Plead or Scream? What's the Best Way to Get Through to Indoctrinated Right-Wingers?
Believe me when I tell you that some of them are seriously unhinged
Hello Friends,
I noticed that one of my recent articles got spammed with hate comments by a white supremacist. For anyone who had to see that, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry we live in a world where so many people turn a blind eye to hatred.
I'm sorry we live in a world where adults and institutions and organizations that claim it's their “calling” to help us, sit on their hands and don't do a thing.
Your support means everything
I'm also sorry that I suspect some people have probably had to retreat from their support of me because they see I am the target of such attacks. I guess that’s the irrefutable influence of terrorism.
But believe me when I tell you that capitulation only GUARANTEES our suffering.
First and foremost, we have to protect ourselves, and that means understanding what we're up against. I've talked with people who have spent their whole lives insulated in blue bubbles. Sometimes, they can't comprehend what those of us who have lived in ruby red rural areas have seen.
There is cruelty in play in the United States of America that you cannot believe.
I have a cousin who is absolutely unhinged. When I was 6 or 7 and he was 19, he told me to stand still in the middle of my aunt's living room. So, thinking it a game, I stood still.
Then he spun around and I thought, “Oh, he's practicing ballet.”
Then he slammed his foot into my belly in a roundhouse kick that sent me flying into the wall.
My eyes went wide and I opened my mouth but no air came out. It didn't really hurt because I was too much in shock. My eyes filled up with tears, but I couldn't make any noise. I thought he'd killed me. I'd never had the wind knocked out of me before.
Fearing he'd get in trouble, he came running over, laid his hands gently on my chest, and said, “Don't cry, don't cry.”
You see, he didn't want to get in trouble.
He just wanted to show off his martial arts skills.
For a long time, I just buried that incident. When he showed up at family gatherings, I avoided him. As I got older, I tried to put the past “behind me,” because that's what survivors are always expected to do.
We have to be the “bigger man.”
But these days, part of me feels that it should be my right to demand that he knows what it feels like to get the wind knocked out of him, and not just once.
He should have to get the wind knocked out of him for every time that experience has replayed in my nightmares. Even now I can close my eyes and remember it. I remember the impact of his bare foot in my chest and the crackle of the wood paneling as my back hit the wall.
But I suppose if I proposed this resolution of a thousand blows upon his body, he'd insist it was “unfair.”
A few years ago, he posted some nonsense on social media about his support for various far right movements. I decided to humiliate him because why should I treat him with any respect?
He was an adult when he attacked me. This is a pretty sorry excuse for a human being.
He was writing some nonsense about gun rights and I explained how the National Firearms Act of 1934 is an example of legislation that has been very effective at stopping certain forms of gun violence. In case you don't know, it's the law that got put into place after the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Police got fed up with getting shot to pieces by mobsters carrying Thompson guns.
The NFA is why machine guns aren't used in crime or mass shootings in the USA. The problem we face is that since 1934, gun technology has advanced to the point where semi-automatic weapons are now arguably more lethal than machine guns.
The other interesting thing about the NFA is that it doesn't ban machine guns, it just requires a permit and registration.
Anyway, I was educating my lunatic cousin on the merits of this law. His responses became unhinged on a level that I've never experienced before or since.
Now, keep in mind that my work has appeared on a variety of platforms. There was a time that I used a specific news platform to target cities in the American South to write articles bashing the Confederacy. I'd wake up and crank out 3-5 of these articles, and be treated to thousands of comments within an hour.
Some of those people were extremely hostile as you can imagine.
Not once did any of them come anywhere near the derangement I experienced in the NFA comment thread with my cousin.
It was as if the insanity actually began to ooze out of my computer screen. That was the first time I got the sense that using social media was like gazing into Hell itself. I realized I'd underestimated the situation.
In my mind, he was still that 19 year old bully willing to kick a child in the stomach. In reality, he'd become more and more corrupted and evil in the intervening 4 decades. I barely had the sense that his words even originated with a human being. It felt more like trying to reason with the noxious fumes of a burn pit.
Even worse, I came to discover that he'd established himself as the patriarch of his family. There were dozens of teens who looked up to him and listened to the soul corrupting lies that he spewed. They eagerly lapped it up and tried to use those words as the guiding philosophy of their own lives.
I imagined all of them standing in line, diligently practicing their roundhouse kicks on hundreds or thousands of unsuspecting children.
“When you kick him, you better kill him, or he might come back to berate you on social media.”
This is what we're dealing with folks.
Now, I'm fully aware that not everyone on the right is committed to the current right-wing authoritarian movement. Not everyone is so deep within the bubble of indoctrination. Some are on the fringes and they can be encouraged to join the side of reason.
But we also have to recognize that there are those who are completely immersed in the corrupt slop of hate ideology, and they revel in it. They roll around and chortle to themselves. These are the teenagers who started off as troubled kids who physically assaulted children, and they grew into repugnant men committed to making endless replicas of themselves.
Even in writing this, you can't fully understand how bad these people are. You can't understand it unless you know the terror of being an innocent, powerless child who has to suffer through a breathless moment of thinking you're already dead.
You have to endure the lie of having your murderer gently lay his hands upon your chest not because he wants to provide you with any comfort, but because he wants to escape accountability.
I often find myself conflicted about whether we should try to plead with MAGA to stop its abuses, or scream at them.
Plead or scream?
There are days when I scream, there are days when I plead, and there are days when I scream my pleas with tears running down my cheeks and snot running from my nose.
When I get to that third option, I find that the tormentor who is currently facing me shuts his mouth and begins to slowly back away.
At this point, I can't tell if that's progress or not. Sometimes it's just survival. Sometimes we have to celebrate finding the strength to fight another day.
I eventually got my wind back.
I eventually regained my ability to speak.
I didn't tell anybody about what he did to me, because even then I knew that the adults in the house wouldn't have done anything about it.
Today, I'm the adult in the house.
You're damn right I'm committed to killing the cruelty of the past. Whether it's through pleas or screams, I don't care. We have to oppose this hatred. We have to oppose it until our last breath.
Today it feels like our entire society has had the wind knocked out of it. We're pressed against the wall, our eyes bugging out and gasping for air.
We must fight through this moment of uncertainty.
Remember the sense of betrayal you feel. Remember this unnecessary pain.
When you get your air back, resolve to be an agent of change.
Let's work to ensure other innocent human beings never have to endure these torments. We must resolve to hold the transgressors accountable.
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The current administration has found a way to attract and recruit sociopaths and sadists to turn this entire country into the hellhole that is a living, breathing, in-the-flesh version of social media. There is no talking sense into those people. They are rotten to the core. We need to have a unified message that this is pathological behavior and gather the numbers to stand up to the bullies and overwhelm their cowardly followers. Trump clearly has dementia, and all these so-called experts are acting like he’s a genius. None of them can admit he would be better off in a health care facility. Instead they are all using this dementia patient as their own corrupt personal paths to power and wealth. I hope they all rot in hell.
"using social media was like gazing into Hell itself."
Indeed it is.
Yet magnitudes less than reality.