The only shocking part about this is that the white supremacistsNeo NAZISAlt RightMAGAfascistsbigotsextremistsRepublicans are still dabbling in dog-whistles. Convict Trump put in four years of hard work to inspire the worst impulses in his followers.
Why the euphemisms, then? Why don’t they just come right out and admit that their goal is to delete “The Blacks,” “The Gays,” “The Mexicans,” and anyone else they deem to be undesirable, from any influential positions of prominence?
The basest motivation
You might not know that Candorville wasn’t my first syndicated comic strip. I started it in 1995 for my college newspaper, and self-syndicated it to Black newspapers and a zine called Continental Newstime throughout the Nineties. But The Washington Post Writers Group didn’t launch it in mainstream papers until 2003. In the meantime, I was working on something else.
In 1997, I co-created the comic strip Rudy Park, with New York Times reporter Matt Richtel. We’d meet once a week at San Francisco’s Metreon where we’d eat lunch, people watch, and joke about Bush, Rumsfeld, Paris Hilton, and whatever else was in the news. Then he’d go home and write a week’s worth of Rudy strips, I’d edit them, and then draw them. After he won a Pulitzer and wrote a few best-selling novels, he wisely freed up some time to spend with his small kids. He handed the writing duties to me.
The hardest character to crack, for me, was Armstrong Maynard, the conniving boss. They were all hard, actually, until I decided to zero in on one character trait that I always enjoyed in Matt’s writing. For Armstrong, I decided that the reason why he was always screwing over patrons and his employees wasn’t because he was greedy. It was because he was a sadist. A shameless, amoral, gleefully malevolent soul, for whom the cruelty was the point
Ever since Reagan ran against a fictional “welfare queen” in the disco era, conventional wisdom has told us that Republicans dog-whistle to convince deplorable bigots that they’re with them. And at the same time, they’ve got plausible deniability.
I believe conventional wisdom has missed the point for half a century.
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Republicans do want bigots, xenophobes, and other assorted scumbags to know that they’re with them. But they don’t want plausible deniability. They want to rub it in our faces, to bait us into pointing it out. Because then they get to play another game: they get to gaslight us. It’s not desperation on their part. It’s not trickery. It’s sadism.
Fascism succeeds when people are trained to ignore their own eyes and to instead see what they’re told to see.
There are five lights. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Donald Trump fought to save Obamacare. Donald Trump didn’t shut down the government during his first term.
It’s the Democrats that are racist, not the Republicans. In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would vote Republican today if a racist Democrat hadn’t executed him.
Their glee is incomprehensible
Gleefulsadism is one of the most effective aspects of a fascist movement. It’s beyond gaslighting. It’s a type of gaslighting where the cretin wants to make sure you know they’re doing it, because it produces cognitive dissonance in decent people. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state of distress produced by holding two opposing thoughts at once. Decent people tend to believe that people who lie to them are decent, if misguided or misinformed. It’s hard for decent people to accept the plain truth that there’s no shortage of politicians, Media figures, neighbors, family, friends, or colleagues, who are gleefully and knowingly being disingenuous – or worse – lying to their faces.
When faced with cognitive dissonance, one common reaction is to simply give up. To stop trying to correct misinformation. To stop pointing out wrongdoing. To stop organizing. To stop resisting. To wall oneself off from what’s happening and focus on self care. Maybe take up knitting, or watercolors, to pass the time until the national fever breaks.
The first, and maybe most important way to counter it is, to simply assert to whomever is doing it, that you know it’s happening, that you know that it’s intentional, and that it will never work on you.
In 2017, the co-creators of the Game of Thrones series announced they were developing an alternate history series called Confederate. From Deadline:
“Confederate chronicles events leading to the Third American Civil War. It takes place in an alternate timeline, where the Southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.”
Critics preemptively attacked the series as “slavery fan fiction.” HBO publicly stood by the show, but two years later, Confederate had never materialized and its creators departed for Netflix (where they created Three Body Problem and other shows).
I recall thinking in 2017 that Confederate would never air because it just wasn’t needed. We already lived in the Confederate States of America.
Neo NAZIS and disenfranchising Black people
Neo NAZIS and other white supremacists had just rallied in Charlottesville, VA. The electoral college, a vestige of a system built to reconcile the power of free and slave states, had selected the loser of the popular vote to be our president. That president was a vile bigot who put migrants in concentration camps and kidnapped their children (many of whom still haven’t been reunited with their parents). Florida wrongly purged Black voters in 2000, giving that presidency to George W. Bush.
One of the lawyers who helped prepare Bush’s legal argument in Bush v. Gore was John Roberts, who Bush later appointed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts later declared racism to be a thing of the past in the South when he and the rest of the corrupt Republican justices eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Immediately, red states that had been subject to pre-clearance under the VRA implemented concerted plans to purge Black voters and suppress the votes of those they couldn’t purge.
Half the nation systematically prevented Black people from voting, from the moment the Black Codes ended Reconstruction in the 19th Century, until the moment LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. A society that denies the vote to an entire segment of its population is not a democracy. The United States of America was an anti-democratic tyranny from its founding, until 1965 when it finally gave everyone the vote.
But then it ceased to be a democracy in the year 2000, when Florida said “not so fast.” Immediately after that, gerrymandering and then the 2014 Supreme Court decision gave the Republican Party’s voter suppression strategy the green light. The USA, the supposed paragon of democracies, was only a democracy for 35 short years.
The slave patrol police forces, the justice system, and the slavery that never ended
Our police forces evolved from the Confederacy’s slave patrols, and still operate as if one of their core mandates is to control Black bodies – to make as many of them as possible available to the privileged classes who can exploit them for their labor and for their sadistic pleasure. It’s been their mandate since the adoption of the 13th Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment permitted involuntary servitudeslavery to continue, but only as a punishment for crime.
It’s not a coincidence that America imprisons more of its population than any other nation. More than 2.2 million Americans are rotting in prison precisely because the state, which operates public prisons, and the corporations, who own private prisons, have a financial incentive to make that happen.
One of the main functions of state and federal legislatures is ensuring a steady supply of criminals to feed the system. Between the end of chattel slavery and now, our lawmakers have enacted thousands of measures making much of what we do illegal. There are over 5,000 Federal statutes and over 300,000 Federal laws and regulations (who knows how many state and local ones exist) that litter the law code like land mines. Some, like assault and theft, are obvious crimes.
But most are obscure. You’ve probably unwittingly committed half a dozen crimes this week alone. For instance, in some locales, if you catch an under-sized fish in a lake and take it home, the Feds can slap you with a large fine. But if you figure out too late that the fish was undersized and you throw the dead fish away so you won’t get in trouble, that’s obstructing a Federal investigation. That crime could land you in prison. Once there, your jailers masters could rent you out to flip burgers at Arby’s for a few years.
A kinder, gentler slavery
The difference between this and chattel slavery is, children of modern-day inmates slaves are not destined to share their parents’ fate. But they are more likely to, and the system knows this. Research shows that children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to wind up in prison themselves.
The prison industry forces prisoners to work in the prison, and it also rents them out on “work release” to clients. We already have the “modern institution” the TV show Confederate was trying to imagine. From Mission Investors Exchange:
“Prison labor in the U.S. started with convict leasing during slavery and has ballooned into a billion dollar industry that is rooted in the racially-skewed nature of excessive incarceration. The abundance and use of prison labor, rather than being challenged by legislators, has been monetized through the sale of cheap labor to companies and state-funded entities, thereby supporting the expense of expanded incarceration and providing a hidden slave labor force.
“While a small percentage of prison labor lies within one specific federally-regulated program, the vast majority exists in state, federal, and private prisons that have no centralized regulatory body. Prison labor is pervasive in the United States penal system, but the extent to which that labor is used to supply American corporations with goods and services is shrouded in secrecy.”
The modern-day plantations are ecstatic
Trump’s first term was just an appetizer for the private prison industry, which scrambled to benefit from his “zero tolerance policy” that turned refugees into inmates. Just days after Trump’s 2024 victory, private prison companies are practically orgasmic over the fortune awaiting them. From the Huffington Post:
“Private prison executives imagined tracking “millions” of people electronically, transporting hundreds of thousands by plane, and expanding detention centers. On earnings calls Thursday, private prison groups expressed a nearly unrestrained glee over what one called the “unprecedented opportunity” that a second Trump administration brings.
“Key Trump advisors have also openly discussed building mass deportation camps along the border capable of detaining tens of thousands of people at a time as judges process their deportation orders, attached to ‘constantly’ operating runways with deportation flights around the world. While Democratic presidents have also massively expanded the immigration incarceration and deportation system in recent years, Trump is proposing his own generational escalation.
“That sort of thing is music to the ears of private prison operators ― whose stock prices soared upon the projections of Trump’s second term in the White House. (On Wednesday, GEO Group was ‘the single biggest winner in the U.S. stock market — among companies of any size,’ according to the investment news site Sherwood News, which is owned by Robinhood.)”
The millions of legal and illegal immigrants (and probably Dreamers) who stand to be corralled into Trump’s concentration camps stands to increase the involuntary labor slave population in this country by an order of magnitude.
Aristotle is a Republican rock star
Aristotle was so keen on the institution of slavery that, next to Jesus and the Bible, Aristotle and his works were the most popular and influential “influencers” in the Antebellum South.
Guess who keeps talking about Aristotle these days. One guess.
MAGA is quite fond of the goofy old philosopher. As their predecessors did in the Antebellum South, MAGA refers back to that ignoramus-savant’s f***ed-up worldview to justify the caste system they mentally rope Americans into. We’ve all got a role to play in the society they envision, and it’s dictated by our innate natures. Some of us are genetically, inherently criminal. Some of us are breeding-stock.
Obviously, the straight white male’s role is to lead or to otherwise protect the sanctity of the caste system by any means necessary. Anything they do to protect that system is not only justified, it’s virtuous. Miseducating our youth, spreading misinformation via social media, or the churches, or Prager U videos, or via a right wing media ecosystem they created, is all just part of their duty. Violence, wrongful incarceration, gerrymandering, stealing Supreme Court seats, stealing Florida in 2000… all of it is in service of an Aristotelian worldview.
Most MAGA fans have probably never read Aristotle. But they’re all influenced by those who have, and by generations of thinking handed down from ancestors who were steeped in it.
The 2024 election was America America-ing
Today’s electorate is still steeped in it. MAGA has successfully persuaded much of America that preventing white kids from feeling guilt or shame (or more likely, any sense of empathy that might cause them to see the caste system as illegitimate) is more important than white kids learning lessons from accurate history. They’ve spent two decades now mocking “social justice warriors” and “wokeness.” They’ve banned books that might generate empathy among their children, who might then stray from their roles as Aristotelian guardians of the social order.
That crowd has spent decades infesting every level of power from the White House to the courts to state offices, all the way down to local school boards and HOAs. White people – including white women – have voted overwhelmingly (three times, now) for the worst and most venal career criminal to ever inhabit the White House. Many of them probably can’t put their finger on why. But they just know they’re doing the right thing.
Befriending Jaws by feeding it chum
And now a growing percentage of minorities has decided they can’t beat them, so they might as well join them.
There’s a term Gen Z uses for people like that: “Pick-me.” A pick-me does what they can to show that they’re not like the rest of their group, in the hope that the dominant caste will embrace them. They hope that by pledging their allegiance to the worldview of the dominant class, that class will recognize their value and their utility, and reward them. They imagine that will earn them the same benefits the members of that dominant caste inherit.
Africans who sold other Africans into slavery were Pick-me’s. Black soldiers who fought for the colonies rather than Britain even after Britain vowed to free them, were pick-me’s. The scores of Mexican citizens and free Blacks who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, were all Pick-Me’s, who sought to prove they deserved a higher social status in whatever society a successful Confederacy might build. Our society’s 400-year-long history is lousy with individuals from historically marginalized groups who chose to align themselves with the white supremacist movement that’s infested and shaped our society since 1619.
Their latching onto it does not turn that movement into a benevolent, multicultural one. It turns those individuals into ramora fish who think sucking on the body of the Great White Shark will provide protection from that shark, and allow them to enjoy everything the shark enjoys. They imagine that in some way, by latching on and assuming the contours of that shark, they’ve basically become sharks themselves. If they imagine hard enough, they can forget that if they ever annoy that shark, it can shake them off and devour them.
Moving on already?
On that cheerful note, I’ll leave you with today’s Candorville:
I think by now it’s safe to say one thing about President Obama: He doesn’t like confrontation. But he also said he wanted to be a transformational president, in the mold of Reagan and Roosevelt (perhaps tellingly, he only cited Reagan. But Reagan was the Bizarro Roosevelt, so…). The problem is, if history’s any guide, transformational presidents not only have to be confrontational, they have to LOVE being confrontational. Take, for example, this video that’s been making the rounds of the Internet all day:
Transformational presidents, in times of crisis, have one thing in common: they use the bully pulpit to call out the people or institutions who caused the crisis, and don’t shy away from portraying them not as good-natured people who simply disagree on how to make America a better place, but as enemies of the people. Reagan said government was the problem and went after it with a meat cleaver… and ushered in thirty years of deregulation. Roosevelt said Wall Street plutocrats and war profiteers were the enemies, and he prosecuted them… and ushered in forty years of progressive economics and the creation of the social safety net.
Lincoln… Lincoln was the Toyota Prius of transformational presidents. Half transformational, half caretaker. He identified anti-federalism as the enemy, and turned a country in which people once considered themselves primarily Virginians, or New Yorkers, or Georgians; into one in which people considered themselves to be Americans. But on the other hand, he failed to identify racists as the enemy (he was, after all, a product of his era) and while slavery ended, we still suffered 100 more years of Jim Crow laws.
When a president is reluctant to identify an enemy in times of crisis – or worse yet, when he identifies the enemy but then fails to go after that enemy with all the powers at his disposal – he creates an enemy-vacuum. And voter anger abhors a vacuum. In the absence of an enemy, in the eyes of the voters, he becomes the enemy. Ford. Carter. Bush I. Perhaps, Obama. I’m sure both Obama’s supporters and his detractors wish he’d show some of Roosevelt’s, or Reagan’s, backbone. Americans respect strong presidents, even when they disagree with them.
On the other hand, there’s one crucial difference between 1936 and 2011: Nobody would ever have portrayed Roosevelt’s cheerful, caustic, dismissive attacks on Republicans as evidence he’s an uppity, angry black man.
To paraphrase Politico, in a few days, the President’s going to give a speech proposing either bold jobs programs the Republican House will block, or timid, ineffectual programs the Republican House will block. Meanwhile, in the alternate universe where Democrats still have testosterone, President Obama will be giving a speech that goes something like this:
Nevada Senator John Ensign (R), “a leading conservative mentioned as a presidential candidate,” told reporters today that he is shocked and disappointed to learn he had an extramarital affair with an ex campaign staffer. He went on to demand his own resignation.
“This wouldn’t be making the national news if it was an ordinary affair,” Ensign said. “But I’m the guy who went on national TV and suggested that my fellow Republican Senator Larry Craig resign because he admitted to lewd conduct.”
Indeed, this is not the first time Senator Ensign has taken to the airwaves to demand accountability from another senator. In 2007, when Republican Senator Larry Craig was caught and convicted of trolling for sex in an airport men’s room, Ensign was unforgiving, saying “This wouldn’t be making the national news if it was an ordinary misdemeanor. He pled guilty to something that, you know lewd behavior, that’s not the behavior a United States senator should be engaged in.”
When he was informed that Nevada Senator John Ensign has praised Senator Ensign’s decision to call for Senator Ensign’s resignation, Senator Ensign explained that conservatives like him consider adultery to be lewd conduct, no matter with whom it’s committed. “If I held myself to a different standard than that to which I held Larry Craig, I would be admitting two things: First, I’d be admitting I’m a homophobe because I think Craig’s failed attempt at a homosexual tryst was worse than my successful – and very sweaty – heterosexual boot knocking. Second, I’d be admitting I’m a hypocrite. And I’m no hypocrite.”
So far, Ensign has received no reply from Ensign.
As reported in today’s Boston Globe, eight year-old Republican Senator Chuck Grassley went straight to Twitter to vent his outrage at President Obama’s request that Congress deliver on the stalled healthcare reform legislation.
Grassley’s first tweet: “Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to deliver’ on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.”
A short time later: “Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.”
I’ve scanned through the Senator’s old twits looking for similar condemnations he must have issued every time President Bush said “I want that legislation on my desk” while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, TX. I couldn’t find a single one. Call me crazy, but I suspect Twitter not having existed back then is only part of the reason.
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Our police forces evolved from the Confederacy’s slave patrols, and still operate as if one of their core mandates is to control Black bodies – to make as many of them as possible available to the privileged classes who can exploit them for their labor and for their sadistic pleasure. It’s been their mandate since the adoption of the 13th Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment permitted 
Nevada Senator John Ensign (R), “a leading conservative mentioned as a presidential candidate,” told reporters today that he is shocked and disappointed to learn 
