Now, That's What I Call Facism! Vol. 2020 - dispatches from quaratine #3
We don't live in a simulation, but half of the American political structure would have you think we do...
We live in a simulation.
At the opening of 2019, a very strange thing began to occur during my car-share rides: men — primarily white — were attempting to radicalize me during short rides into downtown Los Angeles as I commuted to work or to meet up with friends. One ride sticks out in my mind because of the opening line presented to me upon entering the slate-gray sedan, “Looks like we’ve got a twenty-two-minute ride ahead of us…I wonder what we could talk about?”
If someone had told me, for the rest of the ride, this supposed millionaire — who was driving Lyft on the side because he “still had money but lost a lot of it to divorce and a lot of bad decisions” — would attempt to feed me conspiracy theories as a form of small talk (the wildest of which attempts to connect Anthony Bourdain’s suicide to the QAnon conspiracy that 45 is dismantling a global child sex ring because you know, it’s not like 45 hasn’t been accused over the years of being an actual, factual predator). It happened so often I began to report to both Lyft and Uber that drivers were attempting to convert their riders to whatever conspiracy they felt best represented their political beliefs. I never got any significant customer service answer from either company.
The real kicker though was when car-ride sharing millionaire told me, a small, Black, visibly androgynous person, that he believed that Trump was going to save us (myself included) because it was “Biblical prophesy”, I actually heard that story somewhere before…
I grew up in a cult.
After 9/11, our pastor became increasingly obsessed with something known as the New World Order conspiracy, it seemed he couldn't help himself when it came to the topic because it popped up in sermons for years. Naturally, I got on The Googles and did A Search. I thought it curious that my searches often turned up links to white supremacists forums and websites spewing conspiracy theories that were somehow making their way into the pulpit, and into my psyche.
A few months later, our pastor preached the most bizarre sermon I’ve ever heard in my life: that dinosaurs were actually created from experiments ‘willful’ humans who thought themselves to be smarter than God and this was the ‘real’ reason for the great flood — to punish these humans for thinking they could be on God’s level. I promptly told my m*m I would no longer be going to church because not only was that sermon wrong, it was a straight-up lie that people left our church believing.
It would take too many years before I was able to leave the church behind.
We live in a simulation.
A few days ago, I was thumbing through the news on my phone and saw a headline that caught my eye. Actually, it was the subhead that caught my attention: He has done revelatory reporting. But an examination reveals weaknesses in what may be called an era of ‘resistance journalism’, our columnist writes.
“What in the FUCK is resistance journalism,” I mumbled angrily to myself.
I love language but I am not a fan of additions to the lexicon that are essentially euphemistic. I do not care to speak about the reporting in question nor do I care to speak on whether that reporting was incorrect or false. I do want to talk about what it means when these new euphemisms crop up, especially when the brains behind the euphemism is a newspaper.
Perhaps, maybe, the publication itself shouldn’t be blamed entirely since the writer came upon that language and used it in his piece to serve its (his) purposes, however, it is the publications fault that they decided to keep this euphemism in the copy and then make sure it was featured in the subhead. The New York Times has been having some serious issues with the tone of its reporting in this era of growing fascism, so this little bumble feels purposeful.
I cannot help but wonder why the adjective resistance was specifically used to describe what is simply compelling investigative journalism. I’m sure some part of it was just straight up pettiness on the part of the writer, but that doesn’t quite explain why The Times has been attempting this middle of the road neutrality approach to their journalism in the wake of an aspiring dictator whose purposeful mismanagement of a plague has caused our “first world” country to become a failed state in just eight short weeks to serve his ends.
The non-critiques of this administration’s increasingly worrying policy, pardons, and outright crimes are curious, given these sorts of political crimes are ripe for robust investigative reporting, but in the wake of the aggressive buy-out of American newspapers by conservative interests, it's difficult to overlook just what is happening here. Peter Thiel killed Gawker on the strength of having a lot of money and a bone to pick. He was one of the first tech bros to publicly endorse our current president.
Current public enemy number one, Jeff Bezos, recently became a trillionaire (while thirty-six million Americans are unemployed for the foreseeable future), while his company conducts an illegal witch hunt to identify and forcibly remove his own employees if they have any ideas about unionizing or insisting on their right to a safe workplace during a plague — owns the Washington Post. The Post is the most aggressive of the newspaper bunch, so to speak when it comes to their insistence on factual reporting of the daily misbehaviors of the administration and the president, but they only seem aggressive in response to the lack of everyone else’s analysis.
Our independent and alternative weeklies and monthlies are all but gone, and the few that remain are hanging on by a thread. Local newspapers have also been decimated in the wake of this presidency. These publications, just by existing, help to challenge the dominant narrative. In times of fascism, having alternate voices and sources of news allows society to think alternate thoughts, to not be politically manipulated or inculcated by ideology and propaganda.
Our current alternative to the dominant narrative has largely been fake news and white supremacist propaganda which only bolsters the dominant narrative.
It’s a bad mix, but a smart tactic if you’re trying to wage war among your populace.
I grew up in cult.
I’m primarily concerned with what shapes a psyche.
The psyche being understood as “a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, language, and memory”, plays a significant part in shaping our attitudes and actions, so my concern about what shapes the American psyche stems from the lived experience of having my own psyche shaped in a manner that was dangerous not only to the singular self but also the collective and relational selves.
I left the Adventist “church” at nineteen after having a crisis of faith and the hardest work I have had to do since leaving a cult is re-wiring my brain to be able to participate fully — meaning ethically and morally — in the external reality in which we all live and share. I was living in a falsified reality that required I spend time deep inside in my own internal reality, one that was dictated to me by an abusive, power-hungry narcissist, and then church fortified that same authoritarian control over my thinking and behavior.
It was so physically uncomfortable to think a thought opposite of that which I was taught because the fear of punishment, of ridicule, of being rejected entirely would bubble up in my guts, turning my stomach into a cauldron. I’d been taught that fear was a sign from God that whatever you were thinking or doing, or thought and had done, was wrong and sinful.
Even my intuition was being shaped by forces outside of me, so I couldn’t trust it.
I needed to see for myself what the world outside of the church was like and that meant I would have to make up my own mind about what was right and wrong. I found an intellectual (and spiritual) home in philosophy, epistemology, and anthropology. In studying and engaging in these practices, I began to recognize that my humanness didn’t need to be dictated to me by something or someone else. In fact, it is my work as an individual to simultaneously carve out a new worldview for myself and establish my own ethics around how I wished to experience my humanity outside of the prescriptions of a cult.
We live in a simulation.
The Times has been maintained by the same family since 1896.
In that span of one-hundred and twenty-four years, the publication has failed to document into the public record the obituaries of Black people and other notable people of color —only recently correcting that error in 2018. I probably don’t need to mention the publication ignored stories on lynching and racial violence at its height during the nadir and has continued this pattern in a slightly adjusted way for the present: not altogether excluding stories of lynchings but instead reporting on them in a manner so opaque, it often seems the racial violence committed by white people (especially against Black people) purposefully casts doubt against the deceased victim and the survivors of the deceased victim, thus creating distrust around the guilt of the white aggressor despite factual evidence in the way of cadavers.
It is just as opaque on other reporting around race and violence in the United States.
This not a neutral position to take, and it is dangerous.
The Time has been giving me ‘middle of the road’ folk who think politics have consumed too much of our culture, so they can evade their journalistic responsibilities and ethics by being as aggressively and annoyingly neutral as possible until it means holding whiteness, white people, and particularly white men accountable. And then decisions are made.
It’s despicable that the publication would insult the investigative work of others when it has failed to do much serious investigative work itself in an era of fake news and collusion with a corrupt government with aspirations of fascist dictatorship. Every time the advisor to the president wants to deny the natural right of humans to migrate and immigrate, I cannot help but wonder why there is almost never a historic link being made because this is not the first time the Wh*te H*use has crusaded on behalf of racist immigration policies and the groups being targeted have historically been targeted by the American government. Then there is that pesky issue of when a Black person is murdered in cold blood by one of their white countrymen, despite the fact that the violence was in fact racist, the word racist or racism is always diluted by single quotation marks.
When it comes to things we know to be true, why is there so much reticence around the act of telling the truth? And what does this irrational fear of truth say about the American psyche?
We live in a simulation.
Glitches are a common disruption in any simulation. Anyone who has ever played a video game is familiar with just how often glitches occur and how fucking infuriating they can be, especially when you’re almost at the end of your gameplay. Glitches can also be a sign that there is a significant issue on the backend that needs immediate repair. In pre-game development, a glitch can signal careless mistakes or purposeful sabotage.
It is hard to know the purpose of bad code until you examine it.
I grew up in a cult. And so did you.
A few weeks ago I told a friend, “I try not to project innocence on white people anymore,” after she recounted to me some anti-Asian racism she observed in her neighbors. I think this conversation may have happened around the time the president made a point to call the novel coronavirus the ‘China virus’. I was recounting to K the circumstances under which I’d departed Chicago, the city I’d called home for almost a decade, and the circumstances were systemic racism and segregation.
I know you’ve read the Case for Reparations by now, so you already know.
A few years into Obama’s tenure, the midwest hadn’t really gotten the ‘post-racial’ memo (or got it and ignored the shit altogether, but I digress) and instead doubled down on racism in a city prickling with tension for over a century, now. Knowing the history and the circumstances of racial violence in the region, I became deeply afraid for my life. I immediately felt a gauze of danger fall over my body that I knew would never leave me, that maybe only death can remove.
The midwestern psyche is particularly chilling to me, in that I came across so many white people, whose family or friends had some generational affiliation or allegiance to the Klan, who would casually offer such tidbits in the middle of a conversation as though that were a perfectly civilized thing to talk about. Having been raised in Florida, not too far from a city called Davie, or “the seat of the Klan”, so I knew about this sort of shit second-hand but had never first-hand experienced it until moving to Illinois for undergrad.
During my first three weeks in Chicago, one of my dormmates burst into my dorm to call me a nigger to my face and then blamed it on the alcohol, literally. The motherfucker had a 40 in a paper bag in his hand with his cap broke off to the side, and I wish I could tell you that was me being spicy but it’s not. I had a photo class with this joker twice a week.
On a trip to the Southside from the Loop, I got on the packed 2 during rush hour. By the time I sat down, the only available seat was right next to me so, when a frail elder who could barely hold herself up started walking up, I got out of my seat — the ones reserved for elderly and pregnant passengers — and reached towards her, gesturing she could sit. That old woman looked at me as if I had spit in her open mouth and then turned her back to me. Twenty minutes into the ride, after most riders got off the bus, was when she finally sat down because she found a row where no Black passengers were sitting and that reader was the moment I realized why she looked at me the way she had.
Upon boarding a flight at O’Hare I had a huge 20+lb camera bookbag on my back navigating through the narrow walkway, I lost my balance and accidentally brushed an elderly woman’s arm sitting in first class. She proceeded to grab my book bag and pushed me forward, berating me in Russian, sending me tipping over into a mother with her toddler. Everyone witnessed what happened, and not one adult on that plane scolded that woman, including the flight attendant who watched the woman grab me.
I cried the entirety of the four-hour flight back home.
Between the sensationalist reporting on gun violence in Black communities across Chicago and the increasingly hostile microaggressions I had to navigate, I became fearful of everyone around me. My fear of my community, however, was my final straw so my partner and I packed up our shit and left our home and friends behind, or so we thought.
It took about a month, or a better measure of time would be that it took from the time that Tamir Rice (12) and Laquan McDonald (17) were both murdered by the police, for each of us to severe our ties with most (read: all) of the white people we knew. In a few last-ditch attempts to reconcile the individuals I knew with the rhetoric they were spewing I found myself, week by week, taking to The Book to prove my existence to the white people around me. I had lived in a city for eight years, built relationships and friendships I valued deeply, only to discover nine out of ten white people I shared my life with actively and secretly despised me.
That level of betrayal is difficult to put into words, so I stopped trying to.
We do not live in a simulation. This isn’t the Sims, this is real life.
There’s a certain amount of naiveté one has to practice in order to live among white Americans, hence the projection of innocence we all participate in when it comes to reading the white American psyche, and less abstractly, white American misbehavior. This country really thinks the pinnacle of human ethics and morality are resolved via the good guys/bad guys dichotomy that does not exist, as the kids say, period. And it is for the above reason why that fucking resistance journalism euphemism gets my blood boiling — it’s like being sneered at for attempting to grapple with one’s ethics and for having a moral compass oriented towards humanity and not political exploitation, for feeling a duty to protecting the vulnerable, for wanting to see the truth always, in all times, in all circumstances.
All journalism —if it’s thoughtful and ethical and informative — should be resistant to lies, conspiracy theory, abhorrent ideology, misuse of power, all abuses against humanity, and straight-up bullshit. Journalism is just one of a few ways we get to practice being in a democracy but we can’t practice democracy well hedging all our bets on this inane idea that the real enlightened beings taking the high road simply by taking no road at all.
We, each of us, know definitively what we believe to be true and as such we know whose side we’re standing on at all times. In this historic moment, where nothing is more important than your race, gender, and immigration status than whether you feel you are represented by a “cuck” or by an “American Warrior!!!”, when you choose to hide behind euphemism and when you try to play to both sides of the aisle, or no side at all when fascism has made a home in the White House, you are a coward.
Or a white supremacist, or at the very least, a sympathizer of white supremacist beliefs.
In all regards, you are a coward.
Our journalism has failed us in this current president’s tenure — we didn’t have to be here, this didn’t have to be an inevitability. In the wake of 92,000 (and counting) lives being lost in two months, not a single news publication has commented on the mass forgetting that’s being led by this administration. There hasn’t been a moment of silence in recognition of all the lives lost. I don’t know the names of any individuals who have passed nor do I know anything about their lives. That was not the case twenty years ago and the sort of responses we've been forced to observe around mass death and the social contract of keeping each other safe have been abhorrent.
In many ways, by telling the truth of a situation publicly (via newspapers and tv news media) is one way of holding society accountable for its behavior. No one is holding us accountable and the few who attempt to do so have done it at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. As of writing this letter, The Boston Globe is the only news publication to have called for the president’s resignation. The only one. The Globe seems to know definitively what they believe in, at this moment.
In a democracy, the institutions that supposedly point to truth, integrity, justice, and free access to information, should be able to take a stand to say we are in grave danger and we must act, now. And we, as Americans, ought to be able to open our mouths and say wholeheartedly not anymore, not now, and not ever.
A significant portion of the country has always been receptive to the act of murdering other humans in cold blood, especially under ideal conditions —typically, an administration that both ignore provocations of racial violence and subtly harnesses that provocation by way of stochastic terrorism while bolstering and enacting policies that allow for these acts to take place without interference from the justice system and without ever having to be met with actual accountability for ending human life — and far too often does this country find itself under that exact flavor of leadership.
Often, when you really like the way something tastes or feels, you develop a craving for it but not all cravings need to be sated.
While writing this letter over the course of the month, I listened to the classic ‘There’s A Riot Going On’ by Sly and the Family Stone alongside Funkadelic’s self-titled debut after listening to Nick Hakim’s ‘Will This Make Me Good’ — so far, my favorite of the post-Corona albums to come out. During the editing phase, I kept Lion Babe’s 'Cosmic Wind' on threepeat. This month, I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom which caused some wires in my brain to connect and suddenly, a book proposal sprung out of me. I also (finally) read Alan Moore’s 'Watchmen' in preparation for a rewatch of the HBO series. The last three pages of the graphic novel make reference to an event in which over a million Americans died. It sent a chill down my spine. This letter was largely inspired by Dan Harmon, the guy behind 'Rick and Morty' because in 2017 he got on stage in front of a bunch of white people and yelled at them to openly and publicly say they are not nazis. That shit was fire.