letters from a weirdo

Fascists are coming for transgender people because they want to control every single person’s ability to speak, dress, and comport themselves. For fascism to work, they need to tell you who you are and for you to believe it— or at least be too terrified to object.

That’s what the gender panic around trans people has always been about: it’s a Trojan horse to police people of all genders, demanding that each person conform to white Christian supremacist standards of how they think the world should be (small, scared, servile, subjected).

Make no mistake: this is literal gender-policing and it’s meant to terrorize a population at scale. As Stephen Chukumba points out in his piece, “Yes. Those are cops outside the women’s restroom,” white supremacy is a through-line that runs through anti-blackness and anti-transness. He writes:

I keep hearing people ask, How did things get this bad?

The truth is—they didn’t suddenly get bad. They got familiar.

For those of us who have lived under the weight of state-sanctioned discrimination, the signs are unmistakable. This is what it looks like when a government decides that a group of people is a problem to be managed instead of human beings to be protected.

I am the child of African immigrants, raised as a Black American in a country that has always struggled—and often failed—to live up to its promises of freedom and equality. I was raised with the knowledge that America’s ideals were aspirational, not guaranteed. I learned early that rights can be conditional, fragile, and unevenly applied.

Black people in this country have seen this movie before.

We were the ones pulled over for driving while Black.

We were the ones snatched off street corners by police jumping out of vans.

We were the ones watched, policed, surveilled, and brutalized as a matter of routine.

We were the children blocked from entering schools by lines of armed officers.

This was not ancient history. It is living memory.

So when I see guns outside a women’s restroom, I don’t see a policy debate. I see Jim Crow with a new target. I see the same playbook, lightly rebranded. I see fear dressed up as “privacy.” I see cruelty reframed as “common sense.”

Chukumba’s essay is worth reading in its entirety. I hope you spend some time with his words.

Gender Policing Is Also a Part of Our Recent History

I also want to echo that the policing of gender— the policing of everyone’s gender— is also within recent memory. The fascists are reaching back to the “cross-dressing bans” of the sixties and seventies. Men could be punished if their hair was too long. Women weren’t allowed to wear pants. Any kind of visible gender nonconformity regularly resulted in arrests, beatings, and sexual assault— particularly for trans, queer, and gender-fabulous people.

The brutality was a demand that people conform, because the moment people start to feel free and express that freedom in how they show up in the world, they are much harder for weak men to control.

This is a claw-back of rights that affects us all. Fascists target trans people as an excuse to expand that policing to everyone else’s gender expression and bodily autonomy. It’s a craven, cowardly bid to control the population at scale and incentivize neighbors to turn against their neighbors.

It’s a tale as old as time: keep us divided so we can’t unite against them.

There’s an antidote, though: Don’t let it work.

Refuse to abandon your transgender neighbors: Don’t let them abduct us, erase us, criminalize us, or strip us of our rights. Don’t let them scapegoat us as a public danger at the very moment when a child rapist has poured billions of OUR dollars into his personal gestapo. Donald Trump and his entire Cabinet are terrorizing the population at scale. Donald Trump and his entire domestic abuse apparatus are a clear and present danger to women, children, and vulnerable groups.

Speak up and out— to everyone: Call your representatives, even if you think it doesn’t matter because they’re Republicans and won’t listen. Evidence shows they do feel the heat of constituents ire. Show ‘em some dissent. Call your elected officials even if they’re Democrats. Why? Because transphobia— a manufactured fear of trans people— cuts across party lines. These people need to hear that trans people matter to you.

Claim trans people as valued neighbors, even if you don’t know us (yet). Fly a trans flag outside your place. Put a trans flag on your bumper, especially if you’re not trans. Remind your peers that most people don’t know, or don’t think they know, a trans person. Remind them they’re getting all their talking points from a group of grifters with a history of abusing women and children. Anyone trying to get you to hate someone you barely know (or don’t know at all) is trying to manipulate you.

Be loud and proud in your authenticity: Be in your body the way YOU wish to inhabit it. Cut, style, and color your hair the way you choose. Wear what makes you feel joyful. Paint your nails. Don’t shave if you don’t wanna. Wear makeup— or not. Embrace hobbies and interests that bring you joy, regardless of how they are gender-coded. Be whimsical and centered in the face of fear-mongers.

Now is the moment for audacity. Now is the time for a radical declaration of interdependence. We don’t win this by closing the blinds and tucking our heads down. We win this by locking arms with each other, so they can’t pick us off one by one. The sooner we realize this and organize at the local level, the better.

Don’t know how to get started?

I suggest hosting an impromptu, un-fancy block party or house party. Start getting to know one another. Talk about what’s going on. Socialize. Share food. Start talking about how you might form a neighborhood union to take care of each other and practice being in community with one another.

Fascism needs fear to thrive. We win this by becoming bigger than our fear and embracing each other.

We don’t need to dominate them: we just need to create a more beautiful pattern.

Thank you Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, Ea Himmelbjerg, flightlessblrbs, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

this is a call to action for more educators to speak up about what they’re seeing in their classrooms, campuses, and communities. our young people are being traumatized by this regime. it’s time to throw down the gauntlet.

we cannot let this continue.

___

Postscript: I just had to delete upwards of ten hateful comments on this video when it cross-posted to YouTube: I was told I was a danger to children. I was told students were “fleeing” my classes because I was “crazy.” I was accused of being “on meds” and told that I needed to be on meds. I was told I was “confusing students” with my gender. I was told I should be locked up, and I was told I was demonic. One unhinged person [predictably misgendered me and] claimed I almost said the word “bullet” in my video but stopped myself because of Charlie Kirk, implying that I am a violent threat to the community.

Behold a sampling of this insane Nazi s**t:

The point of this dog-pile is to intimidate me and cause reputational damage so that my story might not be believed by bystanders. But, in case you’re wondering, one of my colleagues [a straight, cisgender, white Christian woman] also admitted to seeing the exact same pattern of student drop-off in her own in-person classes— we teach at the same university, on same campus. So I wasn’t wrong when it came to the observations I mention in my video. If anything, I understated the harm. So I’ll say it again:

This fascist regime is traumatizing our students.

These fascists only came into my feed because my honesty and vulnerability cut through the heart of the matter, and it terrified them. You don’t get dog-piled on like this unless you’ve struck a nerve. I intend to keep pressing it.

Tell the truth. Shame the Nazis.

Thank you cynmac, Sandra, Lizzy B, Leanne Neace, Oray, and many others for tuning into my Substack Live, with Evan Stern, as we continued our series on debunking fascist propaganda. Today, Evan and I spoke about two different examples of transphobia that have surfaced in the last week:

* Parker Molloy reported on a highly publicized manufactured University of Oklahoma “controversy.”

White Christian nationalists appear to have orchestrated and monetized yet another attack on transgender educators, this time coming out of Oklahoma University. The student in question received a failing grade for not following an assignment prompt and, instead, eschewed academic source material and used her paper to refer to trans people, writ large, as “demonic.” After receiving a failing grade, the student threw herself into the arms of a well-oiled, well-monied white Christian nationalist outrage machine. The result? The student is awash in cash and coercive support while the transgender instructor (herself/themself a graduate student) was put on administrative leave simply for doing her/their job.

* Erin Reed Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego doubling down on misogynistic and homophobic text messages.

Democratic Senator Rubin Gallego was caught in a transphobic, and all-around creepy gender-policing text exchange with another Republican. After the text exchange was leaked, instead of reflecting on the impact of his words on marginalized communities (trans people, women, and gender-nonconforming people of all genders), Gallego doubled down and claimed his cruelty toward gender-expansive identities was a matter of him widening the tent and being “inclusive.” Top-shelf gaslighting.

With each of these examples, Evan Stern and I dig into facts and the feelings as a way to model for listeners how they might see through the gaslight and challenge manipulative propaganda, with a sense of emotional groundedness that helps people hold their center. I hope you’ll dig in.

Calls to Action: Stand Up for Your Trans Neighbors

* Contact Senator Ruben Gallego (202-224-4521) and share with him how you feel about his gender policing of his colleagues and his willingness to throw a vulnerable group under the bus for the sake of political expediency.

* Contact Oklahoma University’s Board of Regents (contact info below), and their university president (405-325-3916), and demand they reinstate graduate student Mel Curth. But don’t stop there. If you’re an academic, reach out to the psychology department at your university and see about offering Mel Curth an opportunity to transfer her/their graduate assistantship to another institution. We need to be loud and clear here: our transgender neighbors are not disposable, and transgender educators are valued for the gifts they bring to their communities. [OU Board of Regents below:]

Anita L. Holloway[email protected]

Rick Nagel[email protected]

Eric Stevenson[email protected]

Robert J. Ross[email protected]

John R. Braught[email protected]

Kenneth S. Waits[email protected]

G. Rainey Williams, Jr.[email protected]

* Subscribe to transgender journalists like Erin Reed, Parker Molloy, Lexi McMenamin, and a holy host of other transgender content creators on Substack (and elsewhere) so that actual transgender people have the opportunity to speak for themselves and give voice to the brilliant, varied experience in the trans community.

Evan Stern and I will continue debunking propaganda with our heads and our hearts. Please weigh in and let us know which lies and misinformation you would like to see addressed in our next show:

I need you to understand that, at bottom, fascism is a story. It’s a disruption of order that calls itself order. It is a descent into barbarity while cloaking itself in superiority. The story of fascism doesn’t spread because it’s a good story— you don’t have to be a good story-teller to control a population: you just gotta get ‘em mad. Robert Penn Warren taught us that in his book All the King’s Men. Donald Trump is, in this way, an ideal catalyst for the story of fascism— not because he’s smart, worthy, attractive, or charming but because he knows how to get a person mad. That skill-set matters: if you know how to manipulate a crowd by tapping into their despair and turning it into righteous anger, you can get that crowd to believe any old story you tell ‘em. The price of eggs is going down. Affordability is a hoax. Your immigrant neighbors are eating your pets. Liberals are letting children get sex changes. Women who miscarry are murderers. Tylenol causes autism, and autism is “bad.” Only white men can lead things, by virtue of them being white men. The last seven sentences I just typed are absolute utter nonsense. But just look at the vile conduct these stories have inspired! Get the entire nation at each other’s throats, convince them politics is a blood sport, and then sow so much confusion and chaos that no one can see the dismantling of a democracy happening behind the smokescreen of domestic terror to really make a holistic plan to do something about it. So how the hell do we stop this? The first step, I’d like to offer, is for us to change the goddamn story. Bad things have been happening in the United States for a very long time, and people don’t intervene— either because they believe the violence won’t personally touch them (indifference) or because they don’t believe things can change (helplessness). Based on a person’s beliefs, they are moved to intervene, remain frozen, or justify the cruelty. As a rhetorician, I need you to keep something in mind: beliefs it comes from somewhere. Beliefs are a result of storytelling— a nebulous web of stories that often condition you to accept abuse and believe that you are powerless, when you could be standing in your integrity and rising up in collective power. So, if you want to know why the fascists are trying to control social media, news stations, legacy media, algorithms, film industry, and even writing itself: it’s because they’re terrified of people getting together and changing the story. So I sit here, a humble community college English professor, at the precipice of societal collapse, with an offering so simple it may seem laughable: this all stops the moment we start telling a different story about this moment, who are are, and what regular people can achieve when they work together.

Postscript: I wrote this late at night, without paragraphs or proofreading. I publish it, with all its glorious human errors, as an act of rebellion. This world tells us to manicure ourselves— in body, dress, and forms of expression. White supremacy wants us fixated on “perfection” to the point of body horror. I believe using ChatGPT to write is, among other things, its own kind of body horror. Writing isn’t always supposed to be perfect. Sometime perfection kills the message. That’s because we write not just to communicate but to solve problems, figure out who we are, and arrive at a sense of human values. The moment we valorize uniformity and praise it “perfection,” we weed out all the wild and wonderful things about our writing. We rip out the beating heart of storytelling. People who change the course of history are rarely, if ever, perfect people— they’re people who learn how to change the story. Don’t give up your glorious mind to large language models (AI).

grow wild — by flightlessblrbs

I really appreciated getting to spend time with Lawrence Winnerman and Dana DuBois on The Daily Whatever Show, where we talked about solidarity and agency as antidotes to fascism.

Thank you Natasha K., Bud Jones, Carole W, Lizzy B, Wanda Cloutier, and many others for tuning into my live video with Frederic Poag! Join me for my next live video in the app.

fascism is an arresting word

What happens for you emotionally when you hear the word fascism? As an experiment, say the word out loud right now. I invite you to notice your body and the sensations, currents, memories, and emotional energy coming up for you.

consider the limited frames for addressing fascism

What is the story you tell about fascism? Where have you learned how fascism is stopped? Has it been through a multi-million dollar film industry that frames the American military as the hero that saves democracy and freedom? Does that story actually align with the reality we know to be true about how war is often a cover for rich men’s business interests, masquerading as national security? Do you feel free right now?

These are important questions to ask yourself because people always tell stories for a reason, and the films and stories we see that cut across popular culture and popular literature, lionize the military as the solution to unsafety and the defenders of our freedoms. It’s not just that our police are often used to protect property and that our military are often used to destabilize other countries, under the auspices of “national security,” when what they’re actually doing is extracting resources through force. This is why it’s important for you to question of whose safety and freedom are involved in these scenarios.

Related, it is these same millionaires and billionaires, who experience accountability as “unsafety,” that fund the arts the media we consume every day, so of course they are going sell you a story about that taking down fascism requires the military. Why? Because what they don’t want you to know is how fascism is toppled by every day people who remove the fascists’ pillars of support. Guns and money are weak weapons, which is why the film industry and popular culture have done everything to make you believe that guns and wealth are the pinnacles of power.

People who hoard power want you confused about your own power. They don’t want you to know how everyday people, across centuries, have assembled to remove domestic abusers. It’s always been regular people who take down fascists. Not military. Not law enforcement. Not courts. Regular-ass people.

There is also a reason why the United States produced so much material about the Third Reich and other fascist regimes in the first place— and this body of material has little to do with avoiding the harms of fascism. It was about glorifying military strength.

what an anti-fascist education might look like

If this country really meant “never again,” anti-discrimination would be a cornerstone of our democracy, following the second world war. We would have made reparations to First Nations and Black Americans who experienced genocide and chattel slavery. If our country and its media-culture cared about upending fascism, we would have a robust public education around how power is hoarded and how every day people can use their collective capacities to topple them.

The fact that we don’t have this information is very much on purpose.

If you listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson, she often talks about the rich robber barons who throughout the course of United States history have done everything they could to make sure that every day people did not get equal access to the ballot box, so that the will of the people might be overturned in the courts and through policy loopholes. Fascists do not win through the superiority of their moves, but simply because they’re cheating. I mention HCR to amplify that fascism has always been here in the United States. Indeed, as cultural rhetorician, I am also not unaware that Adolf Hitler looked to the United States as his model for establishing racial apartheid and genocidal systems of exclusion, erasure and terror.

I mention all of this to tell you that the stories that you have been told about fascism and how it might be stopped are not only incorrect, but that you have been purposefully mis-educated so that you would have no few ready tools to understand how stand up to fascism. There are a trove of resources from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Strategic Nonviolence Academy, Choose Democracy, Beloved Communities Network, Highlander Center, James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, Southerners on New Ground, and Poor People’s Campaign— all organizations practiced in mentoring neighbors to challenge abusive power systems.

I recommend taking the vulnerable risk to reach out to one of these resources and ask how you might get training to help grow resistance to fascism in your neighborhood. As we have seen, over and over again, neighborhoods who organize are neighborhoods where fascism can’t find a foothold. These organizations will provide you with the information that you need to think strategically and expansively about how to develop a plan forward.

you already have the tools to stop fascism

At the same time, I also want you to understand: You already have the tools available to you, right now, to stop fascism. Because fascism is simply domestic abuse at scale. If you are unfamiliar with this topic, I recommend checking out the Wheel of Power and Control to understand how abusers cause harm.

You can stand up to domestic abusers. The solution to domestic abuse may be effortful but it is also simple:

* remove abusers’ ability to target your vulnerable neighbors

* give to each other everything abusers are trying to take from you.

your neighbors are doing anti-fascist work: join them

Many of your neighbors are already doing their part to stand up to domestic abusers. All you have to do is figure out where they are and join them.

Consider this impartial list of everyday heroes who are fighting back domestic abusers by finding their lane (of time, talent, skills, and resources) and doing their small part:

* There are neighbors who are developing dispersed food, pantries, and funding their local food, pantries, and delivery systems.

* There are people who are teaching their neighbors how to hunt and forage and raise chickens and rabbits.

* People are teaching their neighbors how to dry, preserve, and can food.

* There are neighbors who are building time banks, so that people can exchange goods through a currency that does not involve capitalism but involves our time.

* There are people who are creating containers for people to experience emotion as a collective and have a safe place to grieve.

* There are people who are creating spaces to create public art and joyful celebrations.

* There are people who are praying and singing and dancing and wearing silly costumes to call attention to their vulnerable neighbors who have been stolen.

* There are people who are documenting the abuses of our neighbors.

* There are neighbors who are teaching people how to mend, reuse, repair, share, and crowdsource so we are less beholden to our corporate overlords.

* There are neighbors who are teaching “community night schools” that help adults learn how to organize, while their children (in another room) are learning inclusive curricula and activities not included in fascist-aligned state-sanctioned educational models.

* There are coalitions of churches, synagogues, mosques creating public inter-faith ceremonies so that people of faith might stand up and bear witness to the cruelty of this moment and induce hope and moral courage in bystanders.

* There are people who are opening neighborhood tech clubs that wipe Apple and Microsoft operating systems complicit in government surveillance) from people’s phones and laptops and replacing it with more secure, open-source Linux programs.

* There are artists who are creating zines about how to protect different vulnerable communities.

* There are musicians who are creating protest songs.

* There are artists who are creating public murals.

* There are graphic designers creating art that exposes regime propaganda and wheat-pasting posters around their towns.

* There are individuals engaged in creative protests that the target corporations who are supporting this regime.

* There are people who are coaching their neighbors in how to divest from vulture capitalism and, instead, direct money toward local pro-democracy businesses.

* There are people who are developing roommate-onboarding plans to make sure that none of their neighbors become homeless.

* There are people who are creating spaces for conversation and play as a way to rebuild the fabric of their communities.

* There are neighbors who are working with domestic abuse survivor networks to create underground railroads to hide, obscure, and relocate targets of the regime.

* There are public educators using their skills to teach neighbors how to organize against fascism— through anti-fascist book clubs and community-organizing night schools.

* There are neighbors who are learning ham radio and creating mesh networks in their neighborhoods to communicate should traditional communication lines be downed.

* There are neighbors who are working with the League of Women Voters and other interested community groups to create a trackable paper trail of people’s ballots and educating others about how recounts happen.

* There are young people who are running for office on platforms focused on affordability and inclusion for all.

* There are grandparents and people with disabilities who are babysitting the children of community organizers.

* There are elders who are putting on fluorescent, vests, and whistles, and carrying stop signs to become “cross guards” in their neighborhood, increasing a sense of community safety and connection.

* There are performers of all kinds who are offering free concerts, theater events, dance performances as a way to offer their neighbors encouragement.

* There are neighbors who are decorating their houses with pro-democracy winter lights displays.

* There are neighbors who are caroling in their neighborhoods, singing songs of peace and democracy, door to door, to inspire hope in their neighbors.

* There are groups of neighbors, including Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and other youth groups, who are checking in on their vulnerable neighbors and making sure that they have meals, assistance, and social connection.

* There are neighbors who are teaching their community members about sustainable, small gardening and neighborhood perma-culture.

* There neighbors who are using what is left of our legal system to slow down and document the abuse we are seeing.

* There are some politicians of integrity who are challenging entrenched, corrupt politicians enabling this descent into brutality.

* There are children who are writing letters to their mayors, governors, and congressman, asking them to intervene to help our neighbors and save our democracy.

* There are school children who are taking part in watch-groups to protect their peers from being abducted by ICE.

* There are college student reporters who have bucked institutions of higher ed trying to censor them by creating their own independent newspapers.

* There are coalitions of neighborhood restaurants who work with neighbors to distribute leftover food.

* Some heroes are hiding neighbors who have been targeted by the regime.

* There are pastors who visit local precincts and hold public services outside on the message of loving and protecting one’s neighbors.

* There are cultural figures—from actors and musicians and athletes and writers— who are using their considerable talents, not only to speak out, but to donate substantial sums of their money to create and fund local pro-democracy, resistance groups in their own neighborhoods and home towns.

* There are people teaching free self-defense classes to women and other vulnerable groups.

* There are tenant rights groups preparing for rent strikes.

* There are writers and teachers, who are organizing to resist the erasure of marginalized voices in their workplaces.

* There are some members of the police, military, and intelligence, who are documenting and leaking evidence of crimes so that we might be able to reclaim our democracy.

* There are neighborhood blocks that have created safety plans and drills to make it as difficult as possible for their communities to be raided by abductors.

* There are doctors, nurses, doulas, paramedics, veterinarians, and healers of all kinds who are opening up free neighborhood services so that their neighbors will still receive medical care outside of the “insurance industrial complex” and the intentional gutting of the ACA.

* There are people who are creating community events to give their community a space to express not only what worries them about the situation that they’re in, but also what we want from the future of our democracy.

* There are guilds of lawyers and policy makers drafting a new constitution that enshrines the rights of everyday people and the rights of our planet.

* There are independent journalists working tirelessly to report on the news captured corporate media refuses to address.

* There are parents and their kids, dressing up as super heroes, and creating children’s marches for democracy in their own neighborhoods.

* There are people posting flyers around their neighborhoods about upcoming community organizing events.

* There are librarians in red states creating underground lending libraries for banned books.

* There are collectives of neighbors with home-building and repair skills who are leading volunteer repair efforts, now that FEMA’s mission has become abused and abandoned.

* There are people in every neighborhood developing plans for mass noncooperation, should the regime invoke the Insurrection Act or attempt to declare martial law.

* There are underground collectives ensuring access to reproductive care and gender-affirming care, in spite of regime backlash.

In short, there are people who are stepping forward and using their skills, whatever they are to reclaim our democracy and to stand up to domestic abusers. These people are just like you: regular folks who won’t abide people abusing their neighbors. They’re finding where they fit and plugging themselves in and, in the process, they’re finding a sense of courage and connection they wouldn’t have otherwise found.

So, to recap: There’s no need to use the “f-word.” Call it what it is: domestic abuse. That reframing snaps us out of a freeze state and helps us tap into our our agency and solidarity.

how will you stand up to domestic abusers?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how you plan to get involved to stand up against the domestic abusers who are attempting to tear apart our democracy.

Thank you Evan Stern, Catherine Mommsen, Michelle Robinson, Perry Albertson, flightlessblrbs, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Thank you Jeanne Elbe, Tamie Swain, Peter Sukowski, Sushipheliac 🍣🍥🍣, Elizabeth, and many others for tuning into my live video with Evan Stern! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I won’t bury the lede. Someone needs to shove a mic in Karoline Leavitt’s face, or Donald Trump’s face (for the matter), and ask:

“Is Donald Trump the US Constitution?”

This sounds like a d*****s question, doesn’t it? Because of course he’s not. So why in the hell do I insist that someone ask it? Because right now, Donald Trump and his mouthpieces are using a tactic called forced-teaming to gaslight the public at scale. They’re trying to do the ol’ Nazi razzle-dazzle where, if you repeat the lie often enough, it’ll stick.

Well, not the f^ck if I have something to say about it.

Forced-Teaming Defined

Here’s Gavin de Becker’s definition of forced teaming, from a handout titled “The 7 Things Predators Do to Turn People Into Prey.” This handout comes from his larger work, The Gift of Fear. In it, Gavin de Becker defines forced-teaming as follows:

Forced teaming is a way to establish premature trust because a were-all- in-the same-boat attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude. The detectable signal of forced teaming is the projection of a shared purpose or experience where none exists. “How are we going to handle this?”, etc.

Why is forced-teaming relevant from a national perspective?

First, Donald Trump isn’t a so much president as he is a mobster. Indeed, Trump is a felonious Russian asset who has been part of a transnational crime syndicate for decades, and he’s hacking up this country for parts in an attempt to destroy our democracy— with billionaire backers and venture vultures waiting to carve us up like a gd turkey.

Donald Trump is violating the Constitution.

One of the ways he and his minions are trying to manipulate you is by blurring the line between Donald Trump and the Constitution itself.

A Depraved Example of Forced Teaming

Recently, Donald Trump broke the law by deploying the National Guard as a stunt to intimidate the people of the United States, to make us feel like we are under occupation. Courts all across the country, including judges Trump himself appointed, have told him this is patently illegal.

Donald Trump ignored that court order, and a Guard member, Sarah Beckstrom (just 20 years old), died after a man shot her and another National Guard member. Worse still, intelligence resources that should have gone to protecting the Guard (who are sitting ducks) have been poured into abducting our neighbors— not for anything they have done but because the president is a vile racist who needs a vulnerable group to vilify as he robs the country with his friends.

But let’s return to the federal fuckery: Nearly half of the FBI and other intelligence agencies have been diverted to terrorizing our neighbors— which means they’re not doing key jobs. One of those jobs is vetting asylum seekers, and because the feds were busy doing fascism, no one was there to ask a vital question:

“Hey, this guy applying for asylum might be traumatized. Our own CIA trained him as a ‘child soldier,’ at seventeen. We destroyed his country and then abandoned our Afghan allies. Now we’ve got ICE abducting those same allies who helped the US military survive in that war we waged in Afghanistan. That’s a lot of trauma for anyone to go through. When we process this application, we need to make sure this dude gets counseling and support. (Note: We might also want to impeach our oath-breaking POTUS.)”

But, as I said, they were busy: abducting our neighbors, trafficking them to third countries, holding them without criminal charges or a right to trial, torturing them, and recreating a trans-Altlantic slave trade in the process. This isn’t just corruption. This isn’t politics. It’s an organized crime syndicate, right out in the open.

In short, these people are fucked up and they fucked up.

Or, a more grim possibility: they’ve diverted national security on purpose and let down a number of intelligence firewalls meant to protect the American people, knowing that a chaos would unfold that might allow a conman to attempt to declare Martial law or invoke the Insurrection Act (more on that in a bit).

Back to Forced-Teaming: Here’s What It Looks Like

Hello, DARVO: A Narc’s Old Friend

Here’s a vile exchange between Gabby Giffords and one of Trump’s flying monkeys, Mike Davis. First off, this response from Davis is a “two-fer” of DARVO and forced-teaming. We’ll start with unpacking the DARVO and close out this essay on forced-teaming.

Let’s start with the DARVO long division, breaking down Mike Davis’s attempt to gaslight Giffords and the American public. Remember, DARVO is an acronym created to help people identify a specific tactic of gaslighting, where bad-actor denies the harm, attacks the complainant, and reverses the order of victim and offender. People who are in the wrong DARVO as they breathe, and they also recruit minions to gaslight alongside them, because psychological abuse is more potent when it’s parroted by a chorus.

Here’s DARVO at play in Mike Davis’s nonsense:

* Deny: “Gun violence???” [invalidates the issue]

* Attack: “F**k off, Gabby.”

* Reverse: “The real problem is your piece-of-s**t-husband, @SenMarkKelly and other Democrats”

* Victim: “who mass-import terrorists, demonize the National Guard, and call on 18-year-old enlistees to disobey”

* Offender: “the President of the United States.”

Think of this as a sentence diagram to illustrate rhetorical mistruthin.

Once you see the rhetorical foolery, you can’t unsee it. The point of DARVO is to dodge accountability by making yourself a victim and projecting your failures onto someone else. It’s also psychological abuse.

But wait! There’s more. We still have forced-teaming!

Peep that last scatological utterance from Mike Davis and you’ll see it:

“and call on 18-year-old enlistees to disobey the President of the United States.”

That, ladies, gentlethems, and men, is forced-teaming. This is what narcs do: when they’re in positions of power, they fuse themselves with the institutions so that a critique of them is a critique against the institution itself.

The National Guard doesn’t swear an oath to the President. This is their oath:

“I, ________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and of the State of [State name] against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to them; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the Governor of [State name] and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to law and regulations. So help me God.”

I repeat, once more with feeling: someone needs to get a mic in front of Leavitt, or Trump himself, and ask:

“Is Donald Trump the Constitution of the United States?”

Its a weird-ass question, but it needs asking because direct questions highlight the rhetorical sleight of hand:

No one’s job is to obey Donald Trump. Our duty is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States— even, and especially, against traitors who sell out the people for self-enrichment. The Constitution is the law, not Donald Trump. Our elected officials, intelligence members, and members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States. Donald Trump is not the United States.

Dear Journalists: Ask the Question to Their Faces

“Is Donald Trump the Constitution of the United States?”

Asking it in exactly this manner is important:

* The weirdness of the question’s phrasing breaks the script and grabs attention.

* The question answers itself, but it also puts those trying to blur that distinction on the defense.

* Once the card-trick is exposed, it’s hard to unsee and makes it impossible to swallow fascist b******t.

Here’s another reason I need you to understand what forced-teaming is: this man is trying to sow chaos so that he can invoke Martial law, or cite the Insurrection Act, which would suspend everyone’s rights.

Here are two things to keep in mind: when someone violates their oath of office and is doing illegal s**t, they’ve violated their contract with the American people and the American people, as such, are under no obligation to follow Martial law from those who are lawless and gaslighting us in our faces.

You heard Senator Mark Kelly: don’t obey illegal orders.

That includes us civilians— especially.

Ain’t nobody should be “just following orders” rn.

On Martial Law + The Insurrection Act: We Got This

Anxious readers may protest: “But what do we DO when this happens?”

I understand your worries, and it’s good to ask questions like this. I’ve asked them, too.

Fortunately, there are a good number who have thought about this (and for some time now). For example, I refer you to Daniel Hunter’s “What to Do If the Insurrection Act is Invoked?” from Waging Nonviolence.

Please remember: autocrats are not creative people— they all do the same s**t. Our neighbors around the world have been here before, and there are tried and true strategies to take down dictators. If you’re curious about getting in the details, I refer you to Choose Democracy, Waging Nonviolence, The Strategic Nonviolence Academy, and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict— where you can find resources and mentorship to prepare you to protect our democracy.

Remember: we outnumber the fascists in overwhelming numbers— what determines the course of history is whether everyday people organize in their local communities to shut this all down. We’ve got all the cards that matter. What remains to be seen is if we have the integrity and moral courage to use them.

You are bigger than your fear.

Do not give up the ship.