In the cosmic calendar of resistance, this may well be the Era of the Punched Nazi.

This fact has caused some consternation and hand-wringing among those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record. For the mainline liberals and conservatives who lament the punching of Richard Spencer, the young white supremacist activist who coined the term “alt-right,” Nazism remains a theoretical construct, an “idea” that can be debated and defeated without a shot being fired in anger. For the rest of us — for many Jews, for ethnic and religious minorities, for queer people — Nazism is an empirical fact with the solidity of iron roads leading to walled death camps.

The camps are Nazism’s endpoint; it is what Nazism is for. Nazism serves as a refuge for whites dislocated by mass society and modernity, who seek someone to blame for their anomic dread. With that in mind, we must be very explicit about what Nazism’s relationship to democracy must be, and refuse dangerous, whitewashing euphemisms when discussing it (e.g. “you support punching someone who disagrees with you”).

Such generalizing language is intellectually lazy at the best of times; here it is outright deadly. Yes, it could be said that I “disagree” with Spencer that a genocide of Black Americans is desirable, but I believe he should be punched because of the very real risk that he could galvanize such an event into actually happening. This is a fear supported by the tremendous weight of our history, and by the fact that we had to fight the bloodiest war of our species’ existence the last time Nazism came into conflict with modern democracy. To call this a “disagreement” is an unspeakable slight against millions of dead.

To be blunt: Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions.

Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter.
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Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death. There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else. Simply allowing Nazis onto a stage, as the BBC did when it let British National Party leader Nick Griffin sit and debate with political luminaries on its Question Time program, is to give them an invaluable moral victory. Like creationists who debate evolutionary biologists, the former benefit mightily from the prestige of the latter.

In using this tactic, Nazis abuse the democratic forum to illegitimately lend credence to something that is otherwise indefensible, the equality of the stage giving the unforgivable appearance of “two sides” to a position that is anathema to public decency. This is not because Nazis love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them.

But is it enough to say that we must meet Nazism with force because it is so terrible? It should be, morally. I would, however, add that there’s room to consider why force, specifically, is a necessary tool in these extreme times. There is a reason that it works against Nazis, adding weight to the argument that they are a special case where a normal ethic of nonviolence should be suspended.

The goals of Nazism have not changed, but some of its window dressing has. As he was being punched, Richard Spencer was showing off a lapel pin of Pepe, a cartoon character appropriated by extreme right and Nazi 4channers in their reactionary campaigns, which ultimately featured in many pro-Trump memes, some of which were retweeted by the man himself. The new exponents of modern Nazism are eager to exploit what they see as a constituency of young, tech-savvy white people whose online culture is a neat fit for them.

Nazis, It’s Time For A Common Sense Approach To Not Getting Punched

4chan’s “trolling” culture is built on a perverse ideal that prizes the use of offensive speech and borderline criminal behavior as a means of becoming a stronger, superior person. If you are ever offended by something, hurt by it, or made to fear for yourself, you’re weak, a “special snowflake” who’s been “triggered” and a “lolcow” (someone you should keep hurting because their reactions will be funny). In this ethic, all emotion (except rage, lust, or mirth) is weakness, something the troll can exploit to get big laughs for him and his fellows.

This notion has been exploited to great effect by people like Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who believes “America needs more trolls.” Yiannopoulos, who himself has a history of sympathy for Nazi ideas, and who has tried to lend respectability to Richard Spencer—calling him a “bright” “intellectual” figure on the “alt-right”—has since taken 4chan on the road, so to speak, using his university speaking engagements to gin up mob harassment of transgender students. Unable to resist a photogenic Nazi, the press has treated Yiannopoulos to numerous interviews. In one with the New York Times he literally said: “I don’t have feelings.” While this is an obvious lie, it fits with the troll culture ethos he seeks to promote.

The ideal man — the Trollermensch, if you like — is one who does not feel, who sociopathically wounds without empathy, who finds humor in even the most grotesque of suffering. In exchange, you feel no pain, no vulnerability; you cannot be hurt the way you are ruthlessly hurting others.

This is the alluring promise that 4chan’s culture has made to a generation of disaffected young men who feel powerless, adrift, and vulnerable in a rapidly changing world where being a white man is no longer a guarantee of success and prestige. Be mighty, hurt others, never get hurt again. But humanity, in all its little frailties, always catches up with us in the end.

After he was punched, Richard Spencer told the Times, “I am more worried about going to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kinds of people are roaming around,” adding on a Periscope video that “I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes, that I’m going to hate watching this.” Spencer, who was proudly touting and retweeting 4chan Pepe memes and cheering right along with Yiannopoulos about the world needing more trolling, was expressing fear and vulnerability. The facade had cracked; he was no Trollermensch, just human, equal to everyone he thought himself superior to, equal to everyone he’d see dead.

Nazis have long depended on something like trolling culture to work their dark magic. The concept of the “Big Lie” is right at home in an age of ideologically-driven 4chan hoaxes targeting women and minorities, and Nazism always relied on a certain chicanery to keep people guessing about their true intentions until it was too late — an eerie lesson for the present. Nazism’s fakery, and its ability to distort reality until ordinary people could not trust their own senses, bears more than a passing resemblance to 4chan’s culture of harassment and thuggish hoaxes. But the weak point was always the mythology of superiority and strength.

The Rise Of The ‘Alt Right’ And Religious Right Are Chillingly Similar

Deploying force against Nazis always revealed the lie that they belonged to a “Master Race.” And this was not just military force, mind you, but the rolled-up sleeves and bared fists of ordinary citizens who were determined to prevent the spread of fascism’s cancer. To look at British fascist leader Oswald Mosley disheveled after his rally was shut down by angry East End workers in July 1962 is to look not on the leader of a Master Race, but something considerably more ordinary and pathetic.

As I noted earlier, Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought. The only nonviolent solution is to marginalize Nazism from public life in our society — one may be free to hold these views, but not to try and spread them at the highest echelons of our public fora. When, however, someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate — many thinkers who lived through the Second World War, from Karl Popper, to Hannah Arendt, to Jean Paul Sartre, have been quite clear about why dispassionate discourse with men like Richard Spencer is not only pointless, but actively dangerous.

The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate.
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The use of force, by contrast, does reveal the shared humanity that Nazis deny. Our vulnerability is one of the things that links us all, seven billion strong, in a humane fragility. These are essential aspects of our humanity that both Nazi mythology and channer troll culture deny. Punching a Nazi, by contrast, reveals it. It reveals they are no masters, but quite eminently capable of fear, of pain, of vulnerability. And that takes the shine off; it eliminates their mystique, and it puts the lie to the idea that their ideology is an armor against the pains of modernity.

That alone justifies Richard Spencer being punched in the face on camera.

Tuesday night was a victory.

American media tends to overcorrect in the name of a false balance that caters to the endless caterwauling of conservatives, and there were some rumblings that the much ballyhooed “blue wave” washed out in spite of a torrent of good results for Democrats.

A forthright victory in the House, combined with some significant ballot initiatives and governor’s mansion pickups in various states, added up to a repudiation of reactionary politics from coast to coast. In a media-cycle dominated by hand wringing and pseudo even handedness, there is a temptation to cast the election results as a “split decision.”

But the real story of November 6th, 2018, was a tale of conviction triumphing over cynicism. In all 50 states there was real cause for hope, and, at last, a legislative bulwark was thrown up against Trump’s heinous agenda.

But let us first deal with the night’s disappointments.

It would be the height of foolishness to read the losses of Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke — as some have suggested — as an indictment of values-based campaigning. They fought extraordinarily close races, with O’Rourke winning votes in places Dems haven’t been competitive for a long time and his coattails were long enough to contribute to that House victory that we’re all celebrating.

“Moral victories” don’t win close votes in the legislature, but there’s a lot to be said for how close these races were fought and what they portend. In Florida, Gillum’s campaign almost certainly buoyed a voting rights initiative that restored the ballot to felons, ending a uniquely American injustice in that state. If that battle was winnable, even as Gillum himself fell short, that portends victory down the road.

But the real story of November 6th, 2018, was a tale of conviction triumphing over cynicism.
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Leftists and progressives always face stiff headwinds. Status-quo bias isn’t merely psychological, it distorts political trends as well. Our road is always uphill, always rock-strewn, always stormy; what we face is never easy to overcome.

But what 2018 demonstrates is that we are winning an argument and winning allies in the long fight against reactionary politics; even where we lost, these were narrow losses that spooked those in power, losses that came perilously close to pouring over their ramparts.

And then there are the many, many places we did win. Convincingly, and with ideals and identities that put the lie to so much conventional wisdom. The Democrats’ victors on election night managed to run the extra yard that candidates like O’Rourke couldn’t; that we’re so close to the line in either direction is a portentous victory in its own right.

We must never forget: a close race in a hitherto Republican state or district is still something to celebrate. In the U.S., which doesn’t make “swings” a critical feature of election reporting, ordinary voters may not be informed of important trends in their electorates—trends that are lost in winner-take-all reporting.

The swing against Republicans was convincing, dampened only by gerrymandering, partisan chicanery (especially in states like Georgia), and a Senate-electoral structure deliberately designed to thwart sudden changes in the popular mood.

But there is so much more to celebrate: Native American women taking their seats in a House that legislated against them for centuries, Black women marching to Congress for the first time in certain districts, Muslim women greeting us in Arabic as our representatives, trans people decisively defeating an initiative that would have curtailed our rights in Massachusetts, voting rights restored to millions, marijuana and nonpartisan districting legalized in Michigan; this all matters in profound, life-changing ways.

We must never forget: a close race in a hitherto Republican state or district is still something to celebrate.
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The Democrats flipped districts across the country—to the point where Ann Coulter declared Kansas to be “dead to me.” No less than noted fascist zombie Steve Bannon wondered aloud on his lightly-watched election stream if his side’s “constant barrage of racism, nativism and all that, has that worked?”

It is worth remembering that, by design, the race for the House constitutes a national referendum in a way Senate races cannot. To be sure, all elections were local this year — many Democrats triumphed by aping Danica Roem’s focus on local issues, district by district, state by state — but the House, by its very nature, also reflects a national mood. As I write this, The New York Times had the Dems winning the popular vote by over 7 percent, and turnout was breaking records.

As hard-right Republicans from Kansas to Wisconsin fall, it feels like there’s a convincing answer to Bannon’s agonized question. Trump’s nakedly nationalistic and racist appeals have profound limits when the public is organized.

That brings us to election night’s ultimate lesson — and the words I’d have written no matter what the results were.

What the hour demands is power: the building of it, the securing of it, the wielding of it. I had no patience for the cynicism of those leftists who, with an unbecoming eagerness, all but pissed on the utility of voting. But the more reasoned among their number were quite right to say that a ballot was a beginning, not an end.

Combatting Trumpian fascism demands more than a willingness to wear a sticker after a state-sanctioned exercise; it commands us to honor the stranger, shelter the refugee, break unjust laws, and fight for what is truly moral, even if that fight takes you into the streets.

The work neither began nor ended with the canvassing for Election 2018; so much more remains to be done.

Trump’s troops are still at our southern border; innocents still languish in detention centers nationwide, ferried by planes that cross our vast landmass; the dignity of your fellow citizen is under threat from coast to coast. There will be dark hours that demand sit-ins and late night phone calls to make bail for the unjustly incarcerated, or nights where you may have to shelter someone in your home who is unjustly pursued by the state.

The chimes of that fateful clock will sound, and you must answer.

The Democrats have a bumper crop of officials now. A legion of new legislators, and governors who, for the first time in years, represent a majority of Americans. But voting is about choosing who you will struggle with, and the next two years will be a test; these new Democratic pols won’t mean a damn unless they’re relentlessly pressed to do the right thing.

That will, in turn, demand everything from protests to petitions. Above all else it demands your continued engagement. It demands more than the unbecoming, supine posture adopted by Democratic leadership Tuesday night; we need a willingness to fight, not adherence to spreadsheet politics.

There is no “marketplace of ideas,” as Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi would have it. There is, lamentably, only a battlefield before us.

Combatting Trumpian fascism demands more than a willingness to wear a sticker after a state-sanctioned exercise.
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On October 27th, I woke up to my partner, who sat bolt upright in bed. She didn’t speak in soothing tones, none of the kind indulgences that normally greeted my sleepyheadedness; she was glued to her phone and told me that a synagogue in Pittsburgh had been attacked. I had the unhappy task of informing my other partner by text. Both are Jewish.

I had already been reeling that week from news of the criminally underreported Kroger shooting, which saw a white supremacist attempt to massacre worshippers at a Black church. Thwarted by a locked door, he went to a nearby supermarket and killed two Black shoppers.

Now, his ideological twin murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue. Each was enlivened by the white supremacism that Trump has so thoroughly vivified these past two years.

We talk so often about the stakes in any given election. Days before most Americans went to the polls, I saw the stakes drawn in the blood of my own communities. People who could have been my friends, colleagues, loved ones, were gunned down across the land by Trump’s ideological children; there was never any compromising with this, never any intellectualizing to be done. This was never an election with two equal sides, much less two equally survivable sides.

I could keep trying to persuade you that last night constitutes “good news,” athwart so much media hand-wringing. But as I think back to the aftermath of that bloody week, I recall a quote — stitched together from different ideas in the Talmud — that has, mercifully, found currency among many progressives. It serves as a reminder of our obligations, regardless of election returns, and remains a polestar for our times.

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

For, as a beloved reverend friend put it, “we’ve got more of a fighting chance than we had.”

I almost hesitate to contribute to the flurry of commentary around the now infamous New York Times op-ed.

The Kavanaugh hearings demand the disinfecting sunlight of an O-type star—burning very hot and very bright—after all. But the subtext of the op-ed points to two of the most alarming things about Trumpism. First, the fact that most of its opponents—especially on the right—condemn Trump’s style rather than his substance; second, that as a result of this, the groundwork is already being laid for Trumpism sans Trump.

The op-ed is a not-so-subtle plea to do the very thing we must never do: blame Trump’s proto-fascism entirely on the personal failings and quirks of one man:

“We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

The editorial is, in truth, the confession of an enabler and—despite its nearly unprecedented nature as a devastatingly public betrayal from within—a very traditionally Washington attempt by the author to position themselves for future jobs.

As scathing as the press has been about Trump and his omnishambolic government, there remain two glowing bright spots where even they must buckle and fawn in praise: American military strikes (let us recall Brian Williams’ woeful misunderstanding of Leonard Cohen’s music when the anchor said he was “guided by the beauty of our weapons”), and the mythic “adults in the room” of the Trump White House. These are the “men of honour,” mostly ex-military, who are supposedly sacrificing themselves to be close to Trump, and thus are able to restrain him.

The op-ed author made sure they eagerly claimed the “adult” title, and with good reason: Their audience was not ordinary Americans, but the country’s intelligentsia—political operatives, the non-profit world, academics, and journalists. It was a lullaby meant to reassure them that the “adults in the room” were real, implicitly noble conservatives who put “country first.” In that vein of media-friendly mythologizing, the coup de grace was shamelessly grabbing onto the coattails of the late John McCain’s newly sewn, saint-like hagiography.

The editorial is the confession of an enabler and a very traditionally Washington attempt by the author to position themselves for future jobs.
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Why? Remember that this administration has been uniquely radioactive for its employees and officials. Normally a White House stint is a golden ticket to plum jobs worldwide. That’s not proven true for Trump’s feckless adjutants, however. There’s a skin-deep stain of association with things like Trump’s Charlottesville remarks, where he praised neo-Nazis, insisting there were “good people on both sides” of a one-sided assault—acts which culminated in a terror attack that cost a young socialist counterprotester her life and injured many others.

“Out, damned spot!” cry Trump’s staffers and murderous ministers. They scrub feverishly in hopes of removing the mark that might keep them from a lifetime of corporate boards and preselection for safe seats. Painting themselves as the “adults in the room” media darlings—snatching the halo unworthily bestowed on Chief of Staff John Kelly or Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—is the only way they might cleanse themselves.

We shouldn’t allow this to work. The true thesis of the op-ed is “Trump is horrible, we know, but we’re good people, really.” The signal is sent up, particularly to other conservatives and the baleful number of credulous liberals who still desperately need to believe in the “compassionate conservative”:

“Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

Take them at their word. Don’t get them wrong. They’re right wing and fine with the continual looting of our country and its imperialist ambitions. They just don’t want to be as uncouth and “anti-trade” as Trump. But for malingering as they have, like a long lasting cold, they deserve no mercy or sympathy.

As this is the umpteen-thousandth take on the op-ed I’ll only delve into one more issue, which I feel hasn’t received its due attention. The op-ed is deliberately designed to instill complacency. The last section, which invokes the ghost of Senator McCain in an unintentionally apposite way, is a call to lay down arms.

“The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility. Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.”

The author blames us all for our fate. We allowed ourselves to sink low with Trump, and even our opposition to him is darkened by his long shadow. Aside from the fact that one should always beware anyone peddling “no labels” as a solution to social problems—even the Bible begins with a parable about the importance and power of naming things—this is the bit of the op-ed where you see the oil leaking.

The allegations in the op-ed are deadly serious, and yet that merely indicts the author further for their craven complicity. Even now Republicans are lamenting that the op-ed has backfired because it will make it harder to “contain” Trump. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) went so far as to validate the piece’s major claims about Trump, yet still laments its publication. They represent a perverse GOP consensus with the author: although Trump can be removed, they’d rather control him. No matter who gets hurt.

There’s something slick about it all; it’s all Trump’s fault, but it’s also the nation’s fault. Who’s not at fault? The author, and their cadre of “resistive” but polite proto-fascists.

This sly nonsense should be met with resistance worthy of that name; it is how we’ll deal with the immediate crisis of Trump and the aftermath of rebuilding a shattered society. Resistance must not be limited to opposing one man; it must address itself to the conditions that made him possible—such as the venality of operatives like this anonymous official. We must dispense with the comforting myth that these “adults in the room” are anything but efficient enablers.

In a word: fight. Treacly unity smothered by the flag is precisely the sort of sleepwalking that led us into Trump’s fever dream. To get out of it, we’ll have to dare to call things what they are, disobey—and horror of horrors—break decorum.

The author wants to tamp down on this as it might upend their plush boardroom chair. No more or less.

The author soft-pedals the “adults in the room” line as “cold comfort.” It’s no comfort at all to know that an administrative coup—with repercussions that will far outlast this presidency—is taking place and lies in the hands of such cowardly people that they’d sacrifice us all to Trump’s furies for a tax cut.

There is but one ice-bath of cold comfort in this mess: the knowledge that Trump himself is absolutely tormented by the question of who wrote the op-ed, and that its author is equally tormented by their tell-tale-heart beating beneath the White House floorboards.

When the two finally meet, each will see the other and find himself; they’ll know, silently, that they deserve each other.

Former White House advisor David Axelrod tweeted today:

Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of @PressSec and her family from a restaurant.

This, in the end, is a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America:

Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates!

#sad

The only thing that triumphed here is Mike Huckabee-esque anti-humor.

Meanwhile, a more sober take comes to us from the Washington Post editorial board, whose genteel relativism urges us to “let the Trump team eat in peace”:

Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

It’s not hard at all to imagine what a moral emergency looks like to the extreme right. They’ve murdered abortion doctors and shot up clinics already. We were living in the Post’s grim dystopia for decades before this point. Right-wing extremists, hopped up on their eschatological visions of the world, have indeed taken matters into their own hands repeatedly. They’ve committed massacres at mosques and schools, and from the Pizzagate crowd — deep in thrall to an alternate universe without peer even among the wild fever dreams of conservatism — we’ve only narrowly avoided mass shootings at a pizza parlor and a homeless camp in Arizona.

Thus, I’m less than perturbed at the fact that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was politely asked to leave a restaurant — indeed, she was even told the food she’d already been served was “on the house.” More uncivil, arguably, was the DSA protest that drove Kirstjen Nielsen from a Mexican restaurant in downtown DC, but this involved no violence either and was eminently fair as she’s a cabinet secretary in a public place. By her own claim, she was having a “working dinner” at the restaurant, to boot. So even the Post’s “private time” distinction hardly applies.

The truth is that for all of the recent handwringing about civility, the methods now being employed against the administration’s core supporters are actually quite civil. The manner in which Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave was actually the portrait of civility; it was a communal decision taken by staff, she was informed of the decision in private and politely asked to leave, and was not charged for any orders that had already been delivered. So what happened, exactly? Well, she was shunned. A social consequence was applied to her actions as Press Secretary that served as a powerful reminder: What she does is not normal, and should not be taken lightly.

This seems to be less the embrace of Trumpism than its precise opposite: the enforcement of normative moral standards through the application of polite, non-violent social consequences for immoral acts.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
theestablishment.co

Trumpism, by its nature, is consequence-free. Just witness how Huckabee Sanders herself abused her power as Press Secretary to publicize the incident on her government account, leveraging her status and calling down a rain of abuse on the restaurant. That she used her @PressSec account to do this is a violation of White House ethics policy. It won’t matter.

This is one of many problems with Trumpism. Scott Pruitt’s bizarre, expensive peccadilloes and overt ethical violations as EPA secretary haven’t cost him his job; Kellyanne Conway spruiking Ivanka Trump’s fashion line in her official capacity didn’t cost her hers; Trump himself experiences next to no oversight from the Republican-dominated Congress and routinely positions himself as being above the law — his simpering defenders on cable news argue much the same.

Therefore, an ordinary citizen took it upon herself to quietly, politely, apply a much needed consequence to a member of a government that thinks itself beyond responsibility to anything but Trump’s whims. That doesn’t seem like a validation of Trumpian callousness, but a repudiation of it.

Trumpism, by its nature, is consequence-free.
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Of course, when you use the smooth, overgeneralizing language of the Posteditorial board — the same rhetorical gesture that categorizes even life-or-death political battles as “disagreements” — this can all be effaced. One act of incivility is as bad as another. I’d dispute that the Red Hen owner’s actions were uncivil, but even in a case where a dollop of rudeness was at play, like the Nielsen protest, such things are necessary for exactly the same reason: Without these mechanisms, these people would experience no meaningful consequences for engineering and supporting horrors.

The people are doing the checking and balancing that our government will not. We should be much more worried that we’ve arrived at that point than about the politesse of a private citizen.

But if we must indulge the “civility” discussion, then it’s worth saying that these acts of civic protest remain peaceful. They are a humane response to inhumanity, and, frankly, one more manifestation of democracy and decency. People who support this administration’s cruel Zero Tolerance regime, whether from a White House podium or from a Twitter account spewing memes and hashtags, should be made to experience the power of shunning. It is, at bottom, a peaceful way to say “this is not okay, and you should go away and think about what you’ve done; then you can rejoin society.”

The people are doing the checking and balancing that our government will not.
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Furthermore, unlike, say, “conscience”-driven bigots who wish to use Christian belief to refuse service to LGBT people, the owner of the Red Hen wasn’t antagonizing any class Huckabee Sanders belonged to. She was responding to Huckabee Sanders’ actions as an individual. The very things she, and she alone, are responsible for. In another time, conservatives might’ve called that “personal responsibility.”

Shunning is harsh in its way — we are social creatures, after all — but it is also humane and non-violent. In short, it is civil. Even better, it’s grassroots. Citizens are taking their responsibilities seriously. As the Red Hen owner said, “This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

That’s more than can be said for Huckabee Sanders, Miller, or Nielsen, who rely on a consequence-free environment in order to do their dirty work.

I’ve often been leery of applying the language of interpersonal abuse dynamics to politics. “Gaslighting” is a word perilously close to being defined out of all meaning, just as “trigger” has been all but stolen from trauma survivors. But there is merit in the observation that abusers define any resistance to their actions as rude and uncivil, that they apply one standard to themselves and another to any who might raise a voice against them. That’s long been the case here.

What Huckabee Sanders experienced was nothing compared to what she’s propagandized for from her podium. She goes home to a warm bed and her loving family, not a cage where she sleeps on concrete under foil; her children will not be parted from her before being spirited through a ramshackle, Kafkaesque prison system that refuses to track its wards.

The Atrocities On Our Border Prove Trump’s Base
Isn’t Worth Talking To
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A powerful government secretary was denied the momentary privilege of eating at a specific nice restaurant. Even if I had tears left to shed, this would be the last thing to draw them from me. If these people are so concerned about civility in restaurants, then perhaps they can more aggressively take ICE to task for incidents like this.

We should not fall into the moral trap of analogizing a children’s prison camp to a principled denial of service. Or, indeed, analogizing the latter to Jim Crow or shops that discriminate against queer people, as a breathtaking number of people have done in the last few days. We must be smarter and more discerning than this. We owe that much to ourselves.

Where The Washington Post sees sorrow, I see hope. If our government cannot hold its leaders accountable, then the people must.

It was like a Biblical triptych of our times. On one end, a man telling the heartfelt story of a girl with Down’s Syndrome being forcibly ripped from her mother’s arms, on the other a fascist responding “womp womp!” and in the middle a beatifically silent newsreader letting the obscenity unfold. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski made plain both the substance and practice of his ideology with the characteristic efficiency of his imperial icon: cruelty, swaddled in mockery that evokes the most callous of internet trolls.

The atrocity unfolding on the United States’ southern border is not new, and it has been a swelling cancer on the national consciousness for years. But that continuity should not obscure the dramatic and deliberate ways in which it has been catastrophically worsened courtesy of deliberate enforcement mechanisms put in place by Trump and his cadre, aided by the contemptuous consent of the man’s rabid supporters. We are continually barraged with appeals to understand Trump’s supporters, even as multiple New York Timesop-eds lament the supposed vulgarity of people like Robert De Niro or Samantha Bee.

Frank Bruni writes:

“When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din.”

In the wake of Donald Trump tweeting that Latinos were “infesting” the country, the best the Times could do was proffer this rather nuclear take:

“The contagion of incivility: President Trump says undocumented immigrants want to ‘infest’ the United States. His critics respond with vituperative words of their own.”

Of course De Niro and Bee were mentioned, putting the expectorates “fuck” and “cunt” on the same level as the leaden words of policy that shatter families and traumatize children. What could be more balanced?

Amidst all the hand-wringing about civility is the implication that if only we were nicer to Trump’s supporters, if only we refrained from four letter words and discomfiting comparisons to Auschwitz, if only we assuaged the hurt feelings of ICE and called cages “chain-link enclosures” or baby jails “tender age facilities,” that we would win more people to our cause.

This is a fatal lie that will see blood in the streets, and in camps before the end.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
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Vulgarity and incivility are indeed coarse and uncomfortable, but like any weapon there are moments when they must be employed in self-defense. This is just such a time. If we cannot be vulgar about a cabinet secretary lying to the nation and saying “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border” when her own department has produced statistics and photos evidencing just such a policy, then what is vulgarity for? The milk of human kindness, strained as it is, should be spared for those children and their shattered families — and, indeed, for their homelands who have oft suffered from American foreign policy stretching back decades.

The Kafkaesque cruelty of making their homes unlivable and hammering apart their families when they flee in desperation to the border of the nation that looted its wealth from those selfsame ruins… it’s unforgivable.

At such a point, I’ve no kindness left for Kjerstin Nielsen when she has the audacity to go to a Mexican restaurant for a charming dinner while her department presides over a profound human rights violation, which she had the audacity to lie about. In the midst of all of this, Trump’s supporters have dissembled and equivocated on the question, arguing that asylum-seeking and immigrant parents are to blame for bringing their children in the first place, or that separations are about protecting children from “traffickers and drug lords.” Online, they’re even less circumspect. And that brings us back to the “womp womp,” and to the late report that Trump adviser Stephen Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.”

These people have told us who and what they are, and what they’re willing to make excuses for.

After Lewandowski’s on-air act of cruelty, Trump supporter Carmine Sabia tweeted:

“We as supporters of Donald Trump need to stand and say what Corey Lewandowski said about a 10 year old girl with Down Syndrome was abhorrent. He became the caricature of what the media wants people to believe we are.”

But this is who they are. For evidence I turned to Trump supporter Carmine Sabia, who tweeted that same night “A poem on the Statue of Liberty is not immigration law it’s a fucking poem” and a quote about how 765,000 children are supposedly separated from their active-duty military parents (presumably, those children are not held in cages and permanently separated from their families). This callousness and whataboutery, which is the perfect distilled essence of how Trumpists have justified the family separation policy, is what paves the way for Miller’s sadistic enjoyment or Lewandowski’s ability to mock a traumatized 10-year-old girl.

In short, these are the people that those hand-wringing editorials think can be reached by the right combination of reasoned argument and smiling politesse.

Here are some home truths that we — and The New York Times newsroom — need to understand.

We are well past the point when Trump or his people could cross a red line for Republicans. Nothing this Administration says or does will cause these people to turn against Trump. Every line of cruelty Trump crosses will be excused by them. The mealy-mouthed NeverTrumpers like Ben Shapiro, David Frum, George F. Will, and Bill Kristol? That’s it; that’s as good as GOP/conservative “opposition” is ever going to get. Everyone else has signed up for a one-way ticket to Nazism-but-with-memes.

Back on Twitter, I saw someone — with a verified checkmark — going around saying that when a child dies in one of these jails that that’ll be the moment the GOP turns on Trump. I have some very, very horrifying news for you.

We are way past the point when a dead child would make any of these MAGA-spewers, or any elected Republicans who aren’t already issuing tepid do-nothing critiques, change their minds. They knew what they were signing up for.

When I Said All Trump Supporters Are White Supremacists, I Meant It
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They hate Latino immigrants. They hate refugees. They hate asylum seekers. Passionately. If you think, for one moment, that they would seriously mourn the deaths of any of these people, you have not been paying attention. Either to the discourse here or in Europe — lest we forget, a little Syrian boy washed up on the shores of Turkey, dead from the dangerous Mediterranean crossing. That was in 2015. Since then, Brexit happened, Trump was elected, and fascists have come to power, or entrenched it, in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary.

The people who support these movements were not and will not be moved, by even the most utterly vulnerable visions of our humanity as people of color. They will not be moved even by the very shattering of our lives. That is the depth with which we are hated, and that depth is the chasm that divides people of good will from those who support Donald Trump — or Alternativ für Deutschland.

This is not an academic “difference of opinion.” It is a gap measured in increments of blood already spilled.

The people who support these movements will not be moved even by the very shattering of our lives.
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If a child died in an ICE facility and became a cause celebre, Trump’s supporters would respond in one or more of the following ways:

• Dissemble. i.e. “maybe they were sick when they got to the border! How irresponsible of their parents!”
• Lie. “It’s fake news!”
• Blame Obama.
• Say “well you didn’t care this much when an immigrant killed an American citizen!”
• “What about when our troops die? Do you care then?”
• And finally, the worst of them would just fucking celebrate it.

The enduring mistake made by those huffing the paint can of civility is that they sincerely believe people who voted for Trump, at bottom, care about other people — especially those who could be seen as “the Other.” True, some slices of Trump’s base hate certain groups more than others. Maybe the top priority for some is hating Muslims, for others it’s Latinos, for others still (like the Evangelical base) it’s hating transgender people, or hating queer folks more widely. But they are all united by the conviction that Trump’s presidency would permit them the violent retribution they craved, visited upon somegroup they hated with a passion.

Trump is a shambles of a man, a bundle of impulses and appetites whose Jupiter-mass ego lends itself neatly to reactionary politics. But to his base, he is an idea. More than even that, he is a license. Clothed in the power of the presidency, he grants permission to those who’ve longed to indulge in their worst, most bigoted impulses. It’s why we’ve seen an uptick in hate crimes, and why so many videos are surfacing of loudmouth bigots who either reference Trump or current events in their rants. More than anything else, Trump is permission. “It’s okay to stop caring about other people,” his existence announces. “You too can be fabulously rich, above the law, and as abusive as you please.” So long as he has the imprimatur of the presidency, he will have an invincible appeal to bigots who’ve yearned for some form of towering legitimacy for their hatred.

The Media Must Stop Taking ‘Incel’ Agitprop Seriously
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You cannot wait for some universal moral outrage to overwhelm and convert your opposition. The outrage will never be universal until the threat of fascism has passed, at which point no one will want to admit they cheered on crimes against humanity.

If you are sincerely concerned about the great crimes of our time — from Trump’s policies to the new Italian government threatening to expel Roma — then you cannot concern yourself with appealing to the people vociferously cheering on those policies. They’ve already made up their minds; they’ve found their moment.

Many other people, perhaps people isolated by feelings of powerlessness and despair, are waiting for theirs. Your job is to give it to them, activate and mobilize them. In the process, do not give the slightest damn about the hurt feelings of fascism’s enablers. The only feelings they care about are their own, and that’s always been the problem. They’ll whine more about the cancellation of Roseanne than they will about giving toddlers PTSD. Frankly, fuck them.

There’s no eloquence that should be wasted on them.

The dirty secret of fascism is that its appeal is not rational; it is, therefore, impervious to rational argument. You cannot talk someone out of a feeling of hatred. If your conscience requires you to believe in redemption, as mine does (once a Catholic, always a Catholic), then consider this: Redemption is not yours to give. It can only be sought by the soul that craves it, that has admitted its sins, and seeks to honestly make amends. You cannot give that to anyone. Those who now support fascism may one day stare in a mirror and cry “what have I become!?” But that epiphany can only come from within.

In the meantime, fuck ’em, and organize everybody else.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having.

flickr/StephenRMelling

A s a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write

Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.

Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of her against her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art

Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.

The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.

It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/he-establishment-the-media-must-stop-taking-incel-agitprop-seriously-9c64be0464f5/ Thu, 03 May 2018 18:02:34 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1229 Read more]]> Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having.

As a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write
theestablishment.co

Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.
Click To Tweet

In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.
Click To Tweet

Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of heragainst her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art
theestablishment.co

Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.
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The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.
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It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

Mike Flynn is where he belongs: in the dock. We are, undoubtedly, entering a new phase of special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election, and with it the inescapable question of whether Trump will try to do what some will say is “unthinkable”: fire Mueller and smother the investigation.

Will he or won’t he? The drama of Trump’s unpredictability has chewed up hours of air time and miles worth of column inches.

But that hand-wringing, I’ve come to believe, is entirely the wrong way to approach the situation. Trump is quite predictable. It’s the people who have the power to stop him who aren’t — and that is the true core of the danger we now face.

Trump is often described as “unpredictable,” and not without reason; if he has any capacity for cultivating an image, he’s used it to “keep [us] in suspense,” as he infamously said at the third presidential debate. But as I look back on the last two years I find myself wondering if anything he’s done has been truly surprising coming from a man with his qualities (or lack thereof).

The notion that Trump is unpredictable is, if anything, a gross mythologization of the man. The only “success” that Trump can truly claim as his own is his branding, and the notion that one can’t predict what he’s going to do next is one he’s spun to great effect as proof of both his negotiating acumen and creativity. But he possesses neither.

To some he stands in the established Nixonian tradition of appearing unstable to keep enemies off balance. The so-called “madman” theory of governance. But, for one, this is deeply undesirable on its face; and two, Trump lacks the capacity to do such a thing with strategic intent, even guided by others.

He’s often described as “delusional,” and again, not without cause. Virtual reality has truly hit the big time here: it consumes the White House, swaddling our president and his adjutants in a universe of his own imagining. And yet, the grander and more consequential delusion has been that of all the journalists, commentators, and political leaders who convinced themselves that Donald Trump could be anything other than what he is.

As I look back on the last two years I find myself wondering if anything Trump’s done has been truly surprising.
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At each stage, the latest “unpredictable” thing Trump had done was, after all, eminently predictable. We were merely swept up in the surprise of an upper class that did not want to truly believe what was unfolding before their eyes. Thus, that elusive “pivot” was always just around the corner. Thus, the new line in the sand would surely never be crossed.

And yet, it was always predictable — almost to the point of being a given — that he would cross it.

Some cast Trump as a chessmaster, keeping his opponents off balance with his wild moves; others believe him to be dementia-addled. In each case, it serves as a bizarrely convoluted excuse to ignore what has always been obvious about Trump: He is a spoiled rich boy who has never been told “no” in his life.

Hence, he believes his own lies because he believes what he needs to be true. Hence, he will say and do as he pleases, satiating his slovenly appetites, lurching from one impulse to the next.

What you see is what you get; Trump’s “soul” is exoskeletal. He has no inner life. He is so shocking to some precisely because he is so knowable from even the briefest of looks. He has no hidden depths. He is that empty stream of consciousness that defines nearly all his public speeches. He wings it because he not only has no plan, he is incapable of making one. He substitutes base instinct for sense, pursuing his hungers and uncontrolled emotions like white rabbits in some alternate universe.

But this has been obvious almost from the start. I want to be clear here: I am not presenting this as a genuine insight culled from the mists of Washington’s arcane insider culture. I am telling you, simply, that you can believe your eyes.

Trump’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz—who penned The Art of the Deal—came out swinging when Trump announced his Presidential candidacy; he had crushing remorse at having helped to create a monster.

A few choice quotes from the New Yorker article include:

“The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.”

“It’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement…”

“More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true…”

We seek alternate, elaborate, or even ableist explanations for all this because we cannot quite believe that Trump really is this shallow, that our democracy is now in the hands of a villain so overwrought and obvious. A man who is somehow less than the sum of his impulses. A man who cannot even get through an event literally scripted to make him look magnanimous and presidential without being petty and cruel because he just couldn’t help himself.

Everything Trump has done — pick your moment, be it attacking families of color on Twitter, trying to start a war with North Korea, firing James Comey — has been all too predictable. None of it is actually surprising.

What else would a man like him do when given this much power and attention?

What has been dangerously unpredictable is how the political class has responded to him, and whether or not at any given moment they will enable him. What has been truly delusional has been the efforts of many to suggest that Trump hides some inner depth that is inaccessible to us. Take this recent, brief article by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait:

“The prevailing interpretation of Donald Trump, shared by all his enemies and many of his allies, is that he is a con man. It is a theory that explains both his career in business and politics, and has carried through his many reversals of position and acts of fraud against customers and contractors. It remains quite plausible. But new reporting has opened up a second possibility: The president has lost all touch with reality.”

Is it really so shocking that Trump is disgusting in private as well as in public? What did Chait honestly want to believe? That after hours, Trump muses before a fireplace chortling the night away with Mitch McConnell while saying things like, “Oh yes, the press were such cads today, but the plebes believed me when I said it was fake news; the proles are ever so gullible”?

No, Trump believes his own nonsense.

The shocking thing is that anyone believed he had the guile and cunning to affect a public persona for strategic reasons. What you see is what you get. No more, and certainly no less.

He can con people only insofar as he can con himself. He believes the bullshit he’s sold to all those crowds, and he believes any lie that flatters him—but that doesn’t make him mentally ill. It is merely the very definition of the kind of selfish self-importance conferred by wealth. That Trump remains a Birther, that he denies the Access Hollywood tape’s veracity, should not surprise us.

What is dangerously unpredictable is how his staff and Republican leaders will respond to this. Will they go along with the lie and try to force the rest of us to dwell in it? Or will they try to ease Trump out of an office to which he is eminently unsuited? Thus, our anxiety about whether Trump will try to fire Mueller is really about whether our political elite will let him.

What is unpredictable is not Trump’s temperament —trying to fire Mueller is very predictable. We know he sees the investigation as a “hoax” and as an insult, and that he has tried multiple times to ward away legal scrutiny; he would make it all go away if he could.

What is not quite as predictable is whether this will be the red line for enough Republicans to finally take a meaningful stand against their president.

The idea that Trump is a “poor man’s idea of a rich man” is part of a similar genre in elite thought, one that tries to ignore the ways in which Trump is merely the logical conclusion of values and practices that are common in our upper class. He must, instead, be an interloper. No, better, a “crazy” interloper. A singular aberration.

This, in the end, is what unites liberals who want to pretend everything was fine until January 2017 with conservatives who pretend everything’s been fine since.

Donald Trump Is A Rich Man’s Idea Of A Rich Man
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To such people, whatever Trump is, he is an exception whose manifest failings indict no one beyond himself. To them, he does not speak to the flaws of wealth and privilege, of our upper class, of whiteness, or of the entire American political project, even though all of these things produced him.

He is remarkable only for being the apotheosis of otherwise commonplace Americanisms.

Yet time and again, pundits and scholars alike have tried to discern the Trump Code, the method to his rantings and seemingly senseless pugilism. Most recently, no less than a Berkeley scholar advanced a theory that Trump’s tweets were part of a four-pronged strategic “weapon to control the news cycle.” Esoteric Star Trek lore has gotten a boost from all the commentators arguing that Trump is playing 3D (or 4D or 13D or multi-dimensional) chess.

But the truth is far more simple than that. His tweets are what they appear to be. Spasmodic impulse restrained only by the running schedule of cable news — if anything. As Media Matters for America’s Matthew Gertz put it in Politicorecently: “There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted.”

The Damning Moral Consequences Of Twitter’s Refusal To Ban Trump
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Now that a white guy’s said it, perhaps people will believe me.

Yet the shocking thing has not been what Trump said or did, but the way those in power have debased themselves by adapting to his ascent as if it were a change in barometric pressure. Acting as if he were a phenomenon they had no direct control over.

The ableism inherent to much of the criticism directed at Trump is obvious, and performs the same distancing function. He’s nothing like us, ergo he must be “crazy.” That, too, feeds the “he’s unpredictable” narrative — with the added bonus of antagonizing people with disabilities, who are already suffering because of Trump. But his unpredictability is dependent only on our inability to believe what he’s capable of, in the face of all evidence.

We know he’s the kind of man who would, flippantly, seek to ban an entire religion from the nation, who wants to build a Berlin Wall for the 21st Century, who would mock a disabled reporter, a Muslim family who lost a son to a Republican war, a grieving mother of another fallen soldier whose only crime in Trump’s eyes appears to have been her race, who will use an event honouring Navajo code talkers to use anti-Native slurs to attack a political opponent, who picks a fight with the mayor of London after his city was hit by a terrorist attack, who drags his feet on condemning terror against Muslims, who sees no tragedy too great for him to exploit in the most callous way, who seeks to profit from his presidency at every turn, who tried to ban transgender people from the military via Twitter, who has all but directed the harassment of ordinary citizens and political opponents via Twitter, whose idea of diplomacy has been to taunt North Korea’s thin-skinned Dear Leader while brazenly undermining his own Secretary of State, who bragged of committing sexual assault and who threw his support behind a child molester, who called Nazi terrorists “very fine people,” who initiated a diplomatic incident with Australia for kicks, who said of the now-convicted Flynn that he was a “good guy” and who tried to pressure the then-FBI director to stop looking into him, who got into a days-long Twitter feud with the father of a basketball player who he deemed insufficiently grateful for securing his son’s release from Chinese custody.

Trump is the logical conclusion of values and practices that are common in our upper class.
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The list can and does go on. Trump’s recent sloppy break-up with Bannon, and his response to Fire and Fury, spawned a litany of childish tweets and threats.

One disastrous, squalid affair after another, all of them quite predictable when you simply ask yourself: “What would be the worst possible way he could handle this situation short of actively shitting himself and/or launching nukes?”

Your answer won’t fall wide of reality’s mark, I’m sure.

But about those nukes…

Here’s where the unpredictability question gets even scarier. Recently, Air Force General John Hyten said something that seems, at first blush, extraordinary to an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum. In his capacity as the commanding officer of U.S. Strategic Command — which oversees the American nuclear arsenal — he said this:

“I provide advice to the president, he will tell me what to do. And if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, that’s illegal.’ And guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options, with a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”

Actually, it is. The scenario Hyten presented to the audience (and a nervously watching world) is one that takes no account of Trump’s demonstrated contempt for law, norms, reason, and empathy. The laws governing use of the nuclear arsenal themselves are also not entirely clear.

Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept asks:

“Does Trump, who rails against ‘so-called’ judges, strike you as the kind of leader who is bothered by the rule of law? Why wouldn’t he just fire Hyten and replace him with a more compliant general?”

What’s more, when has the U.S. let international law stop it from taking illegal military action in the past? So, once again, using the schema I’ve laid out: What is unpredictable is not whether Trump would order a nuclear strike (you should assume he would, eagerly), it’s whether STRATCOM would stop him, whether John Kelly and James Mattis actually would “tackle him to the ground.”

…Or whether they would just swallow the last bits of their souls and comply?

After Trump’s infamous tweet about his button being bigger than Kim’s, there should be no doubt about Trump’s depravity and childishly maniacal intentions. It’s all predictable. His brief, pitiful political career is defined by violating norms; norms are all that constrain a President’s nuclear authority.

“If [Trump] gave the command,” writes nuclear security expert Bruce Blair, “his executing commanders would have no legal or procedural grounds to defy it no matter how inappropriate it might seem.”

Therefore, what’s really up in the air is whether the men around him—in suits and neatly pressed uniforms—defy Trump nonetheless, preventing him from opening the nuclear satchel and accessing its codes.

In the end, what will condemn us all is not Trump’s bottomless depravity, but the utter lack of moral courage among the people empowered to stop him.

This is the story of the story I can’t write.

The “#MeToo moment” has cut a righteous swathe through the elite, bringing down once unassailable men in entertainment, news, and the world of politics. The legions of us it united became 2017’s Person of the Year, fitting for so desolate a year that we women who yelled out “Enough!” in unison should be esteemed for it. I have #MeToo stories I’ve not gone public with in any detail. But they’re not what this piece is about.

Rather, this story is about what lurks in the penumbra of #MeToo, what is occluded by the press coverage and the jokes (so very many late night jokes) about the sexual dimension of male power. Power, as a whole, remains in the shadows.

A few women have tried to bring this more complex analysis forward. Journalist Melissa Gira Grant, for instance, wrote for The New York Review of Books about how sexual harassment is a projection of power, rather than something purely sexual. “Sex has overshadowed harassment,” she writes. But this moment points to larger, more systemic issues of men in power silencing and marginalizing those they dominate — whether or not they use sex to do so.

Power, as a whole, remains in the shadows.
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“[W]omen are not supposed to let on that we know how power works,” Grant writes, “Consciously or not, we know how rote male dominance is, and that it often feels like nothing. It is the weather, and it is a form of discipline.”

This was a subtle but powerful point that was also made by Rebecca Carroll, a journalist who produced Charlie Rose for years. She wrote for Esquire about her experience of Rose’s racism. Describing a “toxic and degrading” environment, she recalled how Rose tokenized her for being black, and belittled her for forwarding innovative ideas on how to discuss race on Rose’s program. “If I pushed back on anything race-related, I was silenced or punished,” she wrote, adding that after she suggested a panel discussing the history of the slave trade to frame a piece on the movie Amistad, he became “so irate that he cancelled the whole segment and didn’t assign me anything else for days.”

“It was an environment that all but erased me, while simultaneously exploiting me as a black woman,” Carroll wrote. “I felt like an exotic anomaly he could move around the chessboard at his whim — and I was supposed be grateful for it.” None of Rose’s behavior toward her was sexual, notably. It was a parallel form of toxicity that degraded her, specifically, for being a black woman. But would Carroll be considered part of this “moment,” then? Even when her story feels so central to what #MeToo is really about? It exposes a form of male power and entitlement that imbricates deeply with a white supremacist power structure. We should not be surprised that Rose’s intense misogyny was twinned with racism, after all. Lest we forget, Harvey Weinstein tried to publicly discredit only two of his accusers: Lupita Nyong’o and Salma Hayek.

Yet Carroll’s story points the way to a larger understanding of white and male power. This isn’t about sex. As Grant, writes: “Our conflict is not over sex, or with men in particular or in general, but over power.” The even more challenging point she makes is that this reckoning should not just be about whether we “feel” violated, or pained, which reduces everything to a personal experience and slots neatly into the trope of tearful white woman as victim who must be rescued (and thus the only person whose harms must be, narrowly, redressed). Rather, it is about the fact of our power being reduced, our time being frittered away, our energy being spent on “dealing with” our abusers, our careers dissolving through it all against our will.

And thus we come to the story I can’t tell.

Whisper networks have been in the news lately, but they don’t just exist for discussing sexual predators. Marginalized folk of all genders have networks where we discuss other kinds of malefactors — not all of them men, but most of them white, certainly. They are people who prey on us; we’re resources to them — “informants,” “sources,” even when we’re actually supposed to be colleagues. We may be “inspiration,” or “muses,” colorful little characters in a story with a punchy headline. But we are never ourselves.

Once we outlive our usefulness we become so much trash to be dumped, and we are perpetually reminded that, whatever qualifications we hold, whatever we’ve done in our fields, whatever our titles, we are not their equals.

It’s the white cis woman who tells me that she loves my work but that she’s just so disappointed in my anger over her prejudicial statements on trans people; and she makes sure all of her (much larger) base of followers is aware of that. It’s the white cis man whose personal brand controls a newsroom with such force that it could turn an entire city against a trans activist who complained about unfair coverage. It’s the white trans man in a prominent community perch who gatekeeps the careers of so many aspiring trans women while degrading their talents in private, glorying in his power over them. In each of those cases, we had to smile, bow politely, and commit our time and energy to smoothing things over. We withdrew a little bit more of ourselves from public life, devoted more of what was left to mollifying them.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity
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I think also of the man who essays from a prominent media platform about the supposed threat posed by trans women like me. Liberal concern trolling, if you like. I have the temerity to publicly criticise him on social media, while speaking to another woman.

Before long, I find a furious email from him in my inbox angrily accusing me of spreading lies, belittling my professional qualifications and claims to expertise. Shut up and go away, he said. And yet months before, he had taken to social media to loudly denounce me, and spuriously accused me of professional malpractice to all of his followers, not a few of whom were in my line of work. I couldn’t send him an angry email of course.

That required power I simply do not possess.

Each of these cases is marked in a graveyard of text files that may never see the light of publication. Each case is marked by a singular lack of singularity — there are other people who’ve been harassed by the powerful folks in question, after all. But they don’t want to, or can’t, come forward. There’s never enough critical mass of testimony to go to press; without their story, there is no story.

Thus I’m so often alone with the man in the inbox.

He emailed more than once— because of course he did. It’s his privilege to vent to me in a manner unbecoming of his profession, to try and isolate me in a dark corner of my inbox. Who knows, he may recognize himself in this story and email me yet again.

My role in his life is that of a strange helpmate; a sounding board for his anxieties about his targets talking back.

There are other people who’ve been bullied by the powerful folks in question. But they don’t want to, or can’t, come forward.
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I was not hurt by these emails, I wasn’t even sad. The first time I tried a little emotional labor — who among us, as women, hasn’t felt the need to soothe a man who is yelling at us? That’s what you do, right? The second time, I merely rolled my eyes and didn’t respond. This is a man who sought to make claim on my psyche, deliberately preyed on my insecurities, and tried to poison my profession against me. Because I’m a trans woman with an “agenda.” That had to be put down; I could not be regarded as an expert or an equal, only a shallow fraud who needed to be silenced.

Another man, with another email, sent after a talk I gave at a major professional conference. He started off by asking me not to make his words public before he launched into a belittling tirade about how awful I was for not including slides in my presentation and how he’d “never seen so many people walk out of a talk” before. I was at the podium, I saw the crowd, and the statistical feedback, I heard the exact opposite about that talk from so many people, and thus I knew all the ways he was wrong. But he still wanted to make a claim on my consciousness, eroding my expertise to feel more secure in his own.

This, then, is about all the bitter little ways our power — as women of color, as queer people — is diminished. It hangs together with quotidian online harassment from people who seek to reduce you to a witless ethnic stereotype; my favorite was an angry gamer calling me “Home Depot Anita Sarkeesian,” get it? Because I’m Latina? Hi-larious. But when slightly more highbrow variations on that theme come from your white male “peers,” it takes on a different shape because they really have the power to degrade your professional standing.

When A Woman Deletes A Man’s Comment Online
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It’s worse when they think they’re on your side. A cis man wants to be regarded as an ally of trans people; I explain why his ideas are actually transphobic, he responds by trying to erase me and telling the world I have no credentials to question him. In private, he condemns me; he casts me as the aggressor, says I am unprofessional, that I have no claim to any expertise on, say, online harassment or trans rights. He’s the real victim. As it so often is with the men whose heads you must sympathetically pat while they scream at you. Keep yourself safe by playing your preordained role in the drama he’s scripted, fret your hour on his stage, move on.

I’m not hurt — much less “violated” in any sense. But time and energy that could’ve gone into other things is now lost to the four winds. And I have to be concerned about what all those emailing men, the ones who don’t want me to reveal their splenetic rantings, could do to my reputation in the public sphere they so comfortably own.

And I must emphasize here: None of this behavior was sexual. None of the anonymized stories I’ve told here are about sexual harassment. But these people abuse their power in the same way; certain white people and men try to control the narrative in public, while cribbing you in private, making sure you can’t say what happened there. The consequences will be yours to reap, after all. You’ll be unprofessional if you come forward. You’ll get sued.

Keep yourself safe by playing your preordained role in the drama he’s scripted, fret your hour on his stage, move on.
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#MeToo has already become a vast and sprawling conversation about complex, important issues regarding sex crimes. But there is connective tissue between sexual harassment and platonic forms of abuse, for each is rooted in a privilege no one should have. This is a venerable feminist insight that should not be forgotten.

“If it wasn’t about sex, why didn’t he just hit her?” asked Catharine A. MacKinnon, when trying to sort out whether rape was motivated more by sex or generic power. Like so many of her points, this aphorism is so simple as to seem inarguable, but it won’t reckon with the people who do hit us, or who try to destroy us without laying a finger on us.

Sociologically, it is more sensible to see sexual terror as existing on a continuum with abuses of every other kind of power, every other kind of social interaction. The point of abuse, and why it’s so insidious, is that it takes the material of ordinary life and turns it into a weapon: touch, sex, communication, privacy. These things are not inherently evil; their uses can be. Sometimes that use is neither violent nor violating, it just causes you to wither.

Grant’s essay reminded me of this. In a media economy that prizes women’s suffering as an Ur currency, it helps to be reminded that exercises of power don’t need to “hurt” to be harmful. Just because you can’t “sell” your story doesn’t mean it’s not important or informative.

The point of abuse, and why it’s so insidious, is that it takes the material of ordinary life and turns it into a weapon.
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It’s vital to recognize that feelings are real and worth respecting, but we must be wary of the ways in which our stories are commodified as trauma porn for safe consumption. The larger fight? It’s not about feelings, but actual diminishment of real power: power over my time, my life, my work.

Back in the whisper networks a familiar dialogue proceeds. “Watch out for him,” “He creeped me out too,” “He does this to everyone,” “I got receipts,” “He came after me when I said x.” It’s all we can do to keep ourselves safe, and to retain the modicum of power that comes with knowing you aren’t alone. Same as it ever was.

Through it all, certain people will try to deny your power, or your ability to connect their fell deeds to a fell system.

They demand privacy because they know that “privacy” individualizes your story, makes it “he said she said” drama, and keeps it away from the bright lights of a larger analysis that would suggest these men aren’t the towering gods they think they are, but so many interchangeable parts in a larger machine.

We Shouldn’t Focus On How Men Feel About Female Victimization
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The strangely viral New Yorker short story, “Cat Person,” serves as a case in point — not just for how it sharply divided opinion along gender lines, but for the fact that so very many people, even those who approved, thought the story was an “article.” So commodified are our personal stories that something labeled FICTION in bright red ink was still presumed to be a “confessional” essay. Non-fic chick lit. It’s just so gratingly difficult to conceive of women’s experience of sexism, however subtle, as an analysis (or as art) rather than a personal story.

The confessional form itself, like its Catholic forebear, is a suffocating space where you submit to anonymous male judgement. There is no real redemption, and you are not allowed to survey, or assess, or judge for yourself.

Thus, on the one hand, you can read this essay as tragic, for it confines abusers’ identities to whisper networks. And, indeed, their anonymity is an exercise of power. On the other hand this form has been liberating: This isn’t a lurid drama of pain and tears which must, invariably, center the abusers as co-stars. This is about territory I’m more comfortable in: analyzing social structure, as a woman qualified to do so, regardless of what my emailing “friends” preferred me to believe.

There’s a reason that Rep. Maxine Waters’ invocation of parliamentary procedure, “I’m reclaiming my time,” spoken during a committee meeting where she was being interrupted and talked over by a white man, has gained immortality as an anti-racist/feminist slogan. The resources sapped from us by white patriarchy are that fundamental, and daring to reclaim them assertively remains a painfully radical act.

One day, perhaps, I’ll learn to reclaim mine.

Despite talk of how ‘unprecedented’ the Trump era is, what we’re seeing is the Greatest Hits album of right wing Americana turned up to 11.

Modified from pixabay/ wikipedia

T his week, the United States and South Korea are conducting a joint exercise of their air forces—dubbed Vigilant Ace—involving some 12,000 personnel and hundreds of aircraft.

In a depressingly familiar news cycle — this is the third such exercise in as many years — North Korea warned that such exercises are provocative and may bring us all “to the brink of war.”

What’s different now is that, for the first time in a quarter century, nuclear attack sirens are blaring over the city of Honolulu. We have lurched back into an era that once seemed safely confined to history: that of nuclear terror.

For all the talk of how “unprecedented” the Trump era is, what we’re actually seeing is the Greatest Hits album of right wing Americana turned up to 11. What has been so terrifying is not quite that Trump and his sycophants are doing anything new, but that they’re forcing us to relive terrors we’d buried, and amplifying existing ones.

Case in point: all of our urgent discussions about nuclear war. The Trumpian twist is that we now have to worry about the terrifying, almost infantile fixation of our own president on the nuclear weapons he commands.

For younger people, the nuclear fallout advice of hiding under your school desk for air raid drills seems like it belongs in the ‘50s.

But throughout the ‘80s, nuclear terror was as pervasive as ever, ritualized into neverending drills, dramatized in film, and flooding earnest instructional videos.

Even in my own childhood, in the early ‘90s, I remember “shelter drills” where we had to line up outside our classroom and then crouch against the blue tiled walls, hands over our heads. The school bell rang out like that of a church; slowly, deliberately, instead of with the rapid pace of a fire-drill bell. It felt maudlin, even to lil’ ol me without words for such things.

The tensions of the Cold War traveled through peaks and valleys. The first summit was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second occurred around 1983, and is less well remembered by those who didn’t live through it — but it is far more instructive for our current moment.

In November of ’83, a NATO military exercise called Able Archer (this one was more of a communications and paper exercise, rather than one involving tanks and ships) got underway. It was an annual ritual, one meant to simulate the lead-up to an actual nuclear strike against Warsaw Pact nations. But this time, a noxious combination of tensions, posturing, and miscommunication led the Soviet government to think the exercise was cover for a very real nuclear attack.

We came perilously close to the apocalypse.

Critical to this entire scenario was how profoundly each side misunderstood the other, and how otherwise disconnected events all added up to a rational calculus for Armageddon.

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Reagan’s infamous “evil empire” remarks—meant to pander to an audience of right wing Christians—read to the Kremlin as rationalizing a forthcoming attack; the Soviet Union shot down a civilian airliner, murdering hundreds, fearing it was an American spy plane and earning international condemnation; the U.S. invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow a Marxist government (continuing a long tradition, of course), providing a timely reminder to the Russians of the U.S.’s willingness to strike first; and the U.S. put its own facilities on high alert in response to the bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut.

Then Able Archer happened, and paranoia truly blossomed among the Soviet leadership — all while the U.S. was blissfully unaware of the profound effect its actions were having.

As the final day of Able Archer unfolded—which simulated a NATO nuclear strike—the Soviet premier and his top generals all had their fingers poised over the Button.

It’s a fascinating—if deeply terrifying—story in its own right. The U.S. and USSR had embassies in each other’s countries, as well as high-level envoys that could—at least in theory—speak to each other. But despite all this, a miscommunication so vast and deep occurred that two nations were brought to the brink of destruction.

Part of this dynamic, of course, was a combination of Soviet paranoia and American arrogance; the latter was founded around the naive and self-serving idea that “everyone” must know the U.S. would never attack first, after all. We’re the good guys. And they went right on believing that even as Grenada was invaded. Even at the highest levels of the Reagan Administration, there was a chronic unwillingness to grapple with the non-Western perspective on the matter, which saw the U.S. as an aggressive and even warlike nation. Being a tribune for this perspective, it informed the highest levels of Soviet strategic thinking.

Based on what we now know—and despite Reagan’s millenarian prophesying—the U.S. neither wanted a nuclear war, nor would’ve initiated one. Indeed, in his memoirs, and despite his own infamous posturing, he wrote of those generals who thought nuclear war to be winnable, “I thought they were crazy.”

‘Everyone’ must know the U.S. would never attack first, after all. We’re the good guys.

But Reagan communicated that fact rather poorly to a world that had no reason to believe him anyway, even if he was only using these threatening tactics to bolster the bluff of America’s “deterrent.” And his own newfound fear of nuclear Armageddon caused Reagan to accelerate programs like SDI/Star Wars, which served only to exacerbate tensions.

It nearly cost us everything.

When I think of how the lines of communication between NATO and the USSR were a roaring river compared to those between the U.S. and North Korea, I find myself very alarmed indeed. We have no embassy, no consulate, no diplomatic office. The “New York Channel” —a diplomatic link exercised at a New York City office during UN convocations—has long since been shut.

What’s worse, thanks to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s shambolic tenure, the State Department is so demoralized and hollowed out that it is virtually a non-entity on the world stage. Amidst soaring tensions with North Korea, we do not even have an ambassador to South Korea in place yet — so eager was Trump to fire Obama’s appointee.

And to top it all off, we have a president who truly seems to treat the nuclear arsenal as an elaborate toy collection — and who wants the U.S. to have as many as it did during the 1960s. “Then why are we making [nukes]?” Trump asked of an MSNBC interviewer who questioned his sabre rattling, “Why do we make them?”

Why indeed.

In 1983, both sides of the nuclear equation were rational actors who did not want a nuclear war; it still nearly happened. In 2017, both North Korea and the U.S. are led by notoriously mercurial men with tyrannical temperaments whose appreciation for the horror of nuclear war is questionable at best.

Not only is miscommunication a certainty, but a significant percentage of that communication is being conducted by President Trump on his Twitter. The North Korean government is paying attention, but it doesn’t quite know what to make of the tweets (Who would? Who does?). From their perspective, the safest move is to assume Trump is ambling up to the brink of war. It’s “evil empire” times 10, if you like.

Provocative words that they interpret as paving the way for bloody deeds.

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The gulf of misunderstanding is wider as well. The Iron Curtain was, at least, porous. With North Korea, by contrast, it’s harder for information to get in or out. Substituted for that is a culture where North Korea is a never-ending slapstick gag, ripe for a kind of grotesque comedy that occludes both the brutality of its Stalinist regime and the horrible reality of what renewed fighting on the Korean peninsula would look like. A conventional war with North Korea could almost certainly be “won” by the U.S. and allied forces; the problem is that any victory would be of the Pyrrhic variety—essentially ruinous to the “victor”—even by the standards of such wars.

A refugee crisis that would eclipse Syria’s, nuclear fallout, millions of civilians dead, the devastation of Seoul, the destabilization of Manchuria, economic hardship throughout the Far East—all are near certainties of a new war.

North Korea and the U.S. are led by notoriously mercurial men whose appreciation for the horror of nuclear war is questionable at best.

Nontrivial possibilities include attacks on Japan and Guam. That Guam, a colony of the U.S., could suffer so devastating a blow because of its colonizer’s flag is a hideous irony. The violent overthrow of the Kim regime would create unpredictable geopolitical crises that will take well over a generation to resolve.

And, just maybe, North Korea might manage to launch a nuclear attack on the continental U.S. as well, before all is said and done.

A nuclear attack remains unlikely, but it’s a nonzero probability now in a way that should disturb us all.

We, as a nation, have chosen to waltz the entire world up to the brink of a new nuclear crisis. But even if it’s a low probability event, the past teaches us that nuclear terror preys on the minds of ordinary citizens in ways that can alter our democratic habits of heart. Air raid drills serve a propaganda purpose as well, after all—not so much to drill citizens in safety, but to drill into them a permanent consciousness of alien threat, to maintain what was once called “a delicate balance of terror,” a civic fear that was useful for many in the upper echelons of politics.

Just look at Japan.

The return of Cold War-style terror, after all, is by no means confined to the U.S. Northern Japanese towns and cities, which have experienced direct flyovers of North Korean missile tests, are now compelling their citizens to participate in regular air raid drills.

‘A delicate balance of terror’ is a civic fear that’s useful for many in the upper echelons of politics.

It certainly feels necessary — North Korean missiles aren’t known for their stability — but it is also a boon to the freshly empowered government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who seeks a mandate to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution, which prevents the military from being anything other than defensive. He belongs to a faction of Japanese ultranationalists who view the constitution’s pacifist provisions as a humiliating and unjust imposition by foreigners. How useful might that “delicate balance of terror” be to a prime minister who needs his people to support a militarist revision to the constitution?

How useful is Trump to such an endeavor, when he himself infamously said that Japan should arm itself with nukes?

It’s at this stage where we start to see how the shockwaves of instability emanating from Washington are having serious knock-on effects, even in unexpected places. We’ve seen what nuclear powers locked in a mis-interpretive dance can do; what happens when the bigger of the two powers is all but spoiling for chaos and bloodshed and cares nothing for even trying to communicate?

The early 1980s were a frightening time, and I only know the fear through the accounts that emanate from pages and old video; I wasn’t yet born. I didn’t gain an appreciation of the real, apocalyptic terror instilled in people during those years until fairly recently. Even the music—with its upbeat, unrelenting pop and synth—makes more sense. It feels like a bit of ironic dancing before the apocalypse — which is to say nothing of more overtly anti-nuke anthems. Faithless hedonism and dancing. In 2017 it feels all too familiar and resonant.

And now we get to do it all over again.

I could end there, it’d be dark and artsy. But I’m not here to further the terror. The ‘80s also provide a way forward, after all. If we’re doomed to relive this history, then let us relive it in the way that averts calamity: it’s time for a new worldwide “No Nukes” movement, and to ratchet up the anti-war pressure on global governments once again.

We may be reliving an all too familiar fear, but history also teaches us that we need not be powerless before even the most terrible of our own creations—whether it’s nuclear weapons or Donald Trump.

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