White Supremacy Has Shown Its Real Face

The now-infamous photo of an unidentified woman surrounded by
Patriot Front members, captured by Reuters stringer Cheney Orr

By now we’ve all seen the photo taken on July 4^th, 2026, of a lone Black woman on a Washington, DC, commuter train. She’s surrounded by White men in matching polo shirts, balaclavas, ballcaps, and wraparound shades: Patriot Front members heading for a White supremacist march through the capital streets. The woman looks not quite into the camera, not quite at us, the picture of determination and despair.

From the photo’s publication, it struck me that not one White person looked at the Black woman. Though their philosophy relies on the presumption that they are better than her, or at least more deserving of life’s protections, they apparently can’t face her while pushing that agenda. Even on the commute, they remain in uniform, shrouded in comfy anonymity. Imagine  construction workers refusing to remove their hard hats and PPE.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears restatement. Harper Lee presented lynchings, the once-common act of racial supremacy through violence, as an overflowing of po’ White trash hatred in a moment of moralistic outrage. Lee’s “Old Sarum boys” rushed the county prison fueled by indignation and moonshine—but, importantly, they retreated as soon as Scout Finch recognized one and called him by name. Losing anonymity broke their momentum.

Except that’s not how it happened. Anybody who’s read American race history knows that lynchings were almost always planned, usually for days in advance, and frequently took place in broad daylight. Perpetrators photographed themselves with the victims, both before and after the murder, and often sold the resulting pictures as penny postcards. Perpetrators of racial violence didn’t feel obliged to conceal their identities.

This wasn’t coincidental. As theologian James Cone wrote, American lynchings served the same role as Roman crucifixions, an official reminder that the dominant population didn’t just run the country, they owned the underclass. Perpetrators showed their faces, both during and after the violence, not only because they feared no consequences, but to ensure the targeted population knew they feared no consequences. Racial oppressors were brazenly, monumentally unperturbed.

I already anticipate the counterargument: didn’t the KKK wear masks and sheets as uniforms? Yes and no. D.W. Griffith’s silent movie Birth of a Nation popularized the image, but that popularity was commodified by racist huckster D.C. Stephenson, according to journalist Timothy Egan. The Klan hood was an image sold to American racists by a former door-to-door salesman, who wanted to monetize American bigotry.

The Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, February
1960. Note that the participants on both sides aren’t afraid to show their faces. (Source)

My point is, racism used to happen in broad daylight. The counterprotesters who opposed the Woolworth’s counter sit-ins or the Freedom Riders, not only didn’t cover their faces, but they didn’t even mind being photographed. They openly put their faces and names to their violence; the white hood existed mainly for weekend pageantry. These historic bigots would’ve scoffed at needing to hide their faces from anyone, particularly a Black individual.

Saturday’s bigots, by contrast, concealed their whole faces. Other than the occasional nose poking out, all identifying characteristics are sanded off. The matching beige ballcaps with identical patches, the matching polos with Betsy Ross flag decals, the matching Oakley wraparounds: any of these men could be any other. They’ve erased their identities because, as participants discovered in Charlottesville in 2017, the consequences of being identified are now severe.

Indeed, because their faces and facial expressions are whitewashed away, there’s only one way of spotting how these men feel about their situation: none of them, not one, looks at the woman. They avoid even the possibility of meeting her gaze, even through the armor of their mirrored shades. People generally avoid meeting others’ eyes for two reasons. First, they might believe the other is more powerful or of higher standing.

Second, because they’re ashamed.

Patriot Front members might yearn for a beatified past where their melanin-deficient skin would’ve provided them with protection in America. But they know America’s cultural currents have moved on without them. Not that racism has receded; as Derrick Bell taught, racism has a nearly infinite ability to adapt itself to changing cultural conditions. But we’ve reached a point where their outright bigotry and cross-burning theatrics have become pathetic, not terrifying.

But more importantly, society hasn’t just changed; they’ve internalized that change. These men conceal their faces because they know they’ll never recover if they’re identified on camera. They know that we’re not afraid of them anymore, they’re afraid of us. They hide their faces where their ancestors didn’t, because they know they’re doing wrong. And that knowledge won’t just go away, not during their lifetimes anyway.

Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

CONTENT WARNING: this essay contains direct discussions of sexual and gendered violence. I've tried to remain dispassionate and considerate of readers’ sensibilities, but the subject remains what it is.

Nobody asked my opinion about the “global rape academy” story that exploded on social media last week, nearly a month after CNN first reported it. As a book blogger with a negligible audience and few respondents, my interpretation doesn’t matter. Certainly nothing I say will ameliorate the repellent content and persistent harm this “academy” has perpetuated. I’ve debated whether my contribution would do more harm than good.

But in one of those flukes of synchronicity, this story overlapped with several others. The story gained traction as I finished reading Gareth Russell’s The Six Loves of James I. Russell writes that, nearing the end of his life, King James strenuously avoided entangling England and Scotland in Europe’s wars of religion. For this, British political and religious leaders disparaged James as “feminine,” and therefore unworthy of power.

Millions of viewers watched Louis Theroux’ Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, which dropped almost simultaneously with CNN’s report. Theroux interviews representatives of a highly public form of masculinity, which rewards displays of strength and valor, while actively disparaging women. Theroux’ interviewees call their girlfriends “the dishwasher” and discuss monogamy for thee but not me, demonstrating the inferior position they reserve for women.

Anti-estrogen pills for men have begun invading my all-night doomscrolling sessions. Minimally regulated supplements, sold by mostly anonymous vendors, promise to help aging men eliminate man-boobs and soft guts, while turning them into sexual powerhouses guaranteed to please their partners. These ads’ innate subtext includes that any implication of femininity, including softness or having boobs, undercuts one’s status as a man and a husband.

All three influences share the supposition that femininity is necessarily inferior. Any man showing feminine signs is perforce disqualified from being a king, a husband, or even a man; men must purge femininity through war, domination, or chemical self-mutilation. Men must hurt or kill anything feminine within themselves, not only internally, but in highly public displays of masculine reinforcement. Anything less diminishes a man.

Should we wonder, in such conditions, that some men—and indeed, some women—consider the feminine necessarily deficient, no matter who displays it? Womanhood becomes, not another manifestation of human potential, but an enemy to control and restrict. Men raping their wives, or men intruding themselves into women’s personal space in public to demand sexual favors, aren’t merely criminals or assholes. They’re defending their dwindling male prerogative.

This form of masculinity often, but not necessarily, correlates with political conservatism. Right wingers like Paul Joseph Watson, who popularized the epithet soyboy, and Alex Jones, whose rage at progressives often becomes so pitched that he screams wordlessly into the microphone, perform notorious displays of machismo. Jones’ shirtless horse rides, a naked mimicry of Vladimir Putin, are pointedly anti-American in nature.

Nor are these displays unique to men; because conservatives consider anger a prerequisite to seriousness, conservative women adopt public displays of macho anger. Tomi Lahren notoriously starts her broadcasts already spitting rage. Candace Owens loves getting belligerent, often cussing into the microphone to prove her legitimacy. If violence and war are necessarily masculine, and therefore strong, these women will remake themselves as masculine as possible.

Most men lack the social reach of Alex Jones, manosphere influencers, or President Taco. They can’t hurt women as a class. They’re reduced to hurting women as individuals—which means the women to whom they have the readiest access. Reducing gendered violence to a sexual fetish also allows them to commodify their violence; CNN reports that several “academy” participants sold one another unregulated sedatives online.

Woman hatred as entrepreneurship. Yuck.

These men drugging and raping their wives are functionally equal to ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who videoed himself shooting a mother in the face, then calling her a “fucking bitch.” Whether it’s murdering mommies in the street, belittling them on podcasts, or turning them into lifeless sex dolls in their own bedrooms, these men all treat women equally. Femininity deserves to be hurt, both in myself and in the world.

I take comfort that these displays are rare. As Snopes reports, the 62 million users number, popularized after CNN’s report, describes the entire hosting website, a porn outlet owned by a New York smut entrepreneur. The “academy” itself had barely a thousand active users. Even this, though, isn’t wholly comforting, as the site’s content is entirely user-generated, and therefore almost certainly contains other illegal content.

I wish I had uplifting, humanitarian solutions. Sadly, we’ve reached this position behind a raft of causes: male economic obsolescence, rapidly changing gender roles, diminishment of hierarchy and violence as mandatory social organizing tools, and more. We neglected the causes until they became a crisis. History warns that the situation is unlikely to reverse itself now, unless something brutal upsets the apple cart.

Until then, all of us, male and female, will continue paying the revolting price.

The Doomed Promise of Change from Within

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

“Why don’t you try applying for ICE and see if you can maybe change things from within?”

I’ve been out of work for several months now with precious few leads and no real opportunities pending. I can’t be the only one in this situation, as our national policy-makers keep inventing new ways to submarine domestic development and make every consumer good more expensive. But every unemployed person ultimately faces the problem alone, as bills accumulate and the daily reality becomes more bleak. I find myself becoming despondent.

Meanwhile, ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has recently received a massive cash transfusion from the Taco Administration, making it America’s largest law enforcement agency. This tops the previous largest agency, Customs and Border Protection. To meet the Administration’s demand for more deportations, ICE is offering luxurious sign-on benefits and expedited training. It’s also notoriously handing firearms to loose cannons and dangerous people.

In this tumultuous context, my friend good-heartedly suggested I join ICE. Why not get that lush government bag, she said, while also standing against the rampant violence we’ve seen unfolding in Minnesota? I’ve read and heard similar stories for years. Applicants join the police, military, federal agencies, and other secure government jobs, full of idealism, eager to push reform peacefully, from within. These stories seldom end well.

We’ve probably all heard anecdotes. For serious sources, let’s consider Shane Bauer, author of American Prison. As a journalistic project, Bauer took a job as a corrections officer at a private prison in Louisiana. In his telling, Bauer started off idealistic, eager to discover how prisons change prisoners while making a profit. He left the project, though, when his girlfriend reported his private communications becoming increasingly bitter, vindictive, and violent.

Matt Taibbi describes something similar while writing about Eric Garner. He quotes a patrolman who joined the NYPD, hoping to challenge the department’s bureaucratic cruelty. But subject to constant micromanagement and quotas, he found he hadn’t changed the department, it changed him. Besides this, agencies notoriously find inventive ways to enforce conformity, resist scrutiny, and punish reformers and whistleblowers.

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

We could discuss why this happens. Maybe power corrupts, but as Brian Klaas demonstrates, power also attracts those most willing to be corrupted. People who become cops and corrections officers already have a vindictive streak; power simply gives them official vestments. Besides law enforcement, we’ve probably all seen laborers who became managers, students who became teachers, renters who became landlords, and adopted the worst aspects of their new positions.

Colleagues of good standing could, hypothetically, stop this. But we know they don’t. Six ICE officers dog-piled on Alex Pretti before one finally shot him; three officers surrounded Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd, not stopping Chauvin, but forming a human barricade to keep civilians back. Maybe officers high-minded enough to stop the violence already quit the agencies, but more likely, participants conformed themselves to the existing structure.

These patterns aren’t unique to law enforcement, though police ubiquity makes it more visible. When institutional rot infiltrates a subculture, purging it is rare. We’ve seen private corporations, college fraternities, and other civilian organizations succumb, even if they aren’t protected by qualified immunity. Put simply, those who have power, even limited power within a specific institution, become enamored of it, and perform heinous acts to protect it.

Nor are these effects limited by circumstances. Shane Bauer recalls needing months to recover from the aggression he learned as a corrections officer, rewriting his book several times to purge the anger. Eyal Press describes the ways that COs, drone bomber pilots, and even meat-packing workers experience wartime levels of flashbacks and nightmares. Social psychologist Rachel MacNair calls this phenomenon perpetration-induced traumatic stress.

I’d argue that the violence we’re now seeing enacted in Minnesota, is a more extreme version of violence we’ve all seen before. From schoolyard fistfights and fraternity hazing, to union busting and workplace interrogation, to police violence at anti-police violence protests, it’s all the same. In a structurally unequal society, those who benefit can maintain their standing only through force, or threats of force. Wealth, power, and status are therefore innately violent.

Therefore, changing from within isn’t possible. Though some individuals make some progress, and the occasional abuser may get purged and prosecuted, lone idealists generally can’t fix broken systems. Once the institutional rot becomes widespread enough that the institution must close ranks to protect itself, there’s little chance of “reform.” The system will warp and destroy those who learn its ways, no matter how idealistic.

Opening the Door to Violence

Charlie Kirk

Nobody cares what I think about Charlie Kirk’s recent public assassination, nor should they. Thanks to the internet, our public discourse is littered with opinionated cranks whose ad hoc platforms give them space to spew unbaked viewpoints and soak up citizens’ dwindling attention. Kirk himself might’ve become one such purveyor, had marketing copywriter Bill Montgomery not mentored and bankrolled him. Also, Kirk might still be alive.

I face two conflicting impulses regarding Kirk’s death. Historically, I’ve been a longtime advocate of nonviolent resistance, believing that shows of force only give powerful people the justification they need to instigate draconian crackdowns. Therefore, I would never advocate anyone actively assassinating Charlie Kirk, no matter how reprehensible I find his opinions. Anyway, that’s my longstanding historical opinion, which I still broadly believe.

Recent political trends, however, force me to evaluate my position. We saw, during the summer protests of 2020 and after, how the police used routine, lawful protests as justification for attacking American citizens like a Greek hoplite phalanx. More recently, we’ve seen ICE agents swarming over workplaces, businesses, and whole communities, in such number that Gandhi-like responses would be thoroughly impotent, and possibly even get people killed.

Concisely, you can’t hug it out with the fash.

Nonviolent resistance always contains within it the prospect of violence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached the point where he objectively needed to participate in the plot to assassinate Der Führer. Dr. King’s resistance to state authority always implicitly held groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in reserve. Whenever we assert the primacy of nonviolent resistance, we tacitly also say: “For as long as that works.”

Demonstrations, language, and semiotics won’t work under current conditions. We can’t afford the time necessary to convince a critical number of Americans to withhold their support from an administration that shows thorough disrespect for the law. Not only the upper echelons of power, the White House or the complicit Congress, but also the boots-on-the-ground functionaries who get their limited scraps of social capital from helping enforce the administration’s goals.

Thus we hit my first impulse: the necessity, in dire times, for direct action. We must do something. Not just generating symbols or waving placards; these only work under normal conditions. Rather, we must strike at those who misuse their power for selfish, harmful, or venal ends. When the Einstatzgruppen invade, you don’t inaugurate a committee to build consensus. You shoot back.

But there’s my second impulse. Who or what gives us the authority to exercise violence? Under whose orders to we fire and reload? Mine? I’d make a terrible generalissimo; I can easily imagine getting so lost in my personal mythology that I forget the cause or ignore my allies. As Brian Klaas writes, power corrupts good people, but power also attracts those already vulnerable to corruption. And I’m Christian enough to know my vulnerability to Original Sin.

Revolutionary violence frequently starts well, but it seldom ends that way. Robespierre, the rhetorician of the French Revolution, couldn’t accept that he’d won, and launched the Reign of Terror. Chairman Mao called for perpetual revolution, which precipitated sectarian infighting after the Kuomintang collapsed. Contra Marx’s trust in collective wisdom, there’s no evidence that the next revolution will resolve any better.

Whenever we commence a campaign, we cannot anticipate where it will conclude. Society has too many moving parts to allow simple point-to-point planning. We can, at best, try to anticipate contingencies and make allowances. But the more people involved, and the more sweeping the social consequences we pursue, the more likely it becomes that we’ll unleash a monster we cannot control. The likelihood of that beast consuming us is high.

As I was drafting this essay, news broke that law enforcement had apprehended the probable shooter. Far from a leftist revolutionary, Tyler Robinson is apparently a conservative and a Nick Fuentes follower, who felt Kirk was too accommodationist. All reports are preliminary, and the accused deserves a fair trial, notwithstanding today’s political currents. But this only supports my belief that once you permit violence, you don’t get to stop it.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that strongman dictators generally only leave power in chains, or in a coffin. Either way, they require somebody, inside the country or outside, to oppose them. Nobody outside America can challenge our military, suggesting we’ll need insiders to take initiative. But history isn’t on our side; once we allow violence into politics, we can’t eject it easily, and the price may be steeper than we anticipate.

The Rise and Fall of American Evil

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

D.C. Stephenson was an itinerant snake-oil salesman with a string of divorces and unpaid child support when he washed up in Indiana in 1922. Initially, he had nothing Hoosiers wanted, and struggled to pay his bills. But his arrival coincided with a landmark in American history: the rebirth of the long-dormant KKK. Indiana, the least-diverse state in the old North, was a prime market for an ambitious young Klan salesman.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan has written previous books about the years between World War I and the Great Depression. The decade famous for flappers, jazz, and Jay Gatsby also harbored simmering resentments that primed America for hatemongers and terrorists. Klan-adjacent politicians got elected governors of several states, including supposed progressive strongholds like Oregon and Colorado. No state welcomed the Klan more eagerly than Indiana.

Egan charts Stephenson’s rapid rise, championing the so-called Invisible Empire. Though the 1920s are famous for ostentatious displays of wealth, most ordinary Americans lingered in an economic doldrum, worsened by Prohibition. This, coupled with changes in immigration patterns and lingering wartime propaganda, encouraged ordinary Hoosiers to seek an outlet for their resentments. Stephenson effectively resold Americans their own resentments, dolled up in Lost Cause mythology and shiny white bedsheets.

Stephenson’s Indiana success gave him control of recruitment in nine Northern states—and he was good at it, too. Though membership rolls were secret, he supposedly initiated well over a million into the Klan, and its women’s and children’s auxiliaries. He skimmed money off both the initiation fees and uniform sales, money he plowed into buying politicians in multiple states. Before long, Stephenson was a certified kingmaker in Midwestern politics.

But like many political wheeler-dealers, Stephenson lacked the virtues he professed. His Klan pushed staunch Prohibition, while Stephenson held lavish bacchanalian parties. He preached simplicity and hard work while buying the biggest mansion in Irvington. And most importantly, his Klan advocated lily-white womanhood, the myth of wives and daughters who need protection, while Stephenson himself showed women abject disdain. Stephenson was, by any measure, a sexual predator.

Timothy Egan

That’s where Stephenson’s undoing began. He targeted women close to him: receptionists and secretaries, then celebrities and socialites. Egan describes Stephenson as a monomaniac so drunken on his own mythology that he becomes reckless, racking up a Weinstein-like roster of crimes. But Stephenson’s loyalists keep ranks closed and lips sealed; countless women kept his secrets, believing themselves the only ones. Until Stephenson picked one woman too many.

Madge Olberholzer was pretty and well-liked, but unmarried at twenty-eight, practically an old maid. Stephenson became unaccountably obsessed with her, offering her lavish gifts and possible government jobs in exchange for her time. Then one night in March, 1925, Stephenson lost all composure, Backed by his Brotherhood muscle, he basically abducted Madge and held her captive, putting her through a weekend of torture that ended in disgrace, suffering, and attempted suicide.

Egan recounts the pains Stephenson inflicted on Madge, and on everyone who dared care about her in the weeks afterward. Because Madge had deep community sympathies, several trusted sources kept extensive records of what she endured. This included doctors, attorneys, and professors, people whose testimony Hoosiers trusted. Egan excerpts their testimony in detail that is frequently chilling and difficult to read, but no less insightful.

Stephenson’s crimes, once exposed, turned into an O.J. Simpson-like spectacle trial, which tested Indiana’s conflicted loyalties between the Klan and its moral values. As detail after detail emerged, Stephenson, once the darling of Indiana’s political establishment, quickly became a pariah, shunned by politicians he’d helped get elected. His Invisible Empire quickly disintegrated. Not just in Indiana either, as Stephenson’s downfall exposed secrets in other Klan-dominated states.

This story makes for tough reading. Both the tactics Stephenson used to cultivate his empire of bigotry, and the predatory tools he concealed behind his rhetoric, expose the rot common in American politics. But in some ways his story is also reassuring, because as quickly as he ascended the ranks of organized hatred, he descended even faster. Stephenson thought himself invincible, but his political machine lasted only three short years.

In his epilog, Egan waxes rhapsodic about the innate weakness of weaponized hatred. Though he avoids naming names, he clearly intends readers to correlate Stephenson’s fast-burning political empire with current events. The politics of hatred inevitably consumes itself, Egan suggests, even if the system appears all-consuming to those living through it. Hold on and stick with the truth, Egan advises, because bigots only know destruction, and will inevitably destroy themselves.

Fear of the Monster You Created

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

Readers who know me, will already know my longstanding interest in Haitian history and politics, dating back to the 1991 coup. The unique and remarkable circumstances which brought Haiti into existence make it distinct from other countries born of European colonialism. Among the many rare qualities, Haiti, unlike most former European colonies, doesn’t have a native-born White population. No French colonists generated a persistent minority population in free Haiti.

This happened because Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who pushed the Haitian slave rebellion to victory, refused to accept victory. Flush with triumph, Dessalines declared a purge of French-speaking Whites in 1804, under the battle cry: “Cut off heads, burn down houses.” Anyone descended from French colonists and plantation owners had to flee Haiti, leaving everything they owned, or face the wrath of their former slaves, now Haiti’s unquestioned masters.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Such reprisals aren’t inevitable. Mexico, Nigeria, and Brazil have native-born White minorities, descended from former colonists who willingly accepted the Empire’s end. The fact that South Africa still reckons with economic inequity stemming from Apartheid proves that ethnic cleansing needn’t necessarily happen in post-colonial states. But especially in the heady early days of independence, violent reprisals can, and often do, happen.

Timothy Snyder, in the conclusion to Bloodlands, writes that Israel, Russia, and Ukraine all intensely remember the injustices inflicted upon them during World War II. Ukraine asserts its independence, in large part, for fear that Stalin’s Great Terror might repeat itself. Russia zealously recalls the privations and violence of Germany’s invasion, in almost the same terms Americans recall Pearl Harbor, making that violence part of Russian national mythology.

Snyder wrote before the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Just as Putin and Zelenskyy each justify their military actions with collective memory of nationalist agendas during the 1930s and 1940s, Israel uses fears of the Holocaust to justify overwhelming military force. Whenever international critics of the Israeli state (including international Jews and Holocaust survivors) condemn Israel’s apparent targeting of schools and hospitals, they get accused of National Socialist apologia.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Thus we see past injustice mold the legal and moral justification of current, ongoing injustice. Your evil makes my evil acceptable. Again, such reprisals aren’t inevitable; France and Germany, historic enemies for over a thousand years, now form the political and economic backbone of the European Union. But especially for strongman leaders who rule by force of personality, like Putin and Netanyahu, old grievances support new nationalist sentiment and violence.

Such conditions especially prevail in nations willed into existence by retreating European empires. The de-Ba’athification process instituted in Iraq following America’s 2003 invasion often had an ethnic component, especially in the Shi’ite-majority south, where the toppled Sunni-led government was especially unpopular. Many Arab Spring countries suffered ethnic cleansing when minority-led governments fell. The Syrian Civil War drags on thirteen years later, partly, because Assad’s Alawite government fears reprisals.

This brings us to America. In most circles, it’s become unacceptable to espouse bigotry, at least publicly; even the race-baiting Former President calls himself “the least racist person” in the face of evidence. Yet a powerful voting bloc remains terrified of structural changes which will reverse systemic racism, sexism, and ableism. Countless interviews at TFG campaign rallies show majority populations, including Whites, Christians, and heterosexuals, consider themselves embattled minorities.

However, as Tim Alberta writes, America is on-track to see both White people and Christians become minority populations within two generations. This assumes current demographic trends continue, which will certainly never happen. But those current majority populations see demographic change happening rapidly, and their power base disintegrating. They fear becoming a minority in their own country—and being treated like America has always treated minorities.

Again, history proves that reprisals following power reversals aren’t inevitable. But they are possible, and certainly precedented. State power always involves the possibility of violence to control dissidents, minority powers, and nonconformists; as those who flourished under unjust laws find themselves suddenly thrust into minority status, they aren’t unjustified in fearing receiving the treatment they formerly dispensed onto others. Unjust people are rightly attuned to further injustice.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that authoritarian governments let by strongman personalities generally end two ways: the strongman leaves the halls of power in chains, or in a hearse. TFG is witnessing that happening right now: he needs to be reelected President, or face dying in prison. He weaponized the justice system against protestors, refugees, and other dissidents; now he fears his own justice system. His adherents fear the exact same consequences.

Uvalde, Abortion, and You

Robb Elementary School has been shuttered and is scheduled for demolition.

One year ago today, on May 24th, 2022, a gunman armed with a high-yield assault rifle and seven spare ammunition clips entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nobody stopped the gunman (who shall remain nameless here) for 74 minutes, despite the eventual presence of nearly 400 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers on-scene. The shooter killed twenty-one people and injured eighteen, the third-deadliest school shooting, and ninth-deadliest civilian mass shooting, in American history.

This past Monday, May 22nd, 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed LB574, a controversial bill that both establishes a 12-week abortion ban statewide, and bans all gender-affirming medical care for minors. By mashing together two popular conservative bugbears—Nebraska’s legislature is nominally nonpartisan, but dominated by Republicans—this new law gives the state sweeping omnibus authority in how Nebraskans express their sex and sexuality. The “small government party” is literally regulating private citizens’ genital activity.

The correspondence between these two events couldn’t be more jarring. In the year since the Uvalde shooting, state legislatures and Congress have done nothing about America’s overwhelming concentration of private firearms, which now outnumber U.S. citizens and legal residents. These changes, we’re told, take time. Yet at this writing, nineteen states have banned or severely restricted abortion in the eleven months since the Dobbs decision, proving that lawmakers can, indeed, work quickly when they try.

We’re already hearing horror stories emerging about abortion bans’ unanticipated consequences. One high-profile story out of Florida featured a woman forced to carry her fetus to term, knowing it had no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs, and other deadly fetal abnormalities. The baby lived for 94 minutes. A South Carolina Republican legislator publicly regretted the abortion ban he co-sponsored when it almost immediately nearly killed a 19-year-old woman. These are just the stories getting national media traction.

Personally, I formerly opposed abortion, until about 25 years ago. A woman I knew suffered an incomplete miscarriage that created complications which very nearly killed her. Because the treatment for her condition was technically an abortion (although her fetus was already dead), several hospitals bounced her case before one accepted her. That’s when I realized the nuance and complexity of abortion. Last week, I decried LB574 on social media, saying: “this will get people killed.”

A friend responded: “People die by abortion every day.” I don’t know whether my friend means adult women suffer complications daily, or if she counts aborted fetuses as dead humans. Either way, she’s wrong. Pew Research disagrees that complications are common. And even if we believe unborn fetuses are fully human, which I don’t, the underdeveloped fetus cannot have more value than the mother, and her ability to survive and care for her existing children.

Furthermore, our inability to protect elementary school children from Uvalde-style massacres proves that we don’t care about the living. Our legislatures can’t pass even rudimentary precautions like red-flag laws, background checks, and safe storage standards. With no way to prevent weapons hoarding, mass shootings are now literally a daily event. Mass shooters routinely target locations where children congregate, including schools, malls, churches, and concerts. We’ve known this for years, and we’ve done nothing about it.

Claims that we pass anti-abortion legislation to protect children are abject and demonstrable bullshit. The states most likely to pass onerous abortion restrictions are also least likely to have affordable prenatal care. Texas has restrictive abortion laws, and a permitless carry law similar to one recently signed by Nebraska governor Jim Pillen. It also has a high and growing mass shooting rate. Conditions are worse in Texas now than they were before the Uvalde shooting.

Stopping mass shootings don’t require mass roundups of civilian firearms, which no serious lawmaker is proposing anyway. Evidence suggests most mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence; the Uvalde shooter shot his grandmother in the face before moving onto the school. (She survived.) Taking guns away from convicted domestic abusers would protect not only the abusers’ families, but anyone else who may suffer knock-on effects. That suggestion seems both low-friction and supremely modest.

Yet we continue doing nothing. We love every human life while it remains an abstract platonic ideal swimming in the amniotic goo. But the minute it needs a doctor, or a square meal, or protection from an AR-15, our sympathy evaporates. Indeed, we don’t protect fetuses because they’re human; we protect them because they aren’t human, untainted by original sin or human avarice. The minute it becomes human, we’re ready to kill the damn thing.

The New Public Face of Evil

This statement is absolute, unmitigated evil. https://t.co/SOacPGGBse

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) March 27, 2023

I usually don’t like using moralistic words like “evil” to describe politics, because black-and-white thinking obscures the human souls involved. But watching the mass right-wing dogpile that happened within minutes this week after the Covenant School shooter was revealed as transgender, I think that word is appropriate. The conservative desire to turn this into a referendum on a class of people is, in a strictly Christian sense, evil.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The key to understanding this evil lies in the second half of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment, above. She correlates the shooter’s gendered hormone replacement therapy with mental health drugs. Et voilà, we reach the core of conservative judgment: people struggling with mental health are considered morally weak. And gender “dysphoria” is, to the conservative mindset, a mental illness, not a medical condition to receive treatment and respect.

Despite recent trends toward racism and bigotry in American conservatism, elected conservatives still recognize the importance of coded language. They can’t explicitly say racial groups are devolved or dangerous; that’s why Scott Adams can’t buy lunch anymore. The same rules, though, don’t apply to mental health. It remains perfectly acceptable to say people with PTSD, substance abuse issues, or plain old depression are morally weak and individually responsible.

Elected Republicans vote against providing assistance for mental health treatment on a strict party line basis for years. They only mention mental health after mass shootings, to deflect from weapons hoarding as a cause for violence. Mental health remains toxic in America; PTSD is still not considered a “legitimate” war wound, for instance, and not eligible for the Purple Heart. Mental health is considered a personal failing.

This duality becomes pointed after public displays, like Monday’s shooting. By making the shooter responsible by dint of personal moral weakness, conservatives exculpate the two military-grade rifles the shooter carried. If transgenderism exists entirely inside the sufferer’s head, then the sufferer is individually responsible for handling their thoughts. Any person who can’t handle their thoughts is beyond the pale and irredeemable.

But simultaneously, by making the individual morally responsible for their actions, conservatives make the group responsible. Because the group, in this case transgendered people, is organized around something that appears to be a moral choice, then transgenderism is responsible. The mere fact that violence by transgendered people is vanishingly rare matters little. The group is responsible for this individual’s moral failure, and therefore all group members deserve punishment equally.

Right-wing moral judgment depends wholly on a narrow definition of what makes a good or bad person. Conservatives believe moral qualities originate within the individual, and each person is completely unique and isolated. Therefore nothing causes an individual’s actions but the individual’s moral core. Good people do good things, and anybody doing bad is always a bad person. Extenuating circumstances and cultural conditioning don’t exist, it’s always only the individual.

Florida Governor Ron DeSandis, author
of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill

That’s why, even as Republicans rush to blame this individual’s mental health for their violence, they continue voting to discontinue public support for mental health treatment, or even food support. Conservatives scramble to deny mental health treatment, poverty protection, and affordable health care to those who need it most. Thus they deny two groups Jesus specifically cited in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats: the hungry and the sick.

Food and health, American conservatives assert, are luxuries people earn. Those who can afford them, therefore, are already morally good people who don’t need outside support, while those who can’t afford them, don’t deserve them. If they were moral people, the poor wouldn’t be in this predicament. Though American Republicans tout Christianity as their unifying moral force, they actively reject Jesus Christ’s exhortation to defend those who can’t defend themselves.

Thus America persists in doing everything possible to avoid protecting those most needful of protection. Because the defenseless are considered bad people, doing anything to defend them only empowers their need, which only reinforces their immorality. This directly rejects Gospel morality, as expressed by Jesus Christ himself, which states that the poor and the sick deserve Christians’ support, not because they’re uniquely holy or good people, but because they’re poor.

Don’t misunderstand me; this position doesn’t require endorsing changing gender roles or sexual values. This only requires acknowledging that all people are human, and deserve to be protected. But people like Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t do that. They believe protection only extends to “good” people, usually defined as people most resembling themselves. And I consider that evil. As Jesus Christ himself said, even the pagans and sinners can do that.

Take This Badge Off Of Me

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 47
Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) swaggers into the old Spanish mission where the outlaws congregate, showing off his newly minted badge. Not long ago, he was one among this anarchic bunch, but the territorial government has empowered him to bring law to the frontier. Garrett warns his old friend William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) that the government wants Garrett specifically to bring down Bonney. Here’s your first and only warning, Garrett says: get out or get killed.

I remember first watching this movie as a teenager, impelled by the reputation of director Sam Peckinpah, and by this movie’s famous soundtrack, composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. The classic “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” comes from this movie. As a kid, I was appalled by this movie. I watched as it ticked down a list of traditional Western character tropes, all of whom died in the kind of bloodbath for which Peckinpah is famous.

What I didn’t understand, watching it with a kid’s wide-eyed situational ignorance, was the context in which this movie was made. Peckinpah himself had become an unlikely countercultural hero. Though twenty years older than his principal audience, he understood their Vietnam-era malaise. He also understood the self-destructive violence which drove characters in mercilessly explosive classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, as he feuded with production houses and self-medicated to control his bipolar disorder.

William Bonney, good-looking and rife with charm, ignores his friend’s warnings. He came west to escape Back-East law, and reinvented himself as Billy the Kid. For him, outlaw status isn’t a failure to obey the law; it’s an act of obedience to his truest self. He believes the frontier myth of complete autonomy; he sees the West as Rousseau’s “state of nature.” Billy scorns Garrett, leaves the mission, and returns to his career of rampage.

But if Billy has become the amoral extreme of libertarian thinking, Garrett has become the opposite. By accepting a badge, he also accepts the Back-East government’s strict Calvinist interpretation of law. Humankind, he now believes, is irredeemably sinful, and must be restrained by law. As a lawman, his right to enforce order upon everyone else is absolute, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in pursuing that goal. Law is Garret’s goal, not a means.

Kris Kristofferson (left) and James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Here’s where my teenage self reacted with initial revulsion. Raised in an atmosphere of country music, John Wayne movies, and Zane Grey novels, I believed American Western myths of hard-bitten individualism and frontier pluck. Peckinpah chooses the most extreme versions of that mythology: the strict lawman who believes the frontier must be tamed, and the wild-eyed outlaw who glories in the absence of law. The two must fight, and destroy everyone who comes between them.

I failed to understand the context. Peckinpah released this movie in 1973, the same year America’s involvement in Vietnam juddered to an unsatisfying halt. The American myth had devolved into extremes, not dissimilar to those depicted onscreen, and likewise destroyed everything that came between them. Even Bob Dylan’s involvement, as both composer and strange, enigmatic character, served to repudiate the entire previous decade. He’d been reduced to “Alias,” a character with no name or loyalties.

And yes, Peckinpah destroyed every Western stereotype. I saw that correctly, but utterly misinterpreted it. In one memorable scene, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens plays a sheriff conscripted into Garrett’s posse. A gunfight ensues, and Pickens is gut-shot. The camera lingers over him trying to hold his entrails in, eyes wide, while his wife tries to comfort him. The iconic Western character is dying, and knows it.

Pickens would parody this trope the next year, in Blazing Saddles.

Unlike in Peckinpah’s earlier films, made when he was relatively sober, these characters have limited motivations. Unlike, say, David Sumner in Straw Dogs, Billy and Garrett don’t learn or change with the story; they simply possess absolute morals, and kill to support them. But like jazz, this movie isn’t about what it’s about. Billy and Garrett don’t learn, but everyone caught between them certainly does. The lessons are cold, and usually final.

I misunderstood this at 17, because my upbringing strictly refused to accept the lessons of the post-Vietnam era. Worse, looking around today, watching my country getting shredded by a similar adherence to absolute morals, I see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t learn. Today’s moralists even use the same cowboy imagery I grew up with. And now, like then, those who follow absolute morals aren’t hurt, but those caught between them are getting killed.

The Violence Metaphor in Modern Politics

Mike Lindell in an uncharacteristically composed and businesslike moment

Mike Lindell, “the My Pillow Guy,” has announced his intent to run for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. Lindell, 61, has no prior experience in elective office or party organizing, and apparently no particular political experience beyond campaigning for Donald Trump. He’s spent the last two years yelling directly into the microphone on all-night basic cable about how Trump got ripped off, and in his mind, this apparently qualifies him for political authority.

Lindell’s on-camera outbursts started out comical, and for some people, still are. NBC comedian Seth Meyers still mimics Lindell’s grotesque behavior for cheap yuks. But more than two years later, his tantrums have crossed the line into something else, something downright tragic. Either he continues mishandling the microphone because he knows True Believers find his emotional outbursts persuasive, or something far darker is going on. It’s possible he has nothing left besides his spitting anger.

Over four years ago, I wrote that anger has become modern conservatism’s only emblem of seriousness. I wrote this after both Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham pulled Lindell-like antics inside the Senate Chamber. But four years ago, such anger was an isolated display. Lindsay Graham’s prior political career was predicated on displays of folksy charm that belied his deep party machine connections. And Brett Kavanaugh was previously (and has largely returned to being) publicly anonymous.

Since then, these displays have become something much more persistent. Mike Lindell’s two-year rage bender is perhaps an extreme example, crossing the line from pathos to bathos. But earlier this year, in the state where I live, Nebraska, an entire cadre of political neophytes seized control of the state Republican party, driven largely by displays of rage heaved clumsily into the microphone. This “leadership” then got Jim Pillen elected governor by stoking fears of CRT.

On the local level, another political novice, Paul Hazard, got elected to my city’s school board. Before running for office (he previously failed to get elected to the city council), Hazard was a state trooper—which, I shouldn’t have to specify, isn’t the same as being an educator. His qualification (singular) for office is his track record of getting screaming mad during school board meetings and town halls and, yes, shouting directly into the microphone.

Yeah, it's safe to say Justice Kavanaugh resembles Senator Graham

All these candidates pale, however, before the tragicomic spectacle that is Herschel Walker. Like his idol, Donald Trump, Walker has difficulty stringing together coherent sentences or staying on topic. This is perhaps understandable in Walker’s case: after fifteen years in the NFL, he probably has Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a common brain injury in retired football (hand-egg) players. Also like Trump, Walker shows no prior familiarity with, or interest in, government or the entire legislative process.

More important than Walker’s tragic incompetence, however, is his behavior. Herschel Walker is a demonstrably bad person, with multiple credible accusations of domestic abuse, child abandonment, and attempting to induce various girlfriends to get abortions. Public progressives question how Republicans, the “party of family values,” can get behind a man who’s abandoned so many children and paid for so many abortions. Walker, like Trump, spits in the face of the values they claim to uphold.

However, placing Walker in the context of Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and Mike Lindell, a definite pattern emerges. Today’s Republican Party sees anger and violence as leadership qualities. Displays of macho savagery are more important to Republican leaders than competence, experience, or familiarity with the law. A leader, to today’s Republican party, isn’t someone who unites or gives vision. A leader is somebody who socks enemies in the jaw—even “enemies” like his own ex-wife.

Seriously, look at whom Republicans have supported recently. Donald Trump’s entire career was predicated on the promise to bring the hammer down on dissidents. Paul “ACAB” Hazard pledged to bring the same roided-out anger to the school board as he did to the highway patrol. And neither Mike Lindell’s nor Herschel Walker’s candidacies are predicated on policy, as they have none. They simply promise to shout down, or punch, anybody who dares to challenge them.

And unfortunately, this seems to work. Republican voters keep getting behind this series of reality TV stars, athletes, and camera-huggers. Herschel Walker is currently in a statistical tie with Raphael Warnock, an incumbent Senator, minister, and career civil activist. Real or promised violence has become the motivation of today’s Republicans, and it works. Faced with a panoply of digital-age problems, one major party pledges to answer with Stone-Age force, and their voters clamor for more.

White Christians and the Triumph of This World

From the final few frames of the January 6th Committee video

You already saw the ten-minute supercut of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection which the investigating committee broadcast during their prime-time hearings last week. Even we who couldn’t stomach it live, saw it anyway the next day, when the committee shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—sites that are, with Amazon, basically the Internet now. The only way to have not seen it, is to consciously take steps to avoid seeing it.

Different viewers reacted to different parts of the video. I’ll focus today on one aspect: the final few frames. This snippet shows clusters of insurrectionists atop the Capitol’s parapets, waving two flags. One flag reads “Trump 2020,” the other a white flag with a red cross on a blue union: what’s become called “the Christian flag.” For many in recent days, this use of Christian imagery in a violent situation has become the public face of American Christian nationalism.

Respectfully, I want to direct viewers’ faces away from the symbols these insurrectionists hold, however, onto the insurrectionists themselves. The faces below these flags, brandished in a manner probably deliberately modeled on Iwo Jima, are mostly male, and entirely White. These insurrectionists are vocally Christian in their beliefs and imagery, and tied entirely to Donald Trump’s person; I won’t diminish that. But I contend Whiteness matters most here.

Gorski and Perry write that Christian nationalist beliefs aren’t uniquely White in America. Belief that America has historically Christian responsibilities, that American nationhood is founded on Christianity and has a prophetic mission, is held by Black and Hispanic Protestants at roughly the same rate as among White Protestants. But Black and Hispanic Christian nationalists haven’t stormed public buildings or attempted to overturn elections. Yet.

What’s more, many Christian nationalists aren’t even united by religion. Though belief in what researchers call “Evangelical Christianity” unifies these nationalists, that’s a fig leaf. Not only do many Christian nationalists not hold theological positions consistent with Evangelicalism, as many as fifteen percent aren’t even Christian. And not in the “Oh, you’re not really Christian” sense; fifteen percent of “Evangelical Christians” hold some other religion, or no religion at all.

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

The defining trait that pushes Christian nationalists into violence to defend their beliefs, insofar as they have beliefs, is Whiteness. White Christian nationalists are more likely to believe their culture is under attack, more willing to endorse violence to defend it, and even though it’s difficult to corroborate race-based breakdowns of who actually performs violence, the footage from January 6th reveals an overwhelming sea of Whiteness.

This arguably shouldn’t surprise anybody who reads American history. Since colonial times, when racial distinctions were first codified following Bacon’s Rebellion, White Americans have had an implicit social compact allowing them to enact violence on Black and Brown bodies with impunity, a compact that doesn’t go both ways. History of America’s lynching era records that African Americans could be ritually murdered for muttering under their breath at White people.

Religion always provides justification for this violence. As James Cone writes, racialized violence serves the same role in America that crucifixion served in Rome, establishing for subject peoples that we own your lives. Such violence could never be justified without state-based religion, because taken strictly on its face, such violence is obviously unconscionable. Only a God-given social order could ever require such naked violence against resistant subjects.

Arguably, that’s why Christians felt compelled to design a flag in the Twentieth Century. We recognize, then and now, that Christianity’s role as America’s unofficial state religion, compromises our faith. Note that the flag is mostly white, the color of surrender in military operations. The Christian flag, waved on January 6th, was designed to refuse participation in state roles. The Kingdom of God is separate from human law.

But, like all symbols, people in power found ways to suborn that flag to support the already well-supported. And, citing Gorski and Perry again, America’s White power structure has performed rhetorical sleight-of-hand to conflate state power with racialized power. To challenge America’s powerful people in high places, is always to challenge American Whiteness. A racialized social order backed by an illusory state religion.

Don’t misunderstand me; as a Christian, I believe Christianity has done great good. But whenever religion gets entangled in state power, the outcome is terrible for people perceived as outsiders. Extermination of Indigenous nations and racialized slavery under the guise of “missionary” zeal is just one example. America hoards power along racial lines, and justifies itself using religion. And it’s unlikely to stop.

A Manichean Guy With a Gun

President & Dr. Biden at Robb Elementary, Uvalde, TX

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre popularized this bromide in the days following the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. Like its close compatriot, “thoughts and prayers” LaPierre’s saying quickly became unmoored from its roots and warped into a caricature. It’s just another piece of faux morality clogging American rhetoric now.

But it’s also a demonstration of how American public morality has become meaningless. The division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys” is a form of Manichaeism: the belief that the universe is divided into the altogether good, holy, and virtuous, against the altogether bad, godless, and depraved. In traditional Christianity, Manichaeism is considered a heresy. And for good reason, too: because it makes us insensible to the world around us.

As usually happens following mass shootings, the narrative surrounding last week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, has turned on identifying the menace, the crime, or the “evil.” The shooter is described as a manifestation of ultimate evil—or perhaps of “mental illness,” which is frequently a sloppy shorthand for evil. Likewise law enforcement who dithered outside the school for an hour are described in terms from a medieval morality play: “cowardly,” “shameful,” “dishonorable.”

These attempts to define “evil” situate it externally, and in absolute terms. These people are defined by one overwhelming, Aesopic moral trait and, by implication, so are we. We’re reassured that we, mercifully, didn’t kill anyone, didn’t stop parents from rescuing children, didn’t cause or enable the violence. Therefore we can confidently condemn those whose actions or inactions violate our code. Calling others “evil” defends our perceived goodness.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, site of the Parkland, Florida, shooting

Problem is, things are never that absolute. The Uvalde police join a host of security professionals, school resource officers, and other armed guardians who protected their lives over those of schoolchildren. In schools from Littleton, Colorado, to Parkland, Florida, school police fled, and civilian teachers who resisted the violence were the first to die. Armchair strategists love claiming they’d rush into the fire, but few of us really would.

(On a personal note, I have personally rushed into violent conflicts between people better prepared than me. These conflicts only involved fists, though. I doubt strongly I’d ever have rushed optimistically into an active crossfire. That’s why I scoff whenever somebody says “I would’ve taken the risk.” No you wouldn’t, and neither would I.)

I remember taking exception to the “good guy with a gun” narrative when it first appeared. How do we define good guys and bad guys? One acquaintance, an NRA life member and gun rights advocate, insisted we could identify good guys by their licensure. He believed that good guys had training, certification, and permits to handle and carry weapons. Goodness, for this person, is bestowed by official declaration by esteemed professionals.

Sadly, I lost contact with this individual long before last week’s shooting. I wonder how his inner narrative of goodness as accord with authority has survived the knowledge that official local, state, and federal law enforcement did nothing while civilians died. If we’ve learned anything from COINTELPRO or Ruby Ridge, it surely must be that authority and goodness aren’t synonyms—yet many people, evidently, forget quickly.

The quest for external, measurable evil has produced terrible outcomes. By imputing “evil” to others and making that characteristic their defining being, we have, at different times, segregated people by race, economic class, national or regional origin, and the kitchen sink. When we believe that evil lives in cities, or has a certain skin color, or prays a certain way, we make it acceptable to keep others at arm’s length.

The now-infamous photo of concert-goers fleeing the shooter
at the country music festival in Las Vegas, 2017

One needn’t be Christian and believe in Original Sin, though, to realize that humans aren’t neatly symmetrical. We all have the inner capacity to do tremendous good or epic evil, depending on the choices we make, the influences we let inside, and how we react to how others treat us. Moral Manichaeism lets us assign blame, and most importantly, lets us assign it away from ourselves. But that’s always false.

People who quote the Manichean heresy inevitably see themselves on the good side of the split. Wayne LaPierre’s division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or anybody’s reliance on good vs. evil, innately ignores that these words have no external meaning. Goodness and evil aren’t things we are; they’re descriptions of things we do. And as such, they’re completely meaningless in defining how we respond to external calamity.

Heaven, Hell, and the SBC

Back before college, the United Methodist congregation I attended had a youth pastor who loved telling stories of how awful his oversexed youth was. Over and over, week after week, so many stories. He was the JRR Tolkein of elaborate anecdotes about lust and promiscuity. Eventually, I realized, he didn't regret his debauched youth.

He missed it.

As news broke this week that America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is structurally rotten with male sexual violence, I returned to that youth pastor. Back in the 1990s, purity culture infiltrated White Protestantism. Though quasi-puritanical attitudes weren’t invented in the Clinton era, they were codified in new and exceedingly intolerant ways. They divided the world into “pure” and “impure” camps, identity clusters which were reinforced through pulpit sermons, layperson testimony, and in-school outreach.

Purity culture has multiple forms. The lurid popularity of purity balls has attracted attention, as has voluble online condemnation of women wearing leggings and low-cut blouses. The adults governing purity culture have gained notoriety for punishing even the most rudimentary forms of female sexuality. Women’s bodies, according to this reasoning, are so inherently suffused with temptation, that men and boys need constantly shielded from their influence.

Notably, purity extends beyond sex. The SBC, like many conservative denominations, divides theological roles according to biological sex: women are excluded from authority though, as Jim Henderson writes, women mostly keep such congregations working. This division, called by the faux-doctrinal name “complementarianism,” pre-slots people into roles according to accidents of form, and just like racial segregation, gender segregation inevitably carries a whiff of uncleanliness.

The news emerging from the SBC should horrify anybody of any religious persuasion. An all-male pastorate preached sexual purity and defense of “family values,” while sexually abusing parishioners, including minors. A male power structure turned sex into a power prerogative, while spreading a message that women and girls were responsible for men’s libidinous reactions. Constant messages of submission and culpability turned out to have—quelle horreur!—an ulterior motive.

I’ve never heard any accusation that my youth pastor, whom I’ll not name, ever actively abused anyone. By all accounts I received, he was a paragon of respectability… I guess. Because his constant messaging had definite effects. I watched church youth descend into doom-spirals of self-recrimination (Christians are no less likely than anybody else to have premarital sex). Youth, drawn to our congregation by his personal charisma, soon drifted away in a fug of self-hatred.

This problem isn’t universal. As Austin Channing Brown observes, chastity is a preponderantly White church obsession. Freed from the impositions of oppression, poverty, and captivity, White Christians could pursue a ministry of service and responsibility. But that’s a difficult sell; much easier to convince believers they’re secretly oppressed. The belief that, if sexual violence happens against you, you’re covertly responsible, is an outgrowth of Calvinist belief in depravity.

Functionally, this sexual fixation doesn’t preserve anybody’s purity. It just transfers sexual autonomy onto powerful, mostly male, adults. It creates an atmosphere of guilt, stifles forgiveness, and convinces those who most need Christ’s guidance that they’ve fallen outside His domain. I’ve watched Christians, mostly youth, leave the church, not because they don’t believe, but because they believe they’ve done something God can’t forgive. That’s heartbreaking to witness.

Let me stress, irreligion isn’t the answer. The secular world of commerce hasn’t liberated anybody; a casual browse through the internet, or a stumble through any shopping mall, demonstrates that irreligious influences frequently conflate a woman’s dollar value with her sex appeal. Who can blame youth, browbeaten by constant sexual messaging from the spiritual and secular realms, for relinquishing control of their sexual choices?

My youth pastor probably meant well. His voracious sexual history innately entailed disrespecting not only the girls he had sex with, but also himself, and he wanted other youth to avoid that pattern. But his single-plank platform turned Christianity into a vehicle to shame sex, and especially female sexuality. He presented a world without hope, only momentary escape from constant temptation. That’s no way to live a life.

Extreme and repressive attitudes about sex are innately abusive, even before powerful people exploit those attitudes for selfish ends. What we’re seeing revealed at the SBC is simply the end result of a cosmology that ties people to their pasts, rather than opening them to a better future. White Christianity's relationship with sex has been distorted and toxic for some time.

And sadly, evidence suggests that it's going to get worse before it gets any better.

War Is Not the Answer (Except When It Is)

Saddam Hussein in 1990

I find myself thinking lately about the autumn of 1990. For history mavens, that’s the year Saddam Hussein’s Iraq crossed the border and illegally seized Kuwait. Not coincidentally, that’s also the year I first identified as conservative. Amid the saber-rattling rhetoric and rising nationalist sentiment for a swift American intervention, I began seeing myself as part of that push, as somebody contributing to a great coast-to-coast effort.

The rhetoric surrounding Operation Desert Shield (later Operation Desert Storm) was pure national security state mythology. After ten years of presenting Saddam Hussein as America’s proxy hero during the Iran-Iraq War, our national story immediately flip-flopped. Suddenly he became a world-class tyrant, head of a rogue state with Third Reich-ish ambitions and, potentially, a nuclear bomb. Worst of all, his illegal occupation of Kuwait targeted women and children.

I believed everything. When I heard Iraq had 630,000 troops in tiny Kuwait, enough to invade Saudi Arabia, I embraced an immediate American counter-force. Government spokespeople claimed Iraqi troops heedlessly slaughtered Kuwaiti civilians in their homes, I responded with outrage. Like millions of Americans, I react with horror to learn that Iraqi soldiers had stolen Kuwaiti baby incubators, leaving 231 preemies on the linoleum to die.

There’s only one problem. As we now know, all that was a lie.

The legal and moral justifications for Operation Desert Storm were almost entirely fabricated by American PR firms, mostly Hill & Knowlton. These agencies provided lurid content that grabbed ratings on nightly news. It was pure gold for networks; audiences old enough to remember, will recall how Desert Storm turned CNN into a mainstream source, and Wolf Blitzer into a celebrity. To achieve these ends, sources needed only to baldly lie.

This week, after promising for weeks, Russia’s Putin Administration finally crossed the border into Ukraine. Having successfully annexed the Crimea in 2014, and watched NATO balk, Vladimir Putin apparently decided to repeat the escapade once successfully accomplished by tsars and Supreme Soviets before it: seize Ukraine’s abundant farmland on a specious pretext. Like Kuwait before it, and Anschluss before that, it created waves of refugees.

Watching from my armchair, this looks like an unprovoked, illegal invasion, a clear violation of UN standards of national sovereignty and secure borders. Putin used glaring anti-semitic language to belittle Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is ethnically Jewish. Putin also used claims of protecting ethnic Russians from mistreatment abroad, a justification similarly used in Germany to justify repeated unethical invasions. This feels very Third Reich-y.

Vladimir Putin pictured with his favorite lapdog

As a believer in peace, I don’t encourage war anymore. Learning how readily I swallowed lies in 1990 and 1991 partly contributed to my politics shifting several years later. That shift was confirmed when America decided Gulf State entanglements were fun, and we should do that again. I slapped a “War Is Not the Answer” bumper sticker on my car, marched in local peace parades, and started attending a Quaker prayer circle.

But I acknowledge too that no one-size-fits-all policy response exists: Vladimir Putin sure looks evil, and he’s demonstrated that a stern finger-waving won’t discourage him. Having already rabbit-punched Ukraine, he now promises similar treatment in Scandinavia. This isn’t America getting involved in another country’s internal affairs, like happened in Vietnam. This is clearly a toxic mixture of imperial ambition and unchecked power, and peer pressure won’t stop it.

As a dedicated amateur follower of history, I watch with dread, knowing this happened once in Germany. But it also, let’s admit, also happened in the Persian Gulf, twice. Our media uncritically regurgitated fables of murdered babies, of WMDs, of connections to global terror described in clearly racialized terms. And we pedestrians, including me, swallowed it. (The first time; by 2004 I’d grown skeptical.)

If we’re witnessing what authorities say we’re witnessing, this looks like a legitimate case for intervention. Viewed from afar, the Ukraine situation appears clear-cut, the desperate gasp of an aging despot aware that, if he doesn’t do something soon, he’s likely to lose power and die in prison. Even recognizing that we’re pitting two nuclear-armed powers against one another, this appears to be a case of justifiable war.

This appears so. But within our lifetimes, we’ve been lied to, both by our own national security apparatus, and by paid propaganda hustlers. In a world where we know evil exists, and we must confront it courageously, we’ve swallowed so many lies that we can’t tell who’s truthful anymore. I find myself paralyzed. Because, God forgive me, I never want to be that wrong again.

The Changing Definition of “Self-Defense”

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

I’m having difficulty describing the rage I feel watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial unfold. The idea that anybody, especially a minor, could carry a military-grade firearm into a community where he neither lives nor works, kill two people, and claim “self-defense” boggles my mind. The fact that nobody in the justice system discarded that claim unilaterally makes me question the legal proceedings. If that argument isn’t discarded prima facie, that opens doors to unregulated vigilanteism.

American conservatives have rallied around Rittenhouse’s claims. The idea that he has legal authority to “defend” others’ property has become right-wing doctrine recently, a decision that actually makes sense from conservative history. Since at least the 1990s, American conservatives have valued the right for civilians to use violence to defend property as central to jurisprudence. Yet even salutary analysis of their rhetoric reveals something left unsaid. As a friend put it recently, regarding Rittenhouse’s case:

Rittenhouse was afraid of a kid with a skateboard...............

while he was carrying an AR-15.

— Agolf Twitler Slayer (@bblock29) November 3, 2021

I encountered similar logic previously. Writing about Trayvon Martin, killed by George Zimmerman, a vigilante who similarly claimed self-defense, I said that reaction seemed unmotivated by any reasonable definition of the situation. One (unsigned) commenter told me: “Once George was getting his skull bounced on the pavement, without some fantastic counter evidence, self-defense is clear.” Then as now, this struck me as flawed, because it relied on a lousy and legally sloppy definition of self-defense.

In both cases, George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative response has revealed the unspoken supposition: self-defense happens with a gun. When a mysterious stranger pursues a youth through residential streets, and the youth responds with fists, what that youth does isn’t self-defense, even though the mysterious stranger caused the confrontation. Likewise, when a lawful protester sees a vigilante with a rifle, and aims to prevent violence, that isn’t self-defense. Self-defense happens with a gun.

Like me, you probably assumed initially that the Trayvon Martin killing was primarily racial. Martin was Black, while Zimmerman was a fair-skinned Hispanic man whom many commentators, including me, initially mistook for White. But if the Rittenhouse situation is essentially similar, then race isn’t the dominant concern, since both Rittenhouse and the three people he shot (two of whom died) are White. The commonality between these situations isn’t race or class, it’s only the gun.

Trayvon Martin

As an ex-conservative myself, I recall hearing, and occasionally even speaking, the core argument. We need civilian firearms, as people like Wayne LaPierre keep reminding us, to defend ourselves against common criminals and tyrannical governments. All guns, of all kinds. Everything from a pocket-sized Kel-Tec, to a hip-holstered Glock, to a Remington .30-06 deer rifle, to an AK-47. To the firearms true believer, we need guns to defend ourselves from a scary and violent world.

The arguments unfolding around Zimmerman and Rittenhouse reveal, however, that the rhetoric has skidded. At least among American conservatives, the correlation between firearms and self-defense has become reciprocal. Punching your pursuer, or clocking your pursuer with a skateboard, is an act of thuggish violence and mayhem. Shooting the person who punched you or swung at you with a skateboard is self-defense. This seems to apply even if the person carrying the firearm started the conflict.

This argument began among the police. The officer who shot Jacob Blake, kick-starting the Kenosha violence that entangled Rittenhouse, has evaded charges by claiming self-defense. This despite the officer, Rusten Sheskey, shooting Blake in the back while he was walking away. But wait, Officer Sheskey’s defenders hasten to claim: Blake had a knife in his car, and a warrant for his arrest! The mere fact that Sheskey couldn’t possibly have known that evidently doesn’t matter.

But what began among police has drifted into civilian law. Self-defense happens with a gun; anything involving hands or tools is not self-defense. I seriously fear this argument will empower more vigilantes, like Rittenhouse and Zimmerman, to deliberately provoke conflicts with anyone they personally dislike. If this defense holds any legal water—and Zimmerman’s acquittal suggests it does—then it’s only a matter of time before others misuse this premise to perpetrate cheap street justice.

Worse, if Rittenhouse is exonerated, you know it’s only a matter of time before some asswipe (that’s a legal term), giddy with culture-war self-righteousness, takes a firearm into a bar and picks a fight that turns deadly.. If Kyle Rittenhouse is permitted to excuse himself from shooting strangers by claiming self-defense, then the precedent is clear: self-defense is whatever happens with a gun. And someone, somewhere, will use that to make American life immeasurably worse.