Speaking truth to power
I’ve sat at my computer multiple times trying to write something coherent in the almost two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s murder. I was sitting in a hotel room in Austin when I saw the video pop up on my phone. Like most things these days, my first thought was that perhaps it was a deep fake. I realized very quickly that it wasn’t. My initial reaction was selfish—“God, I just want to go to sleep for two weeks and wake up when the discourse is over.” I already knew what odious filth was going to permeate the online and political spheres. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to ignore it. I would want to. But I wouldn’t. And I didn’t. I’m exhausted.
Aren’t y’all exhausted?
I watched the press conferences and read all the breaking news headlines. I listened in horror as elected officials declared war on all Democrats and anyone who has left leaning political positions. Thankfully I don’t travel in circles where people I know celebrate political violence, but I heard about those accounts as well. I was holding it together pretty well until I saw the reason behind the initial thought that the shooter had been trans—because the people analyzing the bullets had seen the headstamp “TRN” which marks the ammunition as the product of the Turkish manufacturer Turan and had thought that it must mean TRANS. Again, I wished for weeks long slumber.
I know many people have heralded Utah Governor Spencer Cox for his press conference calling for a different path forward, and I agree with that sentiment. I agree that political violence begets political violence. But Cox also said this: “For 33 hours, I was praying that, if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for. Just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, hey we don’t do that here.”
This is dangerous. This is the kind of thinking that pits white, conservative Americans against everyone who isn’t a white, conservative native-born citizen. Cox was hoping for an “other,” because it’s easier to dehumanize someone who doesn’t look like you or practice the same religion as you or vote the same way you vote.
Over the last week and a half, I’ve been reading a lot about political violence in this country. I looked into the last 17 incidents that have taken place to see what I could learn. I’ll treat Jan 6th as a separate incident simply because it involved so many people, so out of the last 16 incidents of political violence:
All 16 were perpetrated by men
All by American citizens
13 were white men
Some of these men had liberal ideologies, some had conservative ideologies, some were anti-government, anti-semitic, misogynistic. Many had mental health issues or believed in conspiracy theories. But the thing that connects all of them is that they were so radicalized against an “other” that they were moved to commit violence.
Recently, Jon Favreau, one of the founders of Crooked Media and Obama’s former head speech writer, responded to Kirk’s murder. He said in part:
“I've seen people equate the harm that comes from hateful words or repressive policies with the harm that comes from extinguishing another human life. I've heard people argue that because America has always been a violent country, maybe we're getting closer to the point where political violence is necessary in the face of an authoritarian regime. After all, we fought a violent revolution to win our independence. We fought a violent civil war to end slavery. Maybe if enough Germans had engaged in political violence before Hitler's fascist regime took power, we could have avoided World War II. I want to persuade you that this is horseshit.
Targeted assassinations and acts of political violence are not like wars fought with armies. For one, they are rarely successful in bringing about anything but more death, disorder, and repression. I would bet that the tens of millions of Americans who have died in war and the families they left behind would have traded anything for one last chance to fight for a political solution instead. Dr. King was absolutely right when he told us that violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones.
King's civil rights strategy wasn't rooted in pacifism, but nonviolence. There's a difference. Nonviolent resistance is an active political force. It's also difficult and risky. John Lewis and the people who joined him on that bridge in Selma knew there would be a good chance they'd get their heads bashed in. But they also knew that those images might convince the people watching at home to support their cause. And they did. And that's because nonviolence is a political strategy designed to persuade, to win the perpetual battle for hearts and minds. It is the foundation of democracy. And over the last hundred years, it has been far more effective than violent conflict in bringing down repressive regimes. It's not even close.
I keep hearing people say there's no place in this country for political violence, which, sure, but it's more than that. The very purpose of politics is to figure out a way to live together without violence. The killer said, some hate can't be negotiated out. Sure, maybe that's true. But just because politics has failed in the past to prevent violence, just because it seems to be failing now, doesn't mean that we should give up on it. That we should give up on speaking and acting and fighting in a way that represents our best attempt to change people's minds. To bring the rest of the country a little bit closer to our point of view.”
I agree with Jon, but in order to change people’s minds, we have to be honest about what we’re facing in this moment.
I’ve been reading historian Heather Cox Richardson’s book Democracy Awakening, and she has reminded me that the targeted and precise dehumanizing rhetoric from conservatives started long before Donald Trump entered the fray. I’m not talking about pre-Civil War or even the Reconstruction era when racism and dangerous rhetoric were overt. Just take a gander at the Red Scare or the Southern strategy. If you tap into people’s fears (whether those fears are warranted or not), you can whip people into a frenzy about “the other.” Bad actors don’t need a pretext to justify taking action against “the other,” but they are always on the lookout for one. They start with rhetoric, but if one person or event gives them a reason, they will run with it ad infinitum.
During the Red Scare, the hunt for communists led to raids and deportations with no due process. It also whipped up the Lavender Scare, where thousands of gay people were discriminated against and harmed. The Southern strategy used racist tropes to divide people in the South and appeal to racist white voters. LBJ said of the strategy “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Later in 2005, Ken Mehlman, the chair of the RNC, apologized to the NAACP for “trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” It was intentional. It’s always intentional. Look at the propaganda created in 1930s Germany to dehumanize Jews, or ironically, the rhetoric around Palestinians as terrorists to justify the genocide in Gaza. And here, more recently, rhetorical attacks on women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, black and brown people, government officials, non-Christians.
Trump and his ilk are just the next in a long line of power hungry men who exploit difference for their benefit. They aren’t interested in solving problems. They don’t care about making people’s lives better. They lack empathy. Any issue that can redound to their benefit is on the table. Chaos is a ladder, right? Heather Cox Richarson writes that, “Nixon's media handlers vowed to reach voters by emotion rather than reason. Voters are basically lazy, one wrote. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration. Impression is easier. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” She goes on to claim, “When anti-government gangs marched on Charlottesville at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, they were the logical outcome of the right-wing militancy that the anti-New Dealers had tried to cultivate in 1934 to bring down FDR. The ensuing decades of violence were nurtured by bullies who justified their actions with a right-wing political ideology.”
So that’s it. That’s what we’re facing. A long line of bullies and puppet masters who sit in their positions of power and do everything they can to convince people to hate everyone who isn’t a native born white Christian. It’s the blood and soil rhetoric of Nazi Germany come to our shores. And it has captivated far too many people in America. Even before Charlie Kirk’s death, Trump, Republicans, and the MAGA base were reveling in the white nationalist statements and actions of ICE and in the power grabs and quashing of free speech across the country. But after his death, the fervor has ratcheted up to a fever pitch. Look no further than white nationalist Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech at Kirk’s funeral where he said:
“The day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears have been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand…We will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing.”
Doesn’t seem like he’s talking about Tyler Robinson, does it?
Miller also said that there is, “a vast domestic terror movement. And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.”
It’s really hard to be a deep thinking, reflective person during this hellscape of a timeline. It’s hard to stomach that everyday Americans who are pushing back against the rise of authoritarianism are being told that our protest is the cause of the violence and the division. Let me be clear: It is NOT dangerous rhetoric to describe what you see happening with your own eyes, to describe the actions of people in power who are behaving like dictators, angling for authoritarian power grabs. What IS dangerous is to tell those people they can’t describe what they are seeing because in describing those actions they are radicalizing people against those abusing their power.
I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know how to convince those who have fallen under the spell of the Republican party, of Trump, to open their eyes. I don’t know how to convince them that Trump and his goons will never make things better for them. That wiping out vast swaths of institutional knowledge is dangerous. That while they look to liberals and leftists as their enemies, Trump, his family, and his cronies are raking in an unthinkable amount of money and consolidating power in truly alarming ways. I don’t know how to get them to be rational or to find their empathy. I don’t know how to convince them that diversity is interesting and not something to recoil from. How do we convince them?
Some days I want to give up on politics, give up on this country, accept that the American experiment is over. But then my rational brain takes over, and I realize what a short-sighted and selfish feeling that is. People have been fighting injustice in this country since before its inception. They have given their lives to the cause. They were exhausted, too, but found joy in small things—things that buoyed them to fight another day. They leaned on their loved ones and took heart from others in the fight. I am grateful for American citizens who are standing up for the rights of immigrants, for the doctors and humanitarians in Gaza, for the people on the flotilla trying to break the aid blockade, for the law firms and universities who refuse to capitulate to the bullies, and for the everyday people who speak truth to power even when it means putting their safety on the line.
I’m heading out in Virgie on October 3rd for a month long trip up through Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to Connecticut and then onto NY, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and I promise my next post will actually be about van life; but in the meantime, please enjoy this photo of Roxy and Sunny giving Jay and Silent Bob energy (according to Larissa) and this video of a baby bull chewing on my shirt.
