The End of Ignorance is the Beginning of Freedom

The first month of 2026 has been the beginning of a catastrophic rending for many in the United States. Many are experiencing a sense of rupture beyond any in their lifetimes or they could have imagined. There are many ways this is a progression, the logical advancement of conditions in the too long period of unprecedented times we are all desperate for a respite from. It may be an evolution or it may be a revelation, depending on your perspective. Either way, it's the result of the consolidation of power by people who are driven by the worst of human instincts, the desire to dominate. Whether it's a progression, the result of people consolidating power or an evolution, what they have become with access to that power, is of no real consequence.

Many of you are having an experience I've already been through, and if my expressing it might help anyone, I feel a duty to do so.

The facts won't be new to those who've known me for any length of time but in truth, the experience of the events is something I know even many of the people closest to me, who no matter how deeply they cared for me, couldn't really understand. I think now, the experience of January 2026 has, to my absolute sadness, has made that understanding available to many people who have some sense of civic duty, some sense of responsibility to their fellow human beings, a desire to find that balance between being free and feeling like we belong, and understand the depth of the truth in the simple statement, "None of us are free until we are all free."

I was a participant in the Occupy movement in the city of Richmond VA. In the midst of that, because I was "too online," I realized the claim people taking part in Occupy were being paid had made its way from some YouTube accounts engaged in debates about Occupy to right wing talk radio and to Fox News in just a few weeks, maybe a month's time. I'd seen it first used by a few people contributing videos to those discussions, then quickly adopted by more, and then it was coming out of the mouth of every conservative politician, media personality or everyday person, in a shockingly short amount of time. Back in 2011, the delineation between the digital world and what we then called IRL seemed much more total, so it was odd. As an example, I was shocked by the number of people who were participating in Occupy who asked me to help them set up email accounts and Facebook profiles. Following the suppression of the Occupy encampments, and by extension the movement itself, I had more time on my hands, and recognizing the work this phrase "Soros paid protester" was doing in the public discussion, I decided to see if I could find where it originated on YouTube.

Curiosity had, through the years, lead me to learning about a number of different kinds of social movements, subcultures and the like. Jazz, punk, Beat, hip-hop. It also meant I'd learned how to identify how ideas moved and were adopted, not because I'd set out to learn it, but as a result of wanting to know about what made different people and artists influential in subcultures they were part of. Nothing ever "burst into popular culture."It was always the result of years of percolating in conditions created by the society around it, then conditions creating an audience willing to engage with it, which appeared to that audience and wider culture as a sudden boiling over. To see an idea move so quickly from a few people using it, to saturating mainstream culture, seemed odd.

I could explain the process of following this "Soros paid protester" idea, but as YouTube functioned very differently then, it wouldn't make much sense to most people now. Think of it as following a comment thread back to the original post, basically. Suffice to say, I traced it back to what turned out to be white supremacists and self identified neo-Nazis. That was alarming. More alarming though, was how clear the then Tea Party's rhetoric and symbology was both a polished version of what these same white supremacists were saying, and how much of it wasn't polished at all, but directly lifted. It gave me a clear sense of the way that a kind of plausible deniability was made. I've been a reader and writer, since I was a small child. I know how to use language to soften how much of a provocation a thing is or isn't. I went through the period of my own adolescence and young adulthood, where provocation for provocation's sake was practiced. Sticking my thumb in the square's eye was fun, but I also learned it had unintended consequences, and could hurt people I never had any intention of hurting or provoking. I've also been raised in a culture saturated in advertising, and had been employed in sales or customer service often. Tracing "Soros paid protester" back to the white supremacists and neo Nazis who'd originated it, was looking at that process, in reverse. It was basically seeing it focus group and market tested, without the formality of corporate process. "What's the best way to sell this idea?"

I had been aware of the latent racism in US culture and politics for a long time. I'd been raised in a home that venerated Martin Luther King Jr. with a stepfather who'd been a member of the Rainbow Coalition (originally started by Fred Hampton) as it existed in the eighties. As a young teen, I'd read MLK's books, a few of James Baldwin's books, The Autobiography of Malcom X, To Die For The People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton and The Black Panthers Speak. I didn't read them out of some desire to be perceived any particular way, in political terms. I was just curious, and like a number of other things I'd been exposed to or experienced, I was trying to make sense of why so much that seemed so reasonable and sensible was treated as so radical and dangerous. I could see the relationships between "Black radical politics" and so much of the white people who'd raised me held as foundational beliefs. Dr. King's Christianity, his perspective on the morality of Christ, the dictates of his faith, was one I could see and hear in people like my great grandmother, even if she didn't express it in specifically racial terms. I could hear my much more conservative family members in Malcolm X and The Black Panthers appeal to self sufficiency, self determination and suspicion of power. Race, was the clear and only separation. I didn't realize it at the time, but James Baldwin's clear, confident description of what it took to retain both his dignity and sanity in a society trying to undermine both, had spoken to me as someone who was autistic and didn't know it, trying to understand why I couldn't quite fit anywhere I was supposed to belong.

In learning that I am autistic, I've also realized that most of my "special interests" as they get referred to, have always been related to communication. I engaged with Black radical politics, as it was called then, the way autistic people engage with special interests. I didn't exactly hide it, but the intensity of my curiosity for many different things, was something I'd already learned not to be too open about either. I've also come to realize there was something soothing in people who expressed a profound experience of Otherness, whether it was through the lens of race or gender. I couldn't name the source of my own until I learned I was autistic, but it made me feel less alone, to belong more among the human race, to know other people felt it. Even if the source of that Otherness was something I didn't share, I'd been acutely aware of being Other from a very young age. At this point, the search for the source of that Otherness, and the recognition of other people feeling it, has driven almost all of my most persistent interests, be it reading, music, film, political engagement or otherwise. I have simultaneously been a cis, white, straight male, treated as such by the world I exist in, and incapable of embodying what is expected of that description, because the expectations were shaped and created by a narrow sense of being that doesn't include the vast diversity within what we now call neurodivergence.

In truth, I don't know what it is to feel as if I'm white, a man, cis gendered or to be straight, because all of those things, all of the ideas about what they mean and should be have been shaped by and for people we refer to now as neurotypical. I've never been "at home" in or seen myself as any of them, though I thoroughly understand the way the world has treated me is as if I am those things and could be. I understand the way I've been acculturated has shaped me as well. I have no loyalty to those things though. I have no need of them, and if doing without them allows me a better relationship to, a more open and honesty way of being with my fellow human beings, they can go, with haste. Nothing those ideas have given me, nothing they've done for me has been of enough worth to believe they need my defense. The cost of the ways I was never going to meet them has been far higher.

Probably the only one I understand or identify with is being straight, because I do experience an attraction to women that I recognize when other people express attraction, and I don't experience that toward other men. I've also never been comfortable with the way I'm expected to express that attraction either, because I'm not comfortable with the way its socially expected of men and the two are inextricably linked.

That sense of Otherness, as well as being autistic without knowing it, has contributed immeasurably to a history of depression and anxiety that includes a number of hospitalizations. Between the feeling of Otherness and what I now know was autistic burnout, the result of trying to not be autistic to meet standards and norms I was never going to be able to, has lead to a history with suicidal ideation. The not knowing why I couldn't "be normal," no matter the effort, and trying as many different "perspectives," ways to think, which all really equate to trying to be many different people along the way, were all creating that depression and anxiety.

It's because of all of this, after recognizing the "Soros paid protester" claims came originated from white supremacists and neo Nazis, that I started paying attention to what the "white identitarian" far right was up to, around 2012. It was a function of that kind of focus that gets referred to as "special interests," my experience with them over my lifetime, I started doing things like creating accounts on different platforms to be able to lurk in place they communicated openly with each other. I wanted to know what they were up to, what they were saying amongst themselves. How did one go about believing these things? What did it take to make someone believe such a wide array of other human beings were less than human? Because of the experience with the way that intensity of curiosity has been received, over my lifetime, it also was something I didn't exactly hide, but I didn't advertise either, even to people in my life. My perspective on revealing these curiosities to anyone else has been shaped by the odd combination of reward and punishment that it has been met with from earliest childhood. I have always gone about satisfying the necessities of that curiosity in my own time, in solitude, because I can't trust what it will be met with if discovered. We create names for it, like anti-intellectualism, but the vein of distrust and distaste for curiosity runs deep, and it always favors power.

What I'm trying to get across is that it has never been a choice, never been a sense of moral or intellectual superiority in my reacting to the world around me differently than other people do, and that is as true of the last fourteen years, including what is considered political perspective or political speech. I have always been moving through the world, attempting to navigate the space between the degree to which it sees me as the person who occupies a place afforded the most privilege an identity can be, the degree to which I have always felt an intense sense of Otherness in response to that, and the results of the intensity of curiosity that is the source of that Otherness. A thing I can't express strongly enough is that where most people seem to have some choice about being able to "let go" of certain kinds of curiosities, I don't. "It is what it is" or "That's just the way it is," don't cut it. It doesn't matter how much I say it or try to force myself to believe or act as if I can't/shouldn't think about whatever it is. I either go down whatever rabbit hole it is, until the point my brain is satisfied it knows enough about whatever it is or it is a looming, constantly babbling part of my internal life. It's not even about the it, so much as it is being able to go down the rabbit hole, if that makes any sense. It's both the experience of the rabbit hole and the context it provides.

I started diving into and following what white supremacist and far right Discords, website forums, Facebook pages/groups and so on, as I was building the closest thing I've ever had to a normal life too. It was basically dumb luck that I stumbled on a job where the combination of that intensity of curiosity and obsession with something was also met with an environment where a number of other behaviors related to autism were treated as either harmless or assets. One of the most important was the person who was my superior never perceived my need to understand more context or my attempts to point to possible alternatives as a challenge. They understood and didn't question that these were always attempts to contribute the most and best that I could to the success of the business. I've come to also see the sense of Otherness, and what gets referred to as "masking," the attempt to not have that Otherness, being autistic, not be perceived by other people, has also been responsible for me being "very good with people." Part of what this means that if I have some sense of connection to the product, I can sell ice cream to a polar bear. The intensity that produces curiosity also expresses itself as passion and the ability to see the thing from numerous perspectives. I don't need to do focus groups. I just have to listen to someone talk and I'm going to hear the ways the thing excites me that they'll respond to. Having been acculturated/traumatized into an unconscious need to make people comfortable in my presence, along with a sincere and genuine sense of respect for other people's humanity (because of the degree of Otherness I do feel), gave me ability to both earn people's trust relatively easily, and respect what that responsibility is. I have extreme difficulty being asked or told I have to act in contrast to the responsibility of that trust, as a means to get a few more dollars out of someone. Despite the way our world is constructed, I can't forget that dollars aren't real and people are.

I was experiencing the most success at being "normal," at the same time I was watching white supremacist rhetoric and white nationalist perspectives being mainstreamed, and watching how that was happening. When the controversies of "campus free speech" starting breaking out and groups like the Proud Boys starting showing up, I understood what I was seeing, and why. Again, not because I am in any way smarter than anyone, but because my particular flavor of curiosity that put me in a position of watching white supremacists and neo Nazis actually talking about how to do what they were clearly succeeding at doing.

Because I was doing all of this out of curiosity, and have always been a writer, I started trying to write about it, and honestly, the degree of alarm I was experiencing was growing. I was doing everything I could think of to try to sound the alarm about what was happening. All of this also meant I was also reading and researching their heroes. Pinochet, the Argentinian military junta, the Third Reich, and the long history of American racism and organized white supremacy, at the same time the MAGA movement was coalescing. Why the hell would anyone do this? I was very aware of what kind of threat that was going to mean so many of the people who had in so many ways helped me feel human enough to survive. The problem was, I knew most of it sounded insane to people who weren't seeing what I was seeing, so I had to try to write what I could, in the way I felt was most likely to get it across, without it sounding insane. Think about explaining today, to the person you were in 2014, and ask if they would have believed you.

The people who were close to me through these years know this was something of a bubbling, constant obsession. It was because I was recognizing how little attention the rest of the culture was giving it, the threat it represented to the people who'd all given me a place to exist in the world, and to me as someone who had a history of mental illness. If you don't know... the far right really has a bad history with mental illness and disability. It's as bad as the history with race, gender, sexual orientation and the like. We don't meet their definition of "normal" and someone like me exists as evidence their conception of inherent superiority is in fact bullshit, so they have to get rid of us. What we think of as "mainstream" America, like it's understanding of its relationship with race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, has always been too self congratulatory, self interested and arrogant to take seriously the threat people who believe in genocide and eugenics present. I'd learned that much as a teen reading Black radical political thought.

I did everything I could to sound the alarm, and none of it worked.

I had, at that point, built a life that looked as close to "normal" as I was capable. I had a good job. I was in a relationship that I think was healthy and happy up to that point, with a human being I could not have respected, enjoyed and been more awed by.

All of this, along with the fact that the one place I really felt at home was among the activist community of Richmond and had always participated when called on, lead to me being in Charlottesville at Unite The Right on August 12, 2017. I witnessed a day of white nationalists, white supremacist and neo Nazis being allowed to commit violence at their whim, including the murder of Heather Heyer.

The day itself was traumatic. Over the long term though, it wasn't the violence of the day itself that was the most traumatic, the most troubling. It was the months after. It was the way the nation and society responded to it, and didn't respond to it, in tens of thousands of ways.

I also kept watching our political class, our news industry, our cultural industries... not pay attention to the flood of memos alerting them to the fascist authoritarian movement that had coalesced behind Donald Trump. I watched people with Ivy League educations, published in the most prestigious and well respected outlets in the country, putting that Ivy League education to use, reselling the same things I'd been watching white nationalists and white supremacists saying in private to each other. I watched how many "very serious and infinitely reasonable" people argued about what was and wasn't reality, after a few years of watching white nationalists teaching each other how to evoke exactly that dynamic.

I started to understand the United States was going to end up where we are now. Not just that it was possible, but that it was the most likely outcome. Not because I'm psychic, but because of pattern recognition, and I'd spent enough time reading about the people and governments those genocidal maniacs idolized. It stopped being an "if" to me, and starting being a "when." I could see the degree to which no institution or section of society with any effective amount of power to stop it was not recognizing just how real the threat was. I had, after all, been trying and failing to get even the people around me to start to understand just how real and how serious the threat was.

I couldn't help but think of the many hundreds, thousands of beautiful human beings I'd known, and what they were going to have to endure. I couldn't help but think about how it was going to take something from them they'd never be able to get back.

It was the way we responded to Unite The Right that told me we were far further along the trajectory than I had been able to see. The lack of urgency in our institutions, lack of our "reasonable and sensible" even being willing to seriously consider it... I understood the machinery of society did not have enough momentum to stop it. The garden that would have to feed us what we needed to mount an effective opposition was in too sad a state of disrepair to bare fruit in time.

All of that lead to some other things. I started being unable to continue to treat with respect or develop trust with people who clearly took joy in what was highlighted by Unite The Right and the months after, and in some cases even identified with the people I'd watched committing wanton violence and a murder. I understood what they'd been sold, in other ways. I understood what they were signing up to. I understood what attracted them to it. I'd been watching who those people were for a number of years, saw them saying openly what they wanted, and then I watched them be allowed to bring that want into the world on August 12, 2017. I had to change roles at the job I was in, basically because I couldn't keep treating people sympathetic to that as if they weren't a threat to me, everyone I loved, the future and the concept of a free people. My interactions with them had to be shorter and far more focused.

I know, there's probably still plenty of people who would say, will say if they read this, "Well, that's what being an adult is," or "If you weren't willing to grow up and treat people with differing opinions as worthy of your respect, you get what you get." To my way of seeing it, it's exactly that attitude that's gotten us here. As has been said, disagreements about marginal tax rates are one thing. Disagreements about whether it's good to engage in genocide, eugenics and ethnic cleansing are something else entirely.

I also moved in with that stellar human being I was in a relationship with, soon after Unite The Right. She had two amazing, wonderful teenage children too. It's not as if I hadn't already understood the threat of what I knew was coming, but it took on a new dimension being with them so often and so regularly. They were as stellar human beings as their mother, and that drove home how many of my extended circles had children, and what that future was going to mean for all the children, across the country.

Not long after we moved in together, I lost that job. In part because I was struggling not to see the threat so many people walking through the doors were, and in part because the role I was moved into was basically impossible to succeed at. It had been a revolving door before I took it, and remained a revolving door when I was no longer in it.

I'd been thinking, that if I at least was able to keep the job, I'd be able to meet the responsibilities I'd made to the person I'd promised I would. If the nation did end up stumbling into fascism, because I'd read about Pinochet, the Third Reich, and the American South, I knew there were ways I could participate in undermining it and opposing it that might be dangerous if discovered, but were more quiet. My plan was to just keep working, find what kinds of less visible ways to fight would be, and take care of the people I'd made promises to.

I was driving for Uber and Lyft to try and make money, and hadn't made the best choice in buying a car to do so, so repair costs were piling up. I also knew I was no longer going to be able to keep working with the public in any way I didn't have control of. As it relates to Uber or Lyft, I could dump someone out at my whim. A little too excited about being a racist and fascist? Out you go. A more conventional, traditional job was going to mean I was going to have to interface with those people.

I want you to understand, it wasn't just fear of them. It wasn't just being sensitive. I understood where we were going. I had accepted it, because I recognized the trajectory we had already travelled so far down. It was also my fear of myself. Accepting that, knowing there was nothing I was going to be able to do to change that trajectory, meant accepting there was no way I was going to prevent the harm that was going to mean. I knew what that harm meant. I'd read the accounts of Pinochet's Chile, the Argentine junta's rein of terror, and a good deal more than the average person has about the Reich, and I understood how many people were thirsting for that. The anger and the fear that calls up in me is dangerous to them. I could hurt someone. I do not say that proudly. I do not say that because I want to be perceived as a tough guy. I do not give a fuck about that, legitimately, all of the tough guy, manly man bullshit in the world means nothing to me anymore. It's one of the great gifts of learning I'm autistic. I don't even have to try to be what so many want a man to be, because that box wasn't designed for me. I'm not proud of the fact that I don't know I can control that anger though, that fear. I do know that I don't trust that I can.

I was watching what was coming, having to decide everyday to keep trying to do what I needed to do, what I was supposed to do to take care of myself, with the full knowledge and understanding that it was going to come, we were going to experience that horror, because we were all trying to do what we needed to do and what we were supposed to do.

All of this lead to a spiral beginning in 2018, that included being in and out of psychiatric treatment. I understand now, it was a combination of autistic burnout, due to the added necessity of trying to act normal when I knew we were marching toward authoritarianism, on top of the "masking" that comes with late diagnosed autism, and being autistic with a number of BIG life changes very close together like losing a job and moving in with a partner who had two teenage children. It would have been a lot for anyone. It was too much in combination with the autistic need for sameness, routine and control.

That relationship ended, basically because I couldn't take care of myself. I don't have a lot of regrets. I regret that I wasn't able to keep that promise to such an amazing human being and her children. They all deserved better.

What was I going to do? Every plan I'd had for the future was no longer viable. I didn't even know how to make a viable plan for the future. I struggled, for an eighteen month period, wondering if it was even worth living.

I had to make a choice. Was it worth living, knowing what was coming? Was it worth it to survive and have to experience all of that? What kind of life was that going to mean?

The truth is, I chose to accept I probably won't make it through where we're going. I have a documented history of mental health problems, I'm autistic, and I'm not going to be silent. Those are three things authoritarians, especially the variety of Christian white nationalists here in the United States will try to eradicate.

I'm on disability now, because I do know I'm never going to be "normal." I also know I'm not safe for a not insignificant portion of the population. I'm never going to be polite with fascists, racists and their ideological kin. I don't have it in me. Trying to be that has almost killed me. It's true, they took something from me I can't get back. At the same time, I wouldn't take it back even if I could. One of the reasons I couldn't keep existing in the world the same way was that I could no longer act as if truly things important were somehow of equal importance to things that are not. I couldn't keep lying. I came to understand the cost of it, and it's too high, for me personally, for all of us really.

I could retreat into the other things that are my lifelong obsessions, those "special interests." I could throw myself into the study of horror as a genre and storytelling more broadly, reading, writing novels, diving into sub genres of music and their history, practicing photography... I could hide. I could just try not to be noticed. Try to eek out an existence in whatever space might be left to force myself into.

That's not much of a life though. Do I find those things fulfilling? I sure do. They help sustain me, so I don't let them fall by the wayside. They keep me in touch with our humanity, they remind me I'm not alone. Still, it's not much of a life, living everyday trying to be a shadow, trying to hide, trying not to be noticed, trying to be what's expected... Since I've learned I'm autistic though, I understand nothing has been more harmful to me, and that I've harmed others in the quest to achieve, than the amount of effort and time I've put into trying to be what's expected, trying not to be noticed for what and who I am, trying to hide from the threat of those who see it as their duty to enforce the way others engage with the world.

Why exactly would I keep going then? If I'm sure I'm most likely not going to make it through this. Because a life of standing against the love of cruelty and celebration of depravity, a life dedicated to saying, "We all have worth, and we can do better than this. We can do better together," is about as good a life as one can make. A life lived in the purpose of saying all the ways fascists and Christian white nationalists try devalue human beings is wrong, is a good life. The truth is, I became free to be who I am, who I have always been afraid to be, when I stopped being afraid of what can be done to me, and started thinking about who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live. I life lived in service of speaking and acting in opposition to the ghoulish, bloodthirsty side of humanity, and how many people worship it, is a life well lived. If one person in Minneapolis, LA, Richmond, Providence Maine, Portland Oregon, any of the other places where people are putting their well being on the line, putting time into helping someone that maybe they don't have to, hears or sees me say, "Thank you for the example you are. I love you," it's worth it.

I hope I make it to the day we get beyond this. I hope I make it to the day we can start to take seriously building a future that renders to the past the things that got us here, that we have become inured to suspicion in all the things fascist Christian white nationalists hate about us, instead of valuing and celebrating the way our shared humanity intersects and compliments us all, that we have been corrupted by greed to the point we allowed its most vociferous apostles so much power, instead of lifting the voices who recognize is always reciprocal, never individual, that we have rewarded so much arrogant, certain ignorance and have so often punished the humility of sincere curiosity. I hope we will someday understand in the way we understand the sun rises, the accumulation of power is an inherent threat, and the accumulation of wealth is inherently power. I think we can someday understand this in a way that treats it with the desire for these with the suspicion it so clearly deserves.

I don't expect I'll make it there. In all honesty, I expect things are going to get worse before they get better. I do believe though. I have faith that day will come. I have faith in it because I see the people of Minneapolis, the people of LA, Richmond, NYC, Portland, even places like Tampa Florida. I know what they are learning, and who it is going to turn them into.

Fascists can make the space between borders that we call a nation hell for a while, but they can't stop you from living every moment as if you are free. It's what I plan to do. I know I won't be alone.

Keep going. Be free.