Thoughts and Prayers
On May 14th, 2022, a gunman traveled for hours to the small, friendly city of Buffalo, New York. The script writes itself at this point. He opened fire on people from a marginalized community and killed a bunch of your fellow Americans. Somehow brought in alive by the police.
The devastation that rocked the community in Buffalo is beyond comprehension. People are already drawing connections between that and the shooting that happened in the grocery store in El Paso, targeting Hispanic people. Or we could also point to the recent attacks on Asian Americans.
I could talk about that Buffalo shooting more, but I think it’s important to step back and see the forest. Across the United States, hate crimes are up more than 44%. If that was a stock, that’s a significant increase. As it is, it is only a sad marker driving home the fact that words do damage. Whether it’s branding COVID-19 as the “china virus” or touting, as Tucker Carlson does, the dangers of replacement theory, words and guns are what bring us this destruction.
And this is the saddest part of it. The first amendment protects free speech and religion, and the second access to weapons. These two freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution are being weaponized against, taken altogether, the rest of the citizens in this country by a fringe group gone mainstream. Why can’t we do anything significant about these issues in Congress?
Simple. A sizable subset of Americans has found a new religion. This religion is one of hate, vitriol, and exclusivity: America First. These Americans mixed their Christian beliefs with their Constitutional beliefs to revive a terrible old enemy: overt racism, xenophobia, and genocidal tendencies. This is because one of our major political parties, beholden to special interests and self-preservation more than any intention to help Americans, has decided to win whatever the strategy. In a bold, new Southern Strategy type of appeal to the hidden racists among us, the GOP has decided, implicitly by their inaction, to encourage and support white supremacists.
This is bad for America, not just for black people, because hate is a disease. Like COVID-19, hate spreads and infects others. On this same weekend, another race-based attack occurred in California as a man of Chinese origin attacked several Taiwanese people in a church. Hate spreads, and animosity spreads it. The Buffalo attacker himself admitted that his inspiration had been Christchurch in New Zealand, where someone wrote a manifesto and then streamed the killing of several people in mosques in the province.
We could talk about the actions of deranged madmen, but with hate crimes on the rise, like I mentioned earlier (+44% this year alone), then we can’t say this is a random act of violence or call this the random act of a madman. Remember the shooting in El Paso? 2019, 2021, 2022 — three horrific acts of violence, interspersed with other acts of violence just as troubling that weren’t live-streamed.
And here we are. Probably the only change we’ll see from this shooting is more “thoughts and prayers,” even though most Americans want gun control reform, at a minimum, to include an assault rifle ban. This brings me to the point: if gun control has become a religious position, how will we ever change it? Especially when the majority of the nation is held hostage by a minority government.
“Wait,” you say. “Don’t the Democrats have the majority in both houses?”
To which I say, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But the truth is that without a supermajority — not a majority, but a supermajority — in the Senate, it’s all too trivial for someone to block legislation because of the filibuster. Compound that by the fact that at least two self-proclaimed Democrats in the Senate seem intent on blocking legislation that would help the people. So no, there is no Democrat majority in the truest sense, even if a Democrat is the Senate Majority Leader.
Why? Well, who do you think is pushing the racist replacement theory and the big lie that the election of 2020 was stolen? Who was in on the coup attempt and insurrection? The very same people in both cases.
This is the precarious position that we’re in. And we would say, “go vote,” but with the installation of a minority government and extreme gerrymandering, the fix is in. And with one party willing to spread hate with lies and drip poison into the American mainstream daily (I do mean daily — check @GOP on Twitter to see what I mean), voting seems more pointless now than ever. That’s because, to a large extent — it is. The Electoral College has already seen three elections where the popular vote deviated from the Electoral College vote enough for the unpopular candidate to win. But we have to vote, don’t we? If we don’t, then whatever resistance we can perform is muted. We lose our nation to that intoxicating idea that one group is worth more than another based on superficial qualities like skin color.
So we must vote. Absolutely. But we can’t just vote. That doesn’t work. What we need to do is more outreach. A little-known fact here in the United States that we might take a lesson from is the Ukrainian resistance from Poland. Russian phone numbers are available on the internet (as of this writing) as a public service phone book website or something similar. A growing group of people in other countries are using that public list to direct-call Russians in their homes and discuss the war. This is to get through the disinformation campaign and media controls that the government of Russia has in place. People in Poland started this resistance effort and Russian speakers from all over are doing this now.
That’s what we need to do here in the United States. The red states in this country are locked into disinformation. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Tucker Carlson I hold partially responsible for the rise in hate in America, not to dismiss Newsmax, NYPost, and other more subtle players like Susan Collins, Mitch McConnel, who like to have their cake (power), and eat it too (no consequences). But focusing on the media problem, we can only combat disinformation with information, and it’s a long end endless slog to do so. But we need to reach out and touch those voters who don’t know they’re being lied to at every turn. We need to annoy some people over dinner.
No, that one call won’t do it. Two. Three. I don’t know what the magic number is. But all we need to do is sow a little doubt. That’s it. Just enough doubt that people start to wonder: why do I think it’s such a bad problem that diversity is rising in America? Is it just because a television host told me in so many words that they would displace me and my whiteness? What have these great protectors of whiteness done for me?
That answer is nothing. They’ve used our races to distract us from the fact that Republicans like Jim Jordan have done nothing regarding legislation or actual governance. They have done nothing but block legislation meant to help their constituents because desperate people are easier to manipulate. It’s true. Once they get us listening with our lizard brains, it’s damn hard to shake free of that constant fight or flight—hence the outrage machine.
So join an outreach group and help save our nation from hate, vitriol, and the intoxicating poison of othering. Here are a few who could use your help (of which none of the Right and Freedom founders are affiliated):
