Welcome to the Monkey House
I had a plan to write about something else but I just can’t after what happened yesterday. Yesterday was one of those major world events that occur at specific points in life like a milestone or marker. There’s “stuff that happened before” yesterday and “stuff that happened after”—demarcations in life that everyone can essentially remember.
I just need to talk about it.
Fair warning: I’m going to swear.
This makes me so fucking angry. Seeing someone tote the Confederate flag in our Capital Building disgusts me to my core. We were taught as children in my little school house in New Hampshire that this was a solved issue. The Confederates were slavers from the south who we had a whole war with to get rid of slavery. That’s what we were taught. And now some white motherfucker is carrying that flag in our Capital Building like they won? Fuck that.
But actually, in a lot of ways, they did kind of win. They’re still here. These racist assholes are strutting around like they own the place. They saw the way black people are treated when they dare to protest police killings with far more peaceful protests all over the country over the summer. They laughed. They thought it was hilarious that police were bashing heads and pepper spraying folks who did nothing but stand up and say, “This is wrong.”
I think the thing about yesterday’s attack on the United States Capital Building by domestic white supremacist terrorists trying to overturn the results of our election was that it was the natural culmination of everything that’s been going on for years now. I was thinking about this in the car today. I asked myself who was responsible for yesterday? And while a lot of people will point to Donald Trump, it wasn’t just him. In the end, Trump is just a conman. I was getting emails from Trump’s campaign begging for money as recently as yesterday morning (just before the insurrection started). He’s been using these white supremacists and racists to line his pockets. (Don’t get me wrong, Trump is a massive piece of shit who, along with his fellow Republicans, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths to COVID. But that’s also because he’s an incompetent conman who never should have been President in the first place.)
Side note: Trump’s team had been sending these emails begging for “donations” at a clip of 8-10 a day for months and then, just like that, they stopped completely yesterday at 10:34AM as a bunch of Trumpers stormed the Capitol Building. Funny how that works.
There’s so much blame to go around. So many people to be angry at. And most of them are just bigoted racists who’ve been fed nothing but Fox News for twenty-five years and who literally know nothing or don’t actually have the ability to maintain a healthy life. A lot of these people are “victims” of our society letting them down, but my sympathy for them only goes so far. No matter what your problem is, it’s not an excuse to be a racist, to become a goddamn traitor. Then again, they didn’t come to this on their own. They didn’t organically become terrorists. There’s an entire machine in this country molding them into this.
Anyway, there’s someone we can absolutely blame: Fox News. A media corporation that exists solely to push a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, Neo-Conservative, hyper-Capitalist culture. They shouldn’t be allowed to call it news, but we let the fucking Republicans get away with deregulating everything so now we can’t prevent it. I have relatives whose minds have been completely poisoned by Fox News to the point where that’s the only channel they’ll watch, where any conversation with them leads to a regurgitation of some racist, xenophobic thing someone on Fox News said. We can certainly put some of the blame on Fox News. And while we’re at it, let’s put some on the people who enabled Fox News—the people who work there, the policy-makers who deregulated media, and, bluntly, the people who watch it.
But it wasn’t just them. In fact, Fox News has started losing its own minions to even more unhinged propagandist organizations that are driven heavily by social media and specifically by Facebook. We can absolutely throw a ton of the blame on Mark Fuckerberg and his goddamn sociopathic dating app. I saw some article today that quoted Facebook’s own research showing that 64% of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it. That’s the definition of a pipeline, folks! The “social network” has an algorithm that’s so fucking busted that it sees people becoming more and more interested in becoming bona fide terrorists and then recommends terrorist groups for them to join. That’s how we ended up with these meme-toting dickheads violently invading the Capitol Building today.
And that brings up another thing that came to mind as I watched this shit unfold yesterday. These people invading the Capitol seemed to think it was some kind of joke. They didn’t seem to take any of this seriously at all. They were posting on media, shouting racist epithets, feeling totally comfortable letting their Iron Crosses and Swastikas and other white supremacist tats show in photos that included their faces. Look at this jolly motherfucker thinking he’s clever as he jacks the Speaker’s podium:
Seeing this kind of thing made me realize that to many of these people, this was a big joke. They thought, “We’re all going to show up and invade the Capitol building and show how powerful and right we are!” And while a lot of them seemed to have a great time shitting all over our nation’s capital, carrying their traitor flags through its halls, screaming racist slurs before paintings of our founding fathers, and proudly displaying their Nazi tats through the Congress building, they utterly failed to realize that they were just being used. Their meme-based racism and fear about non-existent threats like “cancel culture” and “wokeness” was just the result of a populist uprising with a ton of different individual (and uniformly hateful) interests. Most of the minor lords of the white supremacist movement are just out for themselves to acquire fame or political standing or money (mostly money).
But a few of them were a bit more serious, weren’t they? Like the ones who were obviously cops in plainclothes carrying guns and handties in with them while they had thin-blue-line patches on their jackets? Yeah. Those are the ones who are taking these Pepe Yahoos for a ride to acquire power. Those are the serious terrorists in the crowd.
And some of the consequences weren’t so funny, huh? Like that manic woman who tried to invade the inner sanctum and got shot dead immediately by government agents as an enemy of the state? Or those other people who died from various health issues at the very same insurrection?
It just makes me so fucking mad. It’s not clever for me to say it, but there it is. I’m pissed about it. I’m not going to stay silent in order to avoid irritating some white supremacist who stumbles upon this post.
I don’t really know what else to say. I’m mad and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of society demonizing the Left and coddling the Right. I’m tired of unfettered Capitalism letting 350,000 Americans die of COVID-19 while our stocks rally and boom. I’m tired of racists feeling bold enough to scurry out of the dark and act like they run the place.
I made a commitment to myself that I would post in my blog at least once a week this year. I wanted to talk about other things in my blog. I wanted to post nice stuff about my kid, about games, stuff like that. But I can’t just pretend like this shit didn’t happen or keep writing and sharing stuff like it didn’t happen. I want people who see my blog to see this and understand where I stand on this stuff. I can’t promise it will be all sunshine and rainbows on my blog because there ain’t anything joyous about this subject. But it’s fucking important and I need to plant my flag in the sand so people know what I stand for and, in this case, what I stand against.