I'm Afraid of Americans

Fear. Anger. Two of the most common and destructive human emotional and psychological responses. They're deeply interconnected, and one of the few real truisms is how often anger is the veil for fear, especially but certainly not only for men.

Market Street, on August 12 in Charlottesville in 2012, is never very far from my thoughts these days, seeing hundreds of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis violently attack anyone and everyone who stood opposed to their terrified, lunatic delusions, while a few hundred police looked on. It's one thing to read their mind numbing yowling across different social media platforms and internet forums, and it's something altogether different to see in person what happens when they get what they want, the ability to violently intimidate or attack anyone who contradicts anything they believe is the natural order, the way things are supposed to be, the norms they feel are sacred.

No one just ends up being a white supremacist or Neo-Nazi in a vacuum. They are made and grown. There are entire veins of American culture and social life which are fertile ground for the seeds they plant and tend in their efforts to recruit and indoctrinate. There's still resistance to the idea that the mainstream right, the conservative movement, has been wholly infiltrated and taken over by what used to be referred to as the far right, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Across the country, we're seeing the efforts to insure that soil remains fertile, from book bans to anti-trans laws, to attempts to prevent teaching the history of American racism as anything other than an individual moral failing, instead of the systemic dehumanization it is.

It's the same variety of thinking which created The Lost Cause Mythology, popularized and legitimized in texts books used throughout the South and in many places in the Midwest. The Daughters of the Confederacy didn't go through the trouble of creating school texts, campaigning to influence school boards and state educational standards for no reason. It's the same reason they raised what in today's dollars would have been hundreds of millions of dollars to install monuments of Confederate military and political figures across the South, in many Midwest states, including some that didn't exist during the Confederacy, and a number of Union states.

People who steadfastly refuse to accept the possibility that racism and prejudice aren't the same thing, that one is a broader culture wide set of norms and the other is an individual, personal bias, often supported by those cultural norms, haven't landed on that perspective by mistake. It's taken sustained and coordinated effort to insure each new generation had a large enough population to insure the norms didn't change, the culture still supported those ideas, and different varieties of ignorance were protected. The evidence of systemic and institutional racism is very  plain, and very clear, unless that reality is just impossible and has no foundation for someone to understand it. The same can be said where various other issues of identity and power are concerned. Patriarchy, heteronormativity, the centrality of Christianity religiously. For these people, there is no context for those possibilities. It is not just impossible, it is rendered unpossible by the world they exist in.

It's like the anecdote about the ships carrying Columbus over the horizon, while the only one among the indigenous people who could see them approaching was the shaman. The idea is that, because the human mind is always building on information we already have, in the context we give it, and it literally adds or subtracts things based on pattern recognition. Being presented with something there is no context for, is something we can't see. In that story, the shaman is the only one who sees the ship because he's used to thinking about the existence of a world he can't see. He's used to extending his imagination to things he has no direct experience with.

To be confronted with this degree of blindness, as the result of everything we've been taught about our history, both personally and collectively, is frightening. No one wants to be a dupe. No one wants to be a mark. That is what it feels like when you start to realize how much of your prior context was based at least in part on social norms that require some people to be perceived as less than human, when they are in fact, just as human as you are. It's horrible to realize how much that was about preserving norms, systems and structure that brought wealth and power to a small few, and that you've participated, whether you consented to or not. It's terrifying, really. There's a whole process of emotional and psychological reactions that necessarily follow. "How could I have believed that?" Connected to it is the even more terrifying, "What could I do to change it now, knowing that it's so much a part of our world, I couldn't even see it?"

That is ground that is fertile for every brand of white hate and other varieties of extremism. They've been hard at work for over a decade now, expanding their ability to seed that ground. It takes fear and consistent tending to grow those seeds of fear into anger, but that's what all white hate movements do, and it's as much a part of the far right as any other characteristic one might require to define something as far right. It's what hate movements do generally, even beyond the borders of the US, in countries where their boundaries of identity don't have the same parameters ours do here. India is experiencing it's own far right ascendence, as is Israel.

Having allowed the far right (and the white hate which is the most prominent trait in the US cultural and political landscape) into the mainstream of American politics and culture is producing results. What we've been calling "the culture wars" aren't what I'm referring to, even as they dominate the headlines. By itself, "culture wars" is a misnomer, a misdirection and successful way to distract from the fact that this is a single battle, a single "war," being waged the people who feel the "normal" which is their legacy, shaped and formed by white, Christian, heteronormative identity and perspective. They're fighting one war, as are the rest of us, but it gets described as a plural because they're fighting it on multiple fronts, because this is has been the dominant, default perspective for thousands of years of Western civilization. Everything roughly termed "culture wars," emanates outward from that central sense of the default identity.

James Baldwin presented the country with a question that more succinctly pointed to the roots of this than probably any other attempt I've ever encountered. It's this white Christian identity which has had the cultural, economic and political power to identify who and what is other, and how those should be defined. Our entire conception of what is and isn't normal flows from it. It's not that the the hoods are coming off, it's that the hoods are coming back into the public square. x

The video of the death of Jordan Neely, and the resulting battle to contextualize it, is one sign of this. A man, obviously experiencing an acute mental health episode, who didn't threaten or accost anyone specifically, was put in a chokehold that killed him. It was homicide, according to the medical examiner, and murder according anyone who doesn't accept the legitimacy of white Christian identity as the power that gets to define what is and isn't "normal." Yet, the murder of a man crying out in hunger, thirst and the state of poverty he was experiencing, has been villainized and demonized, as deserving of the violent death which was visited on him. The man who killed him, who at least on the surface fits that standard of normalcy, is being lifted up as a hero.

Jordan was Black, mentally ill, and homeless, three things which are outside of the normal established by white Christian sense of identity and culture, and not coincidentally three things which the right has used to demonize and leverage as wedges to give them lanes to power, for centuries. You can't look at the history of anti-crime rhetoric and miss it, if you know what it is, which is part of the current project of the right, preventing a large enough population of people from knowing what it is, so they can't identify it. People who are experiencing homelessness and mental illness are exponentially more likely to experience violence from people who aren't than vice versa, but that's never the variety of crime we're most interested in addressing. Like wage theft, it's an inconvenient truth that the people with less or no power are subject to the exploitation and violence of those with more power. Accountability for those in the more powerful position is rare, and always minimal. Accountability for the poor and powerless is brutal and merciless. It's true that we could do less  than the inadequate measures we’ve taken to change this, and that's the future today's right wants, the future they're fighting and succeeding in creating.

Democrats, the political party more associated with "the left," have also campaigned using the fever dreams about crime in cities across the country, including Eric Adams in New York, where Jordan Neely's murder was committed. As told by the "savvy and realistic" political observers of yesterday and today, Bill Clinton's genius stroke was to bring this variety of rhetoric into the mainstream of Democratic presidential politics. Joe Biden's political career was built on it in Congress. The fevered delusions of the right get spread and further mainstreamed and legitimized because of what most of our "legitimate" political thinkers and perspective see as practical politics. The reasoning goes that anyone running for office has to win office in order to be able to do anything. It overlooks the fact that how they run for office can be one of the important factors in shaping how the electorate thinks about and contextualizes any subject. These Democrats get to claim their running on the issues that can get them elected, being practical and reasonable, and then turn around and claim they can't pass substantive solutions, because of the environment they helped created by legitimizing falsehoods through their campaign rhetoric.

A person who was crying out, into the ether, because he was hungry, thirsty and poor, violated the sense of normalcy to such a degree that his murder has become it's own political symbol. Daniel Penny is a hero to the right. The fear of this violation of normalcy so embedded in their narrative and perspective, the existence of a threat, the commission of a crime is unnecessary in believing deadly force is called for. I'm forty-six years old, and at no time in my life has the right not spent a good portion of its time and resources spreading fear about people who experience homelessness and mental illness, and basically anyone who exists outside of their narrow definition of normal. It's not shocking that they'd find a way to justify Jordan's murder, but it surprising that they'd be turning Daniel Penny into a hero, and advocating against any and all accountability. To them, the video of Jordan being publicly, loudly homeless and mentally ill evokes fear and a sense of threat. It's the influence of the far right, now nearly a decade into their control over the identity of conservatism, which prevents even a recognition of what the implications are and celebrates the violence against someone existing outside of that normative reality.

In the crowd whose every utterance is dripping with desperation to be recognized as "moderate," Jordan's murder is being treated as a tragic reality, almost as if it was impossible to prevent. David French characterized it as a failure of law enforcement in a column in The Times, not a failure of our ability to respond to the needs of people with mental illnesses, and our desire to insure they are put behind a veil the rest of society can blissfully ignore the existence of. Neely's repeated interactions with law enforcement aren't a sign of a failed heath care system, but instead of a lack of willingness to imprison people whose mental illness results in them being pushed to the furthest margins of society. French never gets around to the fact that prisons and jails are the number one source of treatment for people with mental illnesses in the United States. He seems to think we're aren't quite criminalized enough, and he's one of Liberal America's favorite conservative columnists, because he's "moderate and reasonable." As a person whose life has been partially shaped by mental illness, this does not inspire confidence in the ability of the "moderate and reasonable" to address the underlying problems with any astute observation or useful ideas.

To the "moderate/centrist" Neely's murder is another sorrowful, unfortunate incident for one to shake their heads at in lament, but not one which suggests any kind of major change in perspective might be necessary. Not in the approach to treating mental illness, beyond the standard tinkering technocratic suggestions, not in the response to the right openly supporting  escalation of corrective vigilantism as a norm to be perpetuated. There's no way access to mental health care could be free and easy, that's preposterous. There aren't even enough health care professionals to meet the needs we already have. We need to change just enough, that things aren't actually different. Like the impossibility of accepting that racism is indeed baked into American culture, politics and its institutions, the possibility that maybe health care shouldn't be a purely for profit industry is anathema. The suggestion of anything like it treated as a delusion, despite the continuing and very clear failures of the system as it exists. Addressing that someone so feared another human beings expression of desperate need, murder was their response, because  that's a really sticky wicket, and it would require addressing that same normativity.

Jordan Neely died because Daniel Penny, and two other men were frightened by his visible, vocal existence as divergence from the norm. I've been on subway trains, and been uncomfortable, with people displaying clear signs of mental illness, and people just being the run of the mill assholes we can all be. Not once has my sense of discomfort risen to the level of feeling like I had to physically assault or restrain someone, and Dear Reader, I'm going to hazard a guess that the bar I had for that reaction was far lower than yours is now, especially in the years I rode subways and public transit in NYC and the state generally. They were afraid of Jordan Neely, even as he made no threat, and the right, they love and live on that fear. It's Mother's Milk and Daddy's Belt, at the same time.

Let's talk about that fear, and that sense of threat, for a moment. On Christmas Eve of 200, I was working in record store in Holbrook, New York. Holbrook is in Suffolk County, almost dead center on Long Island. At 5:45 pm, a man came in, disheveled and distressed, asking for a copy of Britney Spears Oops... I Did It Again. Maybe you're old enough to remember the atomic bomb Britney's first album was in pop music. Maybe you're not. What's important is that we were sold out, at 5:45 on Christmas Eve. Not a surprise, considering the popularity of the album. Upon informing this individual that we were sold out, fifteen minutes from closing, at the very end of the biggest shopping season of the year, he flew into a rage. His rage was initially centered on his disbelief that we could be sold out of such a popular album. When I referred to the popularity of the album being the reason we were sold out, that rage then changed it's focus on me.

I'd spent a good number of years in various service industry positions at that point. I'd been a waiter/sever, a bartender, and even a bar manager, before deciding the hours and lack of constantly flowing drugs and alcohol were a better bet, and gone to work in record stores. In those positions, I'd been yelled out, screamed at, even had one person throw a bottle at me. I wasn't new to confrontations with customers. Never tell a drunk person they've had enough at three-thirty am when closing time is four, if you want to avoid being yelled at. Very few would defend choking a drunken idiot to death because they screamed and made a scene when they got cut off.

The reason I remember this one incident though, is that he spent the next fifteen minutes standing in the middle of the store screaming insults and threats at me. I was the assistant manager, and the other person in the store had signaled in question about whether or not they should call the police. It wasn't until five minutes after six that I finally said he needed to leave or we'd have to call the cops. We were both waiting to go to our family gatherings. It was Christmas Eve after all. He turned to walk out, and on his way, pushed over a stand with a hundred or so cd's on it, and laughed as he left.

Now, you might be asking, "Why wouldn't you want to call the cops?" My experience has been cops are not useful, and generally make things worse. At best, they'd show up thirty minutes later, and take a statement, long after the guy was gone, and both of us working in the store would have been even later for our holiday gatherings.

On top of that, I understood what was happening with this guy. He was there, as late as he could have possibly waited, trying to buy a gift for someone, probably a child in his life. He wasn't angry at me. He was threatening me, but he wasn't angry at me. He wasn't even angry that we were sold out of that cd. He was angry, and desperate, because this was just the latest in a long, long list of incidents where he failed someone he loved, in a very basic, easily preventable way. It was another Christmas he was disappointing someone.

I've lived my entire life with underlying depression, sometimes cripplingly severe. I'd been hospitalized once for suicidal ideation, prior to this. I knew what I was seeing. I might not react to it by raging at strangers, but I understood it. There were men in my life who did react to their own discomfort that way, and I always said I'd never be one. I've succeeded at that much, if little else.

I'm not saying I didn't envision pummeling him unconscious as he screamed at me, and for a few hours after. I did. Absolutely. The thing is, I understood what I was seeing, so I wasn't really afraid. Angry? Yeah. Really pissed when I had to spend an extra fifteen minutes picking up the CDs he'd knocked over and marking out the damaged copies, definitely. Did I think about chasing after him and taking him up on his offer to try and beat my ass? Yes. I didn't though. No one likes to be talked to like that, and anyone whose spent more than a few weeks in a service industry knows what it's like to be the brunt of someone's frustration, because they know you have to take it.

That man threatened me, repeatedly. "I WILL KNOCK YOU THE FUCK OUT! I WILL BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT YOU," as if I had decided I just didn't want him to have this thing, that it was my job to sell him, and would have made him go away. By that point, I was standing behind the counter, staring and nodding my head. This man may not have been diagnosed as mentally ill, but he was certainly not mentally well either. The number of men I've known who fit this description and lash out this way is at least in the hundreds, maybe even the thousands. I've known so many I know it was normal in a few periods of my life, and I couldn't name them all anymore.

Imagine someone, anyone in one of the many hundreds of videos we saw of people absolutely losing their ever loving minds, threatening and screaming at service industry workers during the COVID restrictions and mask mandates had ended up dead as the result of a fifteen minute chokehold. What would the response to that have been?

The difference between Jordan Neely and those people, is that he existed outside the understanding of "normal" for Daniel Penny, the two men who assisted him in restraining Neely and the people who sat there and watched a man murdered over fifteen minutes. Neely existed as one of those "others" the right and the "center" have normalized as a source of fear. If I had put that man in a chokehold resulting in his death on Christas Eve of 2000, in spite of his repeated and direct threats, I might still be in a cell somewhere in upstate New York. I certainly would have spent a number of years there, if not twenty. I wouldn't have been released without charge, and there would have been no political movement standing behind me, cheering me on a hero. No one would have been referring to me as a Good Samaritan, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis did Penny. People like Jordan Neely aren't just beyond help in the perspective of the right, they're a burden unworthy of care because they are takers who contribute nothing and threatens their view of the world. Whatever Jordan brought to the lives of his family and his loved ones isn't enough, because his need intrudes on the "innocent."

It's not just the murder of Jordan Neely either. Roxanne Gay, in a piece in the New York Times, titled Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed, outlined a number of the other incidents of violence resulting from the state of agitated paranoia that's settled in as we've allowed the far right to take over mainstream politics and culture:

In Kansas City, Mo., Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old, rang the wrong doorbell. He was trying to pick up his younger brothers and was simply on the wrong street, Northeast 115th Street instead of Northeast 115th Terrace, a harmless mistake. Andrew Lester, 84 and white, shot him twice and said, according to Ralph, “Don’t come around here.” Bleeding and injured, Ralph went to three different houses, according to a family member, before those good neighbors in a good, middle-class neighborhood helped him.

In upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman, Kaylin Gillis, was looking for a friend’s house in a rural area. The driver of the car she was in turned into a driveway and the homeowner, Kevin Monahan, 65, is accused of firing twice at the car and killing Ms. Gillis.

In Illinois, William Martys was using a leaf blower in his yard. A neighbor, Ettore Lacchei, allegedly started an argument with Mr. Martys and, the police say, killed him.

Two cheerleaders were shot in a Texas parking lot after one, Heather Roth, got into the wrong car. One of her teammates, Payton Washington, was also shot. Both girls survived, with injuries.

In Cleveland, Texas, a father asked his neighbor Francisco Oropesa to stop shooting his gun on his porch because his baby was trying to sleep. Mr. Oropesa walked over to the father’s house and has been charged with killing five people, including an 8-year-old boy, with an AR-15-style rifle. Two of the slain adults were found covering children, who survived.

At a Walgreens in Nashville, Mitarius Boyd suspected that Travonsha Ferguson, who was seven months pregnant, was shoplifting. Instead of calling the police, he followed Ms. Ferguson and her friend into the parking lot and, after one of the women sprayed mace in his face, according to Mr. Boyd, began firing. Ms. Ferguson was rushed to the hospital, where she had an emergency C-section and her baby was born two months early.

Add to those the story of David Doyle, who shot his 14 year old neighbor in the back of the head as she played hide and seek:

The neighbor, identified as 58-year-old David V Doyle, reportedly told police he went inside and grabbed his gun after he saw shadows outside his house. He saw several people running from his property and fired his gun at them, deputies said.

Within the last few days, a mother of four was shot through her neighbors door and killed, in a disagreement where she'd gone to retrieve an iPad her children left behind after being chased out of a field apparently owned by the shooter. Complicating things even further, the mother of four was Black, the shooter white, and Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law has meant police haven't pressed charges yet.

The day after the video of Jordan Neely's murder went viral, a man in walked into an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, killed seven people, and injured eight more before police killed him. Press would track down his social media soon after, and reveal him to be a white supremacist and Neo-Nazi, replete with SS and swastika tattoos. His name is of Latino origin, and this has been good fodder for the right, claiming that someone who "isn't white" can't be a white supremacist. It's another in the long line of claims they make relying on the ignorance of their audience and anyone who might hear them. It's part of why they're trying to obscure the fact that white, Christian, heteronormative identity is the default "normal" and the center from which their assault on everyone not willing to support that supremacy and centrality emanates. The shooter called out respect to Libs of TikTok on more than one post. That account belongs to someone whose been using their platform and notoriety to highlight targets for harassment and bomb threats due to LGBTQ+ hate. Following their posts identifying a business or person, far right groups will show up to intimidate, and bomb threats are now the norm, including to children's hospitals.

Elon Musk, now owner and CEO of one of the most powerful communications platforms in the world, has spent the last week blasting out far right conspiracy claims about the Allen, Texas shooter to his millions of followers. He's using his platform to put white nationalist propaganda in front of many millions of people. What he's claiming, in his own statements, is directly out of the fever swamps of the white supremacist, white nationalist and Neo-Nazi movements. Musk has also taken to openly promoting anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ hysteria.

The Texas mall shooter also heavily identified with the incel movement. It's connection to normativity is through a patriarchal perspective which sees the autonomy of women as a threat. It is very literally a movement based on the fact that lonely young men can't get women to sleep with them, and whose sense of masculinity, which informs their entire identity, is then thrown into such disarray, they have decided the autonomy that allows women to make those decisions is part of the downfall of society. It dovetails quite nicely with the rest of the far rights support for traditional gender roles, and undermining the autonomy of anyone who doesn't support them. This is among the most popular and successful recruiting pools for far right organizations like The Proud Boys, The Base, Atomwaffen Division and other white supremacist and fascist groups, all of whom have now been associated with committing violent attacks. You might remember Elliot Rodger, who is now the equivalent of a patron saint among the incel movement.

The following day, a man drove a Range Rover into a line of asylum seekers waiting on a bus stop outside a migration center in Texas. Famously, and as I personally witnessed, using vehicles as weapons of murder and mayhem is not a new phenomenon for the right and it's ideological adherents. Eight people died, ten others were injured. Witness statements heavily suggest the driver was motivated by anger toward migrants and asylum seekers. That's apparently not enough for police to feel they understand the motive though.

Whether or not one wants to make the claim that the right wants to see the levels of constant violence, the fear driving them and the anger with which they are ultimately brought to life, continue and rise is a matter of perspective. It can matter in terms of understanding how to best respond. It doesn't matter in practical terms, as long as it continues to happen frequently and the majority of us can hold to the belief it's essentially random.

The fact is, the longer it continues and the more frequently, the greater the likelihood the right finally finds the person who will have the collection of traits which will allow a majority of Americans will decide is the right recipe to "restore order and bring normalcy back." It's one of the most frightening things, in my mind these days, the degree to which there seems to be a sentiment that people just want to "go back to normal," despite how clearly the previous normal just lead us here. When the fear and the anger are having even more of a daily effect, and are intruding on people's lives, the cycle becoming self enforcing on an individual level, we'll embrace the person whose fascist inclination are crystal clear, whether or not they make them plain.

It's why the far right subscribes to what's called accelerationism. It's this thinking that lead members of The Base (which conveniently translates to Al Qaeda in Arabic) to plan an attack on in Richmond VA during the states annual day when people advocating for free, unfettered access to fire arms gather at the state's capitol. Their belief was that the attack would be blamed on "the left," and that would spark the chaos of a race war, which would give those who are prepared the opportunity to seize power.

The ninth episode of Succession did a chillingly good job of demonstrating what it sounds like when someone is promising to bring order out of the chaos brought about by attempting to secure domination of everyone outside of the norm, when the norm is such a narrow set of characteristics.

Before the person who emerges with the right alchemical makeup to successfully achieve that though, it has the added benefit for the right of causing an ever growing fear and genuine threat to all of those people who are outside the "normal" of white, Christian heteronormativity, and anyone who loves and/or supports people who do. People of color, LGBTQ+ people, anyone and everyone who can be characterized as a “taker” for any reason the right conjures out of it’s delusional perspective, immigrants and obviously, people who experience mental illness and/or homelessness. It’s now both extralegal and legislative, simultaneously. Everyone who isn’t “other” seems to believe going about their business, and “getting back to normal” is the best way to deal with it, but again, it was normal that got us here.

It doesn’t stop there though, as we see. It’s not always that direct and the people who are “others” aren’t always the ones to take the brunt. They will absolutely take the lion's share, but the right does not and has never cared about who might get caught in the crossfire either. That constant state of terrified agitation means you can’t turn down the wrong driveway, your kids can’t make the mistake of crossing the property boundary into the wrong yard, being accosted and accused of shoplifting can result in your death if you happen to also have any of your own fears related to existing in an increasingly unhinged nation of illusions and a state of terror. This is going to be an increasingly usual, and "normal" part of American life, because we refuse to directly confront what the right is, has become and what they're doing. All of our ideas about respectability and civility are part of how what they're manipulating our current state of existence, through the "normal" of it all and the desire to "get back to normal," and they aren't going to be what prevents this from getting worse. "If we just make the right reasoned argument, they'll see the light," absolutely misunderstands what today's right wing wants, and what they're willing to do to get it.

Consider that Florida just passed a bill making it illegal for trans people to use a bathroom that isn't in correlation with the gender assigned to them at birth. It legalizes genital inspections.

What this bill does, in a practical sense is create a legal structure for initiating a confrontation with people who do not meet the dominant (aka understood as "normal") standards of gender presentation. Let's also not forget Florida is a state which recently passed a bill legalizing the carrying of a concealed firearm, without a permit. This is a lever of repression, oppression and open persecution. The chances that all of these encounters will result in the person being confronted simply demurring and submitting to the person initiating the confrontation are slim.

Within days of the bill passing, those confrontations are already beginning. A cis gender woman was confronted and ejected from a bathroom when someone called the police because she was there. She wasn't performing femininity and womanhood in the way gender norms demand. She's a lesbian, but that doesn't change that she's a cis woman. LGBTQIA people who do not meet the standards of gender presentation that are the "norm" are going to be targeted and persecuted, using this law, as will cis hetero people to a lesser degree, and men to the least degree. All women who do not meet the standards of gender presentation understood to be normal will be the bear the brunt of this legalized intimidation tactic, including cis hetero women.

Nikki Haley, current candidate for the Republican presidential nomination has previously said Dylan Roof, who is now awaiting execution following the murder of nine Black church members who'd accepted him into their Bible study, had "hijacked the Confederate flag." Roof, posted a manifesto claiming his actions were meant to encourage a race war. He cited the usual non-sense claims about violent crime perpetrated by Black people against whites, specifically citing the rape of white women by Black men. History suggests there is no more Confederate sentiment than this one, as it's directly lifted from Klan literature during the period of Reconstruction. Haley is attempting to position herself as the "reasonable Republican," while now adding a new piece of disinformation to the right wing arsenal, that teenage girls are contemplating suicide because of the existence of trans people. There isn't a suicidologist in the country who would back that claim, and chances are now that Haley has publicly proclaimed it, it'll be among the new attacks on trans people.

One of the benefits of existing within the "norm" or "normal" is the assumption of innocence. "I'm normal. People like me don't do bad/evil things." Yet, there's no way to acknowledge what the reality of our current world is and not see that this law is going to be abused, overwhelmingly by people we'd otherwise consider "normal." We're going to see cases of "Drop your pants/lift your shirt or I'm going to call the cops/take you to the station," without doubt. If you think there won't be cops and civilians who use this law to harass women they find too loud or because they find them desirable, you obviously haven't paid much attention to the experiences women have been describing in excruciating, heartbreaking detail for decades, exemplified again by the #MeToo movement. The second most common complaints against police are all related to sexual harassment and sexual assault. A full 40% self describe behaviors in their homes and with their partners that would legally be considered domestic abuse.

All of that, then opens the door to legal definitions of what a man or woman should look like, and that's a regression back to the kinds of laws the right feels should never have ended in the first place. The harassment of hetero cis people who aren't trans, and who don't meet the standards of performance of gender norms is guaranteed. What we're likely to see in response is legislation defining the acceptable appearance of "men and women," in a claim to protect cis hetero people from "misapplication of the previous law," along with legal protections for law enforcement and civilians in their confrontations of people who don't perform gender to the legal standard. We've had laws against women wearing pants in the past. As recently as 1994, bills had to be passed to prevent employers from forbidding women from wearing pants. Just stop and think about how ridiculous that is, and the degree of desire for control of gender roles and their expression that it represents. Pants. It's not "Nobody can wear shorts." It's "Women are not allowed to wear pants." Think about how paranoid that is, for just a minute. A law had to made to stop people from enforcing "traditional (i.e. normal)" gender expression with that depth of paranoia, as if women in pants, regardless of their other qualifications or capabilities, were somehow a threat to the objective of business. Understand, this is what the "drag bans" are about as well. They have nothing to do with protecting children.

If you're aware of and able to cope with the idea that our concepts of "normal" in no way suggest a core morality, nor do they preclude behavior we generally consider wrong or even downright evil, the ancillary effects and uses of this new law in Florida come to mind in seconds. It's not a law about protecting anyone, but it is a law about enforcing the concept of normalcy most closely held by people whose sense of cultural identity has been formed by being white and Christian. It's not just

What we've been presented with, for years now, is atomization. In both the press, and by politicians, white supremacist groups, anti-LGBTQ groups,  the Men's Rights/Incel and other generally misogynist groups (including the anti-abortion movement). Press and politicians treat these movements as separate, and though there are disagreements between them at times, what never gets brought to the forefront is the degree to which they all rely on the sense of normalcy built by white Christian cultural identity.

The right will say, "Why does (insert token racial minority member) support traditional gender roles (misogynistic perspectives on power and social structure) on the world, if it's white supremacist?"  Because we've treated politics as existing on a spectrum of left to right, and not more like a solar system, in which the white Christian identity is the center, and exerts its gravity on every aspect of identity it defines as different/abnormal, this seems like a good question. White Christian identity has defined the entirety of what is and isn't normal, and with each added "abnormal" identity characteristic that is "abnormal" the further one is pushed from proximity to power. "Traditional" is just what power has been able to enforce as normal over time, including gender roles. For people with one identity trait which pushes them out from that center of power, it's not exactly shocking why they would want to insure they support the other "traditional" ideas power has enforced. Some access or some proximity to power is better than none, right?

It is clearer today than it has been in the last seventy years, that all of this is about white Christian cultural identity, and it's war to marginalize anyone who does not fit it and support it's place at the center of power.

In a nation with 300 million people being subjected to a constant barrage of culturally tailored terrors, both imagined and real, which also contains more guns than people, I wouldn't say the prognosis is hopeless, but the prospects of preventing the consequences of what we've already allowed from creating a level of chaos we haven't had the imagination to begin to investigate, don't look good either. Even the current controversy over the debt ceiling comes down to what they believe the level of pain, disruption and discomfort the public will accept without it having some kind of monumental electoral consequences. But, when pain, disruption and discomfort are the things your political movement have been built on capitalizing on and turning to your advantage, your incentive is to cause more pain, disruption and discomfort, up to and including death.

In activism, hope is a thing that comes up often. The sentiment is, "You have to give people hope in order for them to be motivated to do something." The reality is, I don't have much hope to offer. If there is a hope, it's that sometime soon (the sooner the better), there is a realization among a large enough mass of the public that our sense of normalcy is actually contributing to more of our problems than it is producing solutions right now. The fascist movement is taking full advantage of that fact, as well taking advantage of our conception of normalcy itself. Should enough of us be able to come to that realization, there is a good possibility people would be able to engage and organize in ways that simultaneously counter the far right, and force power to start being willing to accept and implement solutions our conception of normal don't currently allow.

The truth is now that this fascist movement has been able to capture as much of the publics imagination as it has, it's not going anywhere, any time soon. Hope is not something which can be given to you. What people are looking for in that case is cheap grace. Hope is something you make, and it is incredibly hard to make it alone. In struggles like this, hope is something made among those who choose work together to oppose the far right and their agenda for chaos, cruelty and violence. They make it, together. The first question each of us must ask, at this point, because this fascist movement has gotten where it has, is "Which side are you on?" If you are not on the side of fascists, then it is your job to make hope where ever you can, and to join who and wherever you can to fight them, and remember that fighting fascism is the job, not fighting the people who are fighting some other battle, in the best way they know how.