lindsey Graham would have read in the 1958 edition of The History of South Carolina, for instance, "Most masters treated their slaves kindly. Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country." Harriot also finds a Louisiana history textbook from a few years before I would have taken my eighth-grade class, and it says the state's slaves were "among the happiest and most content" and, regarding the massacres during Reconstruction, "Because of frequent clashes between freedmen and whites, the War Department dispatched Union soldiers to Louisiana while groups of former Confederates like the White League formed to protect whites." It wasn't that whites were mass-murdering Blacks. It was "clashes."

I'm constantly enraged about the history of this nation and I'm constantly appalled by the treatment of non-whites and I'm constantly disappointed by our refusal to fully confront that past. Even the details around the Opelousas massacre will make your blood boil, like how, under duress, some Blacks declared allegiance to the Democratic Party and they were given red ribbons to wear, indicating to the rampaging whites not to kill them. I've always been furious that we were taught a false version of history, one that elided over the brutality whites committed against Blacks. And I feel that fury anew now that I know that history included an event that should have been, at the very least, given a lesson or two, if not a full damn unit. That fury includes anger for the victims of the massacre, who should not be forgotten by the Black and white people in the state.

Why weren't we taught about the goddamn Opelousas massacre? Someone had a stake in not telling us about it. They had a stake in keeping us ignorant of our sins. They had a stake in lying to us, and in doing so, the schools failed us students. I don't know if the other white kids would have come away from a lesson on the Opelousas massacre with a different perspective on race in our state. But it would have given them a fuller picture of the reality. And that might have changed a few ignorant minds. It might have even made a few of the kids, white and black, angry about their history. That was the threat.

This isn't about an interpretation of history. It's about the factual events of history. Add your interpretation after you tell the truth about the deadliest massacre of the Reconstruction era. Our schools have a responsibility to give us the good and the bad and the outright evil in our history. What's happening today in many of our schools is that they are correcting a generations-old, intentional, harmful deception that has done untold damage to our country. I can't imagine the betrayal that Black Americans feel about that deception, but I fully grasp the betrayal that white Americans should feel about it.

You wanna know why so many people are ready to believe whatever lies the powerful tell them, despite all facts showing the truth? It's because they've been conditioned from an early age to believe a fantasy, one that is affirmed every day by the media they choose and the leaders who benefit from the lies.

So now that works like the 1619 Project and other reexaminations of American history have come out,  now that some schools that used to lie want to tell the truth, today's Republicans need to shut that down. Or else where will they get their future voters?

How a Story From a Middle Tennessee College Is Really About Our American Apocalypse (Part 1)

This isn't a hard story, but the hardest part about telling this story is where to begin. There are so many pieces, so much history, so many still-moving parts. It involves a history of a town, Cookeville, Tennessee; the history of a school, Tennessee Technological University; the personal stories of those involved; a battle over a school mascot; right-wing media's vortex; and so very much more. But, maybe, we should begin with the cause of all the trouble: the flyer.

The flyer shows a white man with a buzzcut sitting on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones, looking stern, as one might do when posing on that iconic prop. This is Professor Andrew "A.J." Donadio of the Nursing Department at TTU. The flyer reads, "This racist college professor thought it would be a great idea to help start a Tennessee Tech chapter for this national hate group, where racist students can unite to harass, threaten, intimidate, and terrorize persons of color, feminists, liberals, and the like, especially their teachers. Their organization created a national ‘Professor Watchlist’ to harass and intimidate progressive educators, including many women, African-American, and Muslim professors. Professor Donadio and Turning Point USA. You are on our list. Your hate & hypocrisy are not welcome at Tennessee Tech. No Unity With Racists. Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech."

The flyer was created by a friend of mine and a tenured English professor at TTU, Andrew William Smith. On Friday, February 5, copies of it were placed on tables in the largely empty Nursing building by tenured German professor Julia Gruber. Gruber went back 90 minutes later to take the flyers away because it is a college in the middle of Tennessee and it didn't seem to be worth the trouble, but some of the flyers had already been taken by someone and shown to Donadio. On the afternoon of Saturday, February 6, Smith posted it on a bulletin board in the student center. It was brought to the attention of the school administration, which launched an investigation into Smith and Gruber based on a complaint from Donadio for violating university policies by posting the flyers, even briefly. They were identified by witnesses and surveillance images - no, really, they used security footage, and they look like terrorists in the pictures from it because they're wearing masks, which is what you do in a pandemic.

Some context here: Donadio, who is an outspoken conservative on Facebook and at meetings in Putnam County where he is an elected county commissioner, became the faculty advisor to a TTU chapter of Turning Point USA, which is the organization started by annoying conservative activist and insipid radio "personality" Charlie Kirk. It says it's a "non-profit organization whose mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom." In other words, TPUSA (which, to be fair, always makes me giggle because, well, TPing the USA does seem like the right-wing's goal) wants to indoctrinate college students into conservatism. It is literally doing what conservatives accuse "liberal professors" of doing. 

Oh, and TPUSA does have a Professor Watchlist, which exists "to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." It's a fairly limited list, and it mostly just gives people excuses to harass the professors for things like sending an email saying that God wouldn't be mentioned in a graduation ceremony or for activism off campus. It's bullshit, like everything Charlie Kirk does, but it has a malevolent intent, like everything Charlie Kirk does.

TPUSA has been cited numerous times for its association with white nationalists and the alt-right and called out for those associations by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. No less a source than the conservative Washington Examiner says that it's "a group that’s deeply troubled and dishonest at its core," citing its issues with racism and its blind support for Donald Trump, in an article titled, "Young conservatives should steer clear of Turning Point USA." Other colleges have refused to recognize campus chapters; at Taylor University, which has a student chapter of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the student senate voted to reject TPUSA. 

And why not? After all, Charlie Kirk praised the continued closure of campuses in the Fall of the pandemic not for safety reasons, but because he believed that it would limit student voting against Trump, which is not exactly supportive of student rights. And Turning Point USA sent seven buses of people to the January 6 election protest that turned into a violent insurrection. Kirk had originally said they would send 80 buses, but he's never not a liar. Kirk himself has often promoted the false allegations of election fraud, with conservative pollster Frank Luntz telling him at one point, "This election is over." In other words, lots of people on the right and on college campuses reject TPUSA and Charlie Kirk. It's not really all that unusual.

I'm telling you all of this because one thing that has gotten lost in the fallout from the flyer is that Turning Point is a terrible organization filled with terrible people and those associated with white nationalist groups and whose goal is to harass and threaten professors, and it suckers students into being part of what is a legitimately more radical organization than just about anything on the left. I mean, for chrissake, look at the hypocrisy at its core - calling out the left for being "woke" and engaging in "cancel culture" while coming up with a rhetorical hit list of liberal professors and attacking anyone who is associated with Black Lives Matter.

I wasn't going to say anything about this whole situation beyond a few tweets because I was worried about my friend losing his job. Then Donadio decided to go public. He turned to the churning right-wing media machine, perhaps hoping to get some mileage out of the usual aggrieved white conservative schtick we've seen so many times. The first piece was in the Tennessee Star, which is run by a former Breitbart-er and Tea Party dinguses. It featured examples of things Smith has said, like a defense of Lil Nas X's "Montero" video. Smith and Gruber are not shy about their activism on a range of issues.

Also getting into the act was Charlie Kirk himself. On TPUSA's website, Kirk called Smith and Gruber "amateur neo-tyrants," and he defended the Professor Watchlist. Yeah, see, according to Chuckles, the Professor Watchlist is pure as driven snow in that it is "reporting only factual accounts that have been published by other news outlets." In one entry, which I won't link to, those "news outlets" include the crazy-right-wing clearing house for attacking liberals at universities, Campus Reform, and the hardly neutral National Review. And then Kirk has the gall to say that it's a threat when the flyer says, "You’re on our list," when his organization has a publicly available, actual, you know, list that professors are, you know, on. So he's saying that to be put on a list is a threat? Then what the hell is TPUSA doing? 

Again, it can't be said enough: This is the kind of thing that Smith and Gruber were protesting: this hatefulness, this demand for conservative hegemonic thought, this silencing of professors they disagree with, this brainwashing of students under the guise of "freedom." And, of course, TPUSA's racist and insurrectionist beliefs.

Smith and Gruber, on advice from their attorney, didn't do any media, awaiting the outcome of the investigation by the university. And, because this was making the rounds on the right-wing nutsosphere, they started getting all kinds of threats and harassing phone calls and emails. Because of course they did.

More on all that, including how they have fought back and how that aforementioned mascot battle is part of the story, in Part 2.

Liz Cheney Demonstrates the Least You Can Do to Preserve Democracy

Among the lies that Republicans tell themselves to justify their continued deranged, perhaps even traitorous behavior in refusing to back down from the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, one of the most persistent is that Democrats were always trying to "overturn" the 2016 election. You remember that one, right? Where Trump lost by 3 million votes but, because our democracy is a bullshit vestige of a time when our oh-so-wise founders decided to coddle slaveowners through the creation of the Electoral College, he still won? Sure, sure, when it was time for Congress to certify the electoral vote, a few Democrats in the House objected, but no senators signed on and there was never a question that then-Vice President Joe Biden was going to do the constitutional thing. 

After that, it was over. Really. Yes, there were investigations into election interference by Russia and others, but those were conducted by committees led by Republicans and Democrats. Yes, there were two impeachments, but, at best, those would have removed Trump from office and left in Pence (no one had the stomach to impeach Pence, too), thus still not overturning the 2016 election. And, sure, lots of people thought Trump was illegitimately elected and harbored some fantasy that the Mueller Report or a Supreme Court decision or, hell, the hand of God or something might sweep him out of office and reset everything back to how it was before the fucktastrophe of the Trump administration, and, shit, that was even before the pandemic, the economic collapse, and the insurrection.

For the most part, though, post-2016, Democrats sucked it up and moved on. No Cult of Hillary developed that demanded that all Democrats must declare themselves loyal to her or be exiled by the leadership of the party. We Democrats really don't work that way. At our most craven, Obama-fellating peak, we still had it in us to criticize our leaders and even turn against them. Of course we have our personality cults, most recently in the Bernie-can-do-no-wrong weirdness, but, again, it has never been this fucked-up outright denial of reality that the Republican Party has  embraced as a lover and declared that all must allow themselves to be fucked by it in order to be loyal Republicans.

Now, I don't have a lick of pity for Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, she who is one of the loin leavings of the legitimately malevolent Dick Cheney. She's a conservative's conservative, someone who has no problem going full-tilt scorched earth. Shit, in her response to President Biden's speech to Congress last week, she called his plans "dangerous" and "heartless" and that "the far-left is now in control of the Democrat Party." I mean, that's like being the shit-throwingest baboon in the monkey house. But it's not enough unless everything you do as a Republican involves you gently cupping Donald Trump's tiny balls and buffing them to a high sheen.

Rep. Cheney is facing a likely ouster from her leadership position in the House Republican caucus because she refuses to back down from acknowledging the truth: that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. That's not praiseworthy. It's literally the least anyone could do to preserve our democracy. It's like giving someone a trophy for not stabbing you in the face or burning down your house when, sure, they could have totally done that, but we generally don't reward people for being basically civilized. All Cheney's doing is saying that reality is real, and the vast majority of Republicans won't even do that. It means that the GOP is a fuck-cluster of batshit conspiracy mongers and cynical pukes who exploit the deranged, all of them varying degrees of fucking racist.

Cheney has had a couple of Republicans support her, ones who will no doubt be booed and purged by their states. The Wall Street Journal, among others, has written that Cheney shouldn't be sent to pasture. As they put it, "The election was close, but not as close as others in American history." Cheney herself just wrote her justification for her stand in the Washington Post, while still shitting on Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans are telling Trump not to worry, that Cheney is as good as dead to the party leadership, with corpse worms like Steve Scalise supporting booting her and installing Trump ass remora Elise Stefanik in her place.

Apparently, Republicans are right: you can get canceled for offensive speech.

Imagine being a Republican and given the choice to go all in with the saggy orange nutsack who rages into the ether on his blog (trust me, I know how that feels) or to change your current platform of tax cuts, racism, and Trump worship, you choose the nutsack. In fact, you choose the nutsack so hard that it completely changes you so that everything you do is so you can keep that nutsack happy, and you feel good about yourself when the nutsack is satisfied. I don't feel sorry for any of these GOP fuckfleas, but, man, sometimes you gotta look up from the meth pipe, glance in a mirror, and ask yourself if you like the toothless bitch you see looking back. Of course, Republicans are so far gone that they'll say they look awesome as they decide to move on to shooting that shit up.

The Republican Party must be thought of and dealt with as an anti-democratic insurgency, one that won't be satisfied until it has eliminated the need for elections in order to maintain power. Without the Liz Cheneys in the GOP, if these fuckers win back the House, it's gonna be crazy shit when it comes time to certify the 2024 election if it's even a little close and the Republican candidate has lost. If that candidate happens to be Trump, they will fucking blow up DC to put his huge ass back in the Oval Office. And I'm not really being hyperbolic with the idea of Republicans blowing shit up.

I keep thinking about this quote from an anonymous GOP official from just after the election in November 2020 on Trump wanting to challenge the results: "What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change." No one, it seems, except the deranged rubes and those who want to win on the backs of the deranged rubes. Oh, and, if you can, take them for every penny they've got to fund whatever bullshit "legal challenge" you want, all the better.

An Open Letter to Tucker Carlson Regarding His Opinions on Masks

Dear Tucker,

Can I call you "Tucker"? I don't really care because I'm sure as hell not calling you "Mr. Carlson," like you're the dad of someone I'm fucking back when I was in high school.

Anyways, I don't watch your goddamn show because you're an obnoxious, privileged, powdered pair of ass cheeks whose face veers between "serial killer who ejaculates while he stabs people" to "high school boy feeling a wet pussy for the first time." Mostly, though, I don't watch you because you're a fucking liar. Sure, sure, you fool the Fox "news" rubes: all those shut-ins and elderly people who can be scammed by the crazed pillow dickhead and gun-fellating men who can't get a hard-on to save their pathetic lives. Or marriages. 

But you don't fool me. You've been vaccinated. Motherfucker, you paid goons to knock off old ladies so you could jump the line. You got that shit back in January. You made sure your family got it. And the only people who would say otherwise are liars and fools. And if you said you didn't get vaccinated, I'd want to see a goddamned blood test to prove it. And I know and you know you wear a fucking mask anywhere you go, even though you're vaccinated. You didn't stop wearing them around the Fox "news" offices because you're too much of a little bitch to really stand up to the Man.

I did watch your 10 minute-long vomit of accusations, lies, threats, and more lies that you retched forth on your show, Tucker Carlson Fucking Hates Your Guts, last night. And then I read it because, really, how dick-kicking insane do you have to be to say shit like that, and I wanted to see if I had heard you right. I had.

I heard you say shit like, "America’s so-called public health community united as one to remind us that corona restrictions don’t apply to BLM rioters" back in June, when you know goddamn well that protesters against police murdering Black people wore masks. In fact, those marches were a clear demonstration that masks helped curb the spread of COVID-19 while your orange fuckhead president was prancing around the country, spreading the virus. 

I heard you lie about how people react to those not wearing masks outside. Motherfucker, I walk around New York City, and we wear masks because we're gonna be in crowds, and we wear masks because it's a sign of respect to those who haven't been vaccinated, and I'm not counting your fucking dumbass viewers who refuse to get the shot. We wear masks because even though, as you and your network's cockworms keep saying, COVID is "a virus that 99 percent of us would have survived anyway," it's also a virus that causes permanent damage to a fuckton more people who do survive, and we're still not sure about how it's spread and about the possibilities of variants.

I heard you mock scientists and experts, accusing them of actively trying to control the population. I heard you try to get all bullshit philosophical, saying, "Masks have always been incompatible with a free society. We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals. Mask transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us. They alienate us. They shut us off from one another. They prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you. Masks are for the guilty. They’re signifiers of shame and submission." Are they, though? Because they can also be signifiers that you care about other human beings, something you wouldn't understand.

And I heard you get outraged to the point of hysteria because there are parents who choose to have their kids wear masks when they're outside. I heard you say, "It should be illegal," and I heard you say that if you see a child in a mask outside, "Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re seeing is abuse. It’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to try to prevent it." And I heard you compare it to your child getting punched in the face by a teacher every day. 

You simpering little ratings whore, you fucktoy of the lowest kind of vermin, you don't know people's lives. You don't know if there are people at their home who can't get vaccinated. You don't know what kinds of sacrifices parents have made. You have decided that liberals are the ones who force-mask their children, and this is a way to attack liberals and maybe even get them assaulted, arrested, and/or harassed. 

Why the fuck do this when we all know you know better? Maybe you're just mad that your fucking kids are at home and you don't have time to fuck Matt Gaetz's hookers or whatever the fuck you do. Maybe someone told you that the way to really go down in media history is to be the biggest cum whore on conservative networks, drinking nutzoid, conspiracy-theorist chowder like it's the blood of Christ. I'd say maybe you actually believe this shit, but, of course, you don't. None of you believe the shit you spew.

You wanna argue about mask mandates? Fine. Let's have that argument. But you don't wanna do that. You wanna make liberals cry by being as irrational as possible while your yahoo hordes of racist morons cheer you on and make life miserable for Anthony Fauci and other scientists.

This is making threats and demanding that police resources be used where no crime is being committed, perhaps leading to violence, perhaps taking the police away from places where they're really needed. 

So do it, motherfucker. Make the phone call. Dial 911 on some mom at a playground. You won't because you know it's illegal to do that shit. You won't because you're the worst kind of bully: one who's too much of a pussy to get your own hands dirty.

I'd tell you to eat shit, but you are shit.

The Rude Pundit

The Chauvin Verdict: Random Observations at the Beginning of a Long, Difficult Road

1. Sometimes I think about all the times that police murdered or beat a Black or brown person and no one was there to record it. It makes me sick to my stomach, as it should every person, as it especially should every white person. I can't get my head around that, and I'm not just talking since the Rodney King video came out 30 years ago, in March 1991, showing a group of Los Angeles police officers beating a Black man, King, who was on the ground and who was trying to shield himself from the batons and kicks and Tasers, which was taken as resisting arrest, which prompted more beating, until the cops put a sheet over him because they thought he was dead. I'm talking going back, in the entire history of policing in this country. Think about that. Think about all the times people read an account of a cop shooting a Black suspect and saying that they were armed and then people just accepted it as the official story and moved on. 

2. Think about the fact that had then-17 year-old Darnella Frazier not taken out her phone and recorded George Floyd being murdered by then-Officer Derek Chauvin, Chauvin would have almost certainly gotten away with it. The line from Rodney King to George Floyd, from the acquittal of the King assaulters to the conviction of Floyd's killer, is one filled with horrific acts of racist, often officially-sanctioned violence against Black and brown bodies, but it is one that extends far before King, all the way back to the bodies of slaves, and one that will continue after this verdict.

3. But for a moment, just for a moment, all but the worst of us could actually exhale, briefly, yes, but still, a breath for this justice being enacted. When the judge read Chauvin was guilty on all three counts - second and third degree murder and manslaughter - it was like the moment when you spark a flame in the wilderness. You don't know if you can get it to grow into a full campfire that will keep you warm and keep the animals at bay, but, damn, you know there's hope as you try to fan it into something more, something that you can add fuel to. 

4. Our failure to radically address the systemic racism and military tactics that our police forces use is a profound lack of imagination and a profound lack of effort by our political leaders at all levels. I'm not going to get into the entire history of how the police became a paramilitary force or how the existence of police departments go back to slave patrols and as a white control on poor and Black populations in northern urban areas. But we have to know that it's all led to this moment of crisis. 

5. We have to know that things must change. The verdict today is an early step in a long, difficult road that threatens to collapse under our feet at any moment. We have to conceive of a new way for law enforcement to engage with communities. We have to allow that an understanding of mental illness and drug addiction, something that is fairly recent in our history, must have an effect on how authorities handle so many cases. We must take funds from police forces and use them for mental health intervention specialists. (That's what most of us mean by "Defund the police.") We have to conceive of a new way to train law enforcement, to come up with a new meaning for law enforcement itself. Perhaps most importantly, we have to acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable and just plain wrong. 

6. That starts with a very public, national reckoning on a few levels. The first is with systemic racism, especially with regards to how disproportionately non-white people are dealt with violently and abusively by law enforcement. Another is with the goddamn guns. The racism and the surge in gun sales go hand in hand. It's white panic against a completely made up enemy, and it's promoted by right-wing media for pure power and profit.  Until we are ready to say that some things are objectively wrong - like that white officers are more likely to use their weapons in Black neighborhoods - and then act to make them right, we can't move forward. Until we are ready to vote out politicians who use racism as an appeal to foolish white voters, we can't move forward. 

7. We must look at this day in another way: We're celebrating that a cop didn't get away with a murder that we all saw happen. That's perhaps the bare minimum a civilized society should expect. If you're video-recorded killing someone, you go to prison. It should be that simple. Yes, the Chauvin verdict might be the breaking of a dam on cases involving murder or assault by cops. But it's a sign of how low our expectations have become that, honestly, many of us, especially in the Black community, wouldn't have been surprised if Chauvin had been acquitted. What I'm expecting now is, at best, an assertion on the right of "See? Justice can be done" before proposing even more draconian crime policies. At worst, I expect a retrenchment by most of the GOP, a clinging to the old campaign tactic of showing scary Black people protesting while praising the clean, white police establishment. 

8. The supposed good cops should be relieved at the verdict today. They should be glad that those who make them look bad, who make them look like racists, who make them look like bad apples might now be punished and make it easier for them to be the good cops they believe they can be. In fact, the supposedly good cops need to be encouraged, even rewarded, for turning in the bad cops. Or else let's finally admit that the whole barrel is rotten.

9. Finally, I want to end this with a moment to remember George Floyd, a flawed man, like all of us, who suffered so awfully before our eyes, who it's not hyperbolic to say died for our sins. But you can't remember him without remembering every single name, every Eric Garner, every Breonna Taylor, every Adam Toledo, and you can't remember them without thinking about all those whose names we never got to learn. 

We can breathe where they can't. But we need to use that breath for something more than sighs of relief.

Shut the Fuck Up and Get Your Fucking Vaccine

A bunch of fanatics are fucking up the vaccination program for everyone. Polls are showing that a significant percentage of people won't get the vaccine. In places where people don't get vaccinated, cases have been on the rise. There are YouTube videos, filled with conspiracy theories, exhorting people to avoid the vaccine. People spread the idea that the vaccine is a way to spy on them, and there has been violence directed against the distribution, with fear that not enough people will get it to eliminate the illness.

Yeah, that's what's going on in Afghanistan as health groups attempt to get people vaccinated for polio. 

The rhetoric that's coming from the antivaccine right (and, to a lesser, weirder, but just as dangerous extent, the antivax left) is qualitatively not that different from what the Taliban has been pushing in Afghanistan. This is not to disparage the Afghan people or call them stupid. Far from it. It's to say that fear and ignorance is pretty goddamned universal, and it often is so on the same issues no matter where one is from.

Here in the United States, when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines, we're swimming in a shit pool of lies and fear. We've got the dumbass white evangelical Christians who believe garbage like "It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here." (So, like, if God gave people the ability to create vaccines...fuck it, not worth it.)  We've got fucking idiotic conspiracy theories like "A massive death wave will be witnessed later this year among those who took the vaccine," ignoring that it's been a year since the first people were vaccinated, and, oddly, no reports of all of them dying have come out. 

And then there's motherfucking Tucker fucking Carlson, who always has the expression of a Victorian gentleman learning that women like sex. Carlson has been coyly and not-so-coyly antivax for the better part of the last few years. With the coronavirus vaccines, Tuckfuck has been vigorously gargling the balls of conspiracy nuts. Wondering why you should still have to wear a mask after getting vaccinated, Carlson's just asking,  "What is this about? If vaccines work, why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives?" Quite note: You're wearing your fucking mask because you still might be able to spread COVID, even if you can't get it, and you're trying not to be a selfish dickhead, something I'm sure Carlson can't even conceive of.

Carlson, who you know got his vaccine the second he could steal the spot from an elderly person, continued tuckerly, "If the vaccine is effective, there’s no reason for people who’ve received a vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. Well, you’d hate to think that especially if you’ve gotten two shots but what’s the other potential explanation? We can’t think of one." Yes, big science wants you to wear masks and not eat indoors at restaurants or go to concerts or movies because...he doesn't say, but I'm guessing socialism or critical race theory or AOC.

Of course, things weren't helped when the FDA and the CDC put a pause on the Johnson and Johnson single dose vaccine because of 6 reported cases of blood clots in the brains of women who had recently received it. And while I don't know the reasons behind such a drastic step, even if the J&J vaccine is only about 5% of the total vaccines out there, it sure as fuck seems like a big damn mistake to have taken that action, considering how fucking stupid and hesitant too many people are being about getting the shot. There may be something to it, but 6 out of nearly 7 million people who received the J&J vaccine makes it an adverse reaction so rare that it's pretty much negligible, and, yes, I'm recognizing that there may be more cases once there's an investigation. Yet the diabetes drug Jardiance can cause your taint (you know, your perineum? your grundle?) to rot (yes, rot), and there have been 12 cases in less than 2 million users, but that son of a bitch has full FDA approval.  

Really, honestly, whenever someone tells me they don't want to get the vaccine because it hasn't been researched long enough or they don't know what's in it or whatever, all I'm left with saying is "Shut the fuck up and get your fucking vaccine." I know one person who shouldn't get it, someone who is severely immunocompromised, and even she wants to get it. Just stop this shit and get the fucking vaccine. Line the fuck up and let shit get back to normal. 

But, no, no, no, not our selfish bourgie asses. Low turnout for vaccine distribution has become standard in many places. Health officials are worried that the country won't reach herd immunity, when at least 70% of people have been vaccinated, primarily because Republicans are being such dicks about it, acting as if there's something to be concerned about with the damn thing.

I mean, come the fuck on. Every single day, Americans suck down and engorge themselves on poisons masking themselves as food. Every single day, Americans are drinking and inhaling hundreds of pieces of microplastics that likely have a toxic effect on us. Every single day, most Americans are living with air so filled with chemicals that we're probably doing ourselves a goddamn favor by wearing a mask. Every single day, most Americans just allow the climate to degrade and diseases to mutate and spread. And barely anyone fucking blinks at this shit. But after shoving a wad of McDonald's french fries in your face, inhaling Dow Chemical's latest highball of poison, and avoiding wearing sunscreen while filling your lungs with enough plastic to make a small ball, all of a sudden, when it comes to the COVID vaccine, you're a fucking purist? Fuck you. Get the fucking vaccine.

By the way, to get back to Afghanistan and toss Pakistan into the mix, there are lots of idiotic, cruel, and backwards reasons that they have an issue with vaccination efforts, including refusing to take it from women (to the point of murdering women delivering it), but one big reason for the vaccine hesitancy is pretty interesting. In 2011, the CIA used a vaccine worker to get DNA samples from kids in an area of Pakistan to see if it matched Osama bin Laden's. Yeah, it was used for spying. Yeah, it completely fucking undermined the efforts of health NGOs. 

In other words, in those countries, they actually have more justification for being paranoid about vaccines than we do, thanks to us. What's our fucking excuse? Bullshit arrogance? Bullshit ideas of freedom?

You know what freedom is? Freedom is celebrating that science can actually solve our fucking problems and taking advantage of that so that your superstition and anti-science fuckery doesn't kill the rest of us.

Shut the fuck up already. Get your fucking vaccine, you fucking assholes.

Conservatives Finally Just Say, "Fuck Your Right to Vote"

As a slew of new voter laws slime their way through the legislatures of mostly Republican states where Democrats have a chance of winning, almost all based on the lie that there was mass election fraud in 2020, conservative commentators have decided that it's not enough to come up with bullshit new procedures that inhibit voting. Apparently, their goal isn't clear enough when they're voting to allow "poll watchers" to video record people going to vote or drastically limiting the number of drop boxes. No, now they're just flat-out saying, "Yeah, go fuck yourself with your right to vote."

This shit is not subtle. Over at the National Review (Motto: "Outraged that the Negroes get to vote for over 50 years"), Kevin Williamson wants us to ponder if "the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters," and he pads his "column" (if by "column," you mean, "an elitist fart fest") with keen observations like "There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine." Motherfucker, voting doesn't involve surgery or prostate-fingering, even if it feels that way sometimes (for good and ill). It's just a shitty analogy, and it allows Williamson to get all smarmy about the loathsome unwashed voting in large numbers: "That sounds like a wonderful thing . . . if you haven’t met the average American voter." 

The tell in the piece, and there's always a tell whenever one of these squamous shits says something outrageous, is that Williamson doesn't say specifically who shouldn't be allowed to vote (beyond most convicted felons). He doesn't say the education level one should have to vote. He doesn't say if one should be of a certain income level. He doesn't say if you should have to literacy test or pay a poll tax. He merely asserts his little assertion, as if we should all understand who he means, itself both a cowardly and a  frightening position. 

Of course, unafraid to go full motherfucker is Tucker Carlson, the most reliable penis fish living in the muck of Fox "news." Last night, on his show Tucker Carlson Force Fists Lady Liberty, the host, who constantly looks like he just saw a Black person for the first time, continued his hoodless white nationalism. Talking about voting, Carlson said that "[T]he Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World." 

You think that's the fucked up part? No, here's the fucked up part: "I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this?"

Try to parse this noxious fuckery out. It's pretty much saying that we shouldn't allow immigration because the immigrants might vote for Democrats (and it also implies fucking clearly that Republicans shouldn't even try to win the immigrant vote). But look at the nonsensical bullshit: He says that his right to vote comes from being born in the United States, which is complete dog piss. His citizenship comes from being born here. His right to vote comes from being a citizen, and there are other routes to becoming a citizen. So the extraordinarily radical proposition here is that only people born in the United States should be allowed to vote. Tell that to the fucking Cubans who have kept Florida red for the last few election cycles. 

Carlson mocks the idea that he's talking about "white replacement theory," which is one of those things that modern Nazis jack off over, the notion that people of white European background are being "replaced" by non-white people from, one assumes they believe, lesser areas of the world through both immigration and having babies. But that's exactly where Tuckfuck's going with all this. 

What we're actually witnessing here is not the growth of a movement, even if it looks that way since the right-wing media megaphone is so goddamned loud that it's like those cicadas fucking all the time. No, what we're seeing is the desperate clinging to power of a party and an ideology that is facing its demographic doom within a generation. And immigration is only part of the reason. Add in the way that online culture expands the world for the next group that will birthday into voting age, and, yeah, the Tuckerites' voices will grown smaller and smaller until they're just screaming into the Newsmax void, like, you know, Donald Trump. 

But until the "replacement" is done, we gotta remain vigilant and active against this stream of conservative thought that seeks to rescind the right to vote. Their problem with Democrats is democracy.

Republicans Don't Deserve Democrats' Bipartisanship

Today, as President Joe Biden was heading from Marine One into the White House, he stopped to briefly speak to reporters. And, sure as the sun comes up in the morning, he was asked about why he's not doing more to be nice to Republicans on the infrastructure bill that does not need Republican support to pass. "Where is the room for negotiation with Republicans?" some goddamn reporter wanted to know. That Biden didn't say, "Right next to my saggy ballsack" demonstrates an impressive level of restraint.

It's just goes on like this every fucking day. Last Friday, Press Secretary Jenn Psaki, who has become an expert at using stiletto to castrate Fox "news," was asked, "There’s the sense that Republicans will not support anything that has basically a Democratic president’s name on it.  How do you — how do you change that dynamic?" In her firm, clear way, Psaki more or less said, "By telling them to go fuck themselves with poll numbers that show their voters want more shit done."

Of course, Psaki gets this shit tossed at her so often that she's developed an invisible shield that bounces it off her and back onto the reporter who threw it. On March 26, Psaki was asked, "How can you achieve bipartisan support for infrastructure if Republicans are drawing the line — a hard line on taxes?" On March 24, she was asked, "Has the President’s definition of bipartisanship change since he arrived in office on January 20th?" Every fucking time, Psaki has to point out a simple truth: Biden's initiatives are supported by a bipartisan majority of voters. Republicans in power just don't give a fuck what their voters want because they know those voters will be distracted by a shiny Dr. Seuss "cancellation."

The media's pathological need for Democrats to have to get Republican approval for everything they want to accomplish in DC has long been pathetic. Coming out of the cancerous presidency of Donald Trump and after a decade of Mitch McConnell jacking off on any notions of compromise or bipartisanship, it's completely baffling. 

To this day, the majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or corrupted in some way, a lie so extravagant and fake that it could decorate a Trump property. Nearly 2/3 of GOP voters still gobble up Trump's election lies like it's kibble from Jesus's ass. Not only are many congressional Republicans still unable to admit that Joe Biden was legitimately elected, but we have states passing laws that make voting harder under the banner of the fake voter fraud. That's like Bigfoot-proofing your house. It won't do jack shit to make you safer, but the Bigfoot supply people are fuckin' happy they put one over on you.

According to too many in the media, Democrats are supposed to just fucking pretend that everything is hunky-dory and forget about Republicans almost getting them actually murdered while cutting off their voters ability to vote because the bipartisan unicorn is more important than anything else. Jesus fuck. Hell, this morning on CNN, Alisyn "Yes, I Spell My First Name That Way" Camerota really said, "Is there some potential upside to some of these laws that it will assuage the anxiety of Republicans?" Luckily, John Berman responded, "You shouldn't have to assuage a lie. I mean, assuaging a lie is not good legislation." No shit. And it shouldn't have to be said. This whole idea of just moving the fuck on is madness.

Let's say your neighbor's kid shit on your porch and set your car on fire. But when you showed your neighbor the Ring video of the teenage fucker doing it, he says it didn't happen, it's not his kid, he doesn't have to pay for anything because your car is the wrong color, and if you call the cops, he'll accuse you of fucking dogs. No one would expect you to invite the motherfuckers to your next barbecue. At the very least, he needs to apologize, admit he's wrong, pay for the damage, and let you shit on his kid's bed. Ok, maybe just three of those things. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democrats should respond to any question about bipartisanship or compromise with Republicans with "When Republicans say that Joe Biden was fairly elected and that there was no widespread or coordinated election fraud or illegal voting, we can talk about bipartisanship." Make it a precondition for everything. The national GOP and all the state GOPs all have to say it. They have to say it's a motherfucking fact. They have to admit they've been fucking lying. They have to say that Donald Trump is fucking lying.  

Fucking hell, stand up for the idea that facts exist. Otherwise, we get the fuckery that's going on in Georgia, which has gone from overcoming Trump's lies and intimidation in certifying its election results to lying about election fraud to passing laws based on those lies so they can overturn an election to corporations protesting the laws that are based on lies to boycotts of the corporations protesting the laws that are based on lies. And that shit is going to happen all over the place. It's not like most Republicans actually believe any of the lies. But, you know, the rubes who still vote for the GOP sure as shit do, so, fuck it. 

Democrats shouldn't be asked to play nice with the party that is trying to legislate them out of existence. We are in dangerous territory when the foundation of democracy, the right to vote, is subject to the whims of a party afraid of losing. I just can't decide if we're more fucked or less fucked if we need corporations to save our sad asses.

Would a Good Guy with a Gun Have Been Justified in Saving George Floyd?

The testimony coming out of the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd has been beyond heartbreaking and beyond enraging. Today, for instance, Floyd's girlfriend revealed on the stand that his pet name for her was "Mama," which is what he called out over and over as he died. It's been this way throughout the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses. Darnella Frazier, now 18 years-old, was 17 when she took the video that first catalyzed the response to Chauvin's murder of Floyd, and she said on the stand, "When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, I look at my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they’re all Black. I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends. I look at how that could have been one of them." This is not to mention the brave condemnation to the faces of the cops by two black men: Donald Williams, who said to them, "Y’all murderers, dawg, y’all are murderers, dawg," and 61 year-old Charles McMillan, who told Chauvin after Floyd's limp body was taken away, "I don't respect what you did." Both men broke down crying on the stand over what they witnessed, what they've had to live with.

Yet what has also been solemnly encouraging is how many people wanted to help Floyd on that awful day. There was teenaged cashier Christopher Martin who wanted his store manager to put Floyd's cigarettes "on my tab" rather than have the police called on Floyd for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. There was trained EMT and firefighter Genevieve Hansen, who called out again and again for the cops to check Floyd's pulse and wanted to offer medical assistance but was spurned by Tuo Thao, the former officer also on trial for his actions during Floyd's murder. Williams called the police on the police because, as he told the 911 dispatcher of Chauvin, "He just pretty much killed this guy that wasn’t resisting arrest." 

While the defense is teeing up an attack on Floyd's drug use, which just leads to more questions of why they didn't administer or allow for medical treatment if he was overdosing, I keep thinking about those people who felt helpless before the police. Even 911 dispatcher Jena Scurry, who was monitoring the events through a video feed since she was the one who sent police to the scene first, knew that "something was wrong" and called Chauvin's sergeant as she watched the murder occur. "You can call me a snitch if you want to," she said.

And I keep thinking about something else that Darnella Frazier said. "It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life," she testified. That urge must have been overwhelming for so many of those watching Floyd beg for his life and Chauvin and the other officers just not give a damn.

Gun "rights" supporters often talk about two things: that some mythical "good guy with a gun" will be able to stop a bad guy in a violent situation, and that people need to be able to own guns to stop the government from treading on their life, liberty, and property. No, I don't believe these things justify mass gun ownership. But we do have a fuckton of guns. In Derek Chauvin, you have both situations bound together. The bad guy was a government official and he was depriving George Floyd of life and liberty. 

So I can't help thinking about what would have happened if someone or more than one someone had pulled guns on the cops and demanded that Chauvin get his goddamn leg off George Floyd's neck. I wonder if a good guy with a gun should have or could have saved Floyd. Would that good guy or gal have been justified in trying? Sure, the obvious answer is that this isn't a fucking game or movie and the cops would have pulled their guns and all hell might have broken loose, and that's a possibility, especially if the civilians who pointed guns at the cops were Black. But let's dare to go there for a moment or two.

I get that this is dangerous shit to even be contemplating, but, motherfuck, we've been watching these white nationalist dickholes work themselves up to a revolutionary rage over lies, over phantoms, over fantasies, and they were ready to overthrow the whole fucking federal government and a few states for shits and giggles and fake election fraud. Meanwhile, all this actual state-sponsored terrorism, violence, and oppression has been happening right in front of our faces, and the fact that we haven't seen a moment when civilians stepped in to stop cops who are abusing and murdering black people, like Chauvin's own sergeant said Chauvin did, is honestly something of a miracle and probably speaks to both the fear we have when it comes to official power and the titanic restraint of Black citizens in this nation. We want to believe the good guys would win. We need to believe that. Goddamnit, we wish that were true. 

To put it succinctly, even if it would have saved George Floyd's life, civilians stopping a violent cop is an uprising, and you can fucking well bet that it would have been put down with a savagery that wasn't even contemplated for the white nationalist rioters. 

Still, not helping, not doing something, anything, when you think you could have to save a life is haunting, as Frazier poignantly says. After voicing those sentiments, she added, "But it’s like, it’s not what I should have done, it’s what he should have done," referring to Chauvin. And that right there is key. The cop is supposed to be the good guy. The tragedy is that they so often aren't.

We have to fix the goddamned broken, racist justice system, hold the cops to the same behavior they hold all of us to, show that murderers aren't above the law because they have a badge, and convict this motherfucker. Do what should be done.  

The alternative is awful to contemplate because it feels so close to real.