This essay started as an article that I toyed with publishing as part of my five year series with our local newspaper back in 2015. As you will see, it has hard words for that paper and for members of our community. Although long drafted and ready, I chose to wait. The situations described wound up foreshadowing a series of now infamous national events. I have updated the original essay in order to account for January 6th and the current ongoing criminal hush money trial and other questions of democratic security challenged by the far right. In that sense it has been significantly updated and widened in scope (which may explain the length). In previous essays, I have battled with ideas and thought processes or asked philosophical questions of the far right mindset without naming names, interested to, as much as I could, address the concepts rather than the mob that adheres to them. In this essay I am more direct and abandon the pretext of delicacy.
The time for prevarication has passed and only rigorous honesty about the worst ideologies in our nation can be of any real help. With that in mind, if you read this and have been a Trump supporter, or a MAGA supporter (or both) I don’t hold back. Nevertheless, I hope you will push through. We have learned to ignore information that we don’t like to hear, preferring to stay buried in epistemological ignorance, hiding in the shelter of one-sided news that allows no criticism or challenge to our way of seeing things. If our democracy is to survive, the era of living in echo chambers, especially of political and religious construction, must end.
About a decade ago, I was standing at the front desk of the library with my colleague doing our regular daily jobs. A man approached the desk. He asked to speak to me. He offered his hand and I shook it. He then handed me an envelope, after introducing himself. As I looked at him, his name and features fell into place with a thud in my head. The man with the letter was a little more bald than his newspaper picture and a little more pallid, but it was suddenly clear who this was. My hackles went up. As my eyes careened over his face and physical appearance, I noted a distinct bulge under his left arm beneath his ratty leather jacket which was zipped up, but it was clear he had a shoulder holster with a gun in it. He told me to read the contents of the letter with smarmy Southern politeness and then departed.
Shaking, I asked my work chum to cover a minute and went off desk to open and read the contents. As my eyes fell over the many pages within, I slowly understood what had happened, and in a fit of growling rage, I began to tear up the letter. Thanks to my friend's cool head (he had come around to check on me) we decided I needed to show the letter to the director, so I stopped short of rending it to confetti.
The contents of the envelope were a printout of a Facebook post and the comments thread that followed. The man had made the post, but one of my friends in town had shared it on his own page. In that thread were comments by many others and one from me. That one was highlighted. I had written, “This is mental illness.”
This post, which was an unedited and desperately poorly written diatribe against the LGBTQ+ community, had also been submitted to the paper and had been published in cut down and edited form. Unhappy with the way his letter to the newspaper had been edited, he posted the uncut version on his Facebook account. His letter, despite being revised, was still a dangerous diatribe aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, full of poisonous threats and promises of eternal punishment (and some more immediate punishments as well).
It turns out that another member of this gaggle of squawking halfwits was also connected through social media to my friend and saw that he (my friend) had shared the man's post. He (the other guy) shared it back to the man with the comment thread and my response attached with everyone else's.
At the end of the long list of comments folded into the envelope was a short list of “evidence” for “when someone is a communist” and a note to the library leadership to fire me directly when they read the letter. Another copy was mailed to the library (which arrived the next day) addressed to the library director.
The man was, at the time, the ‘president’ of the local tea party, a group of far right goons who spouted overt religious rhetoric and thinly veiled bigotry anytime they had the chance. His politics and ecclesiastical views were on total display in his regular letters to the editor. He wrote two or three times a month or more and many of those letters were printed despite the fact that he had no real policy positions, only foam-flecked scapegoating.
Tea party groups had gained some national inertia at that time due to the incoherent ramblings of the then governor of Alaska, as well as a host of other right wing candidates who were making an appeal to the lowest common denominator because the president happened to be a black man and LGBTQ+ humans had recently gained some much deserved rights.
This self-proclaimed ‘leader of the county tea party’ had been railing against everything, expounding about conspiracy theories and promoting himself as the only real Christian, for years, but his output had increased significantly by this point. His content was standard claptrap, full of rant and complaint. Such hysterical talking points are now so ubiquitous in the public sphere that they have become the laughable, eye-rollingly ridiculous product of groups and individuals who are teetering on the brink of lunacy. They have been led to this point by a former president who, pied piper-like, set an example of low tone and incoherent blathering that was easily parroted by people who were angry about everything, felt persecuted for their beliefs and wanted revenge for their lives. I might have recognized this typical victimhood complex in this man, but back then, a younger and somewhat less experienced person, I was deeply upset by the encounter and felt as though this individual was an exception rather than the rule.
Our community was reeling from the fact that the local paper's editor would allow such dangerous language to be printed. Several of her own writers protested. I wrote to her as well and asked that she consider the damage such a letter could do to young people. I felt it was my professional responsibility as a teen librarian and former educator to advocate for the kids in my community. She replied via email that she had “cleaned up” the original letter and that it had been far worse in its original form but persisted without apology. When I read the version on my friend's account, I was already seething at the ludicrous example of “unbiased” that had given this man a platform in the paper. The unedited version was, in fact, so much worse that I realized that the man's problem wasn't that he was an evil person so much as that he was deeply unwell and deserved pity rather than derision (though, I admit I definitely derided him after he tried to get me fired).
It was after this that he brought the letter, while armed, to the library. I had already decided to turn a blind eye to the man's incoherent and vicious ideas published in the paper. He was sick. He could perhaps be pitied but he deserved to be ignored more than anything, the way one might ignore someone with a sandwich board upon which is painted The End is Nigh. This man was an escaped convict of the laugh academy and nothing more. To give him more attention via our outrage was to keep him in the public eye.
After his threat, which was exactly what the county government's safety and HR departments deemed the contents of the envelopes and the man's behavior, an official letter was drafted warning him that further actions would lead to serious legal consequences. I was not pleased by this, as you can imagine. I wanted him to be punished. He had threatened me and had brought a gun into the library, which contravenes a number of local ordinances and laws, not to mention trying to get me fired from a job I love and trying to ruin my good name.
The county justified their inaction because they did not wish to poke what they saw as a hornet's nest. The director expressed some concern about my safety, however and did continue to check on me regularly. For a long time after that experience, I did not feel safe. How hard would it be for this person to gather up his friends and harm my wife or our kids to get even? It would be only too easy, and he obviously felt free to do whatever he wanted without consequence already.
Fortunately the man never spoke to or about me again in a public venue, but it turned out he had problems of his own. Nevertheless, it wouldn't be long hence that such goblin-minded goons would feel empowered in their hateful ideology to beat people up at political rallies or kill people with their cars, and—at the behest of their beloved leader—invade a national building. This wouldn't be all. There were a host of other serious crimes that began as this man's type of ongoing angry raving and wound up injuring someone or worse. Only last week, David DePape was convicted and sentenced to 20 years for attempted kidnapping and 30 years for bludgeoning the husband of the former speaker of the House. DePape’s crime began as very similar behavior as the man who came to the library and eventually ramped up to screaming pitch by exposure to propaganda and conspiracy theories online and by being a huge follower of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Q-Anon conspiracy theories.
The local tea party fools were just a larval stage for a much more sinister and eventually far more violent political movement that was in every way a direct result of those original right wing theses. The tea party was a prototype of the MAGA movement and the angry, miserable evangelical and far right zealots in small town USA were ripe for the picking.
Even after his behavior to me (of which I made the paper's editor clearly aware) the man was made a ‘guest columnist’ and invited to write an 850-word article quarterly. In one of those, the man blasted the state legislature for not being strict enough in redrawing electoral maps. The implication was that their leniency had allowed for Obama’s reelection because too many people of color and other ‘lefties’ and ‘pinkos’ had apparently unfettered access to the polls. Later, North Carolina’s gerrymandered districts were struck down as being too racist, but he did not balk at the connection his own professed beliefs had with bigoted disenfranchisement.
Not long after, the director called me to his office and updated me about the man. He told me that the man had—in one of those delicious moments of sheer irony—gotten caught voting twice, once with his own address at one polling station and once from the address of his girlfriend or his business at another. He wound up being charged with misdemeanor voter fraud and was exposed to his spouse as a philanderer, too.
He got very quiet after that, and soon moved to Florida, where the political climate was probably more to his liking. Several years ago, I found out he passed away suddenly, alone and miserable, likely of COVID. This was verified by a former colleague who moved to that part of Florida. His obituary was the standard of that period. Despite his reprehensible behavior and beliefs, he was lauded as being a man who would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. I wondered as I perused the saccharine eulogizing what the family would have made of his taking a gun to threaten a librarian or of his stance on LGBTQ+ issues.
He predeceased the ill news of November 2016 and the events of January 6, 2021 and the oil slick of nightmarish political scandal in between, in which I'm sure he would have reveled. He may have driven to DC to take part in the insurrection. Such was his rhetoric and mentality that he would have easily morphed into a MAGA goon. As I watched video that fateful winter day of people breaking into the Capitol, I saw so many who were of exactly the same mindset.
I am certain that many good and otherwise normal people bought into the tea party ideologies around the time that this happened. They later traded their rationality and good sense for a red hat and gave their loyalty to a man who made his wealth by talking people into financial ruin.
Today, those people seem beyond the ability to change their minds or step aside from their devotion. Those same people have shown themselves ready to ban books, fire librarians, remove rights from LGBTQ+ and people of color, to rage at immigrants and hurl spittle at women’s bodily autonomy. They have been motivated by political candidates who know just what to say to stoke up their misery and outrage and who used the latent racist and sexist and evangelical framework of the tea party talking points to build a political movement that ultimately seeks to destroy our democracy. The MAGA movement claims to be patriotic, but they wanted their candidate to stay in office, despite having clearly lost, all the while shouting “stop the steal” and bringing guns and weapons into the Capitol. The hypocrisy is thick as cement.
People that I know and love voted for and rejoiced when Donald Trump was sworn in. I did not. I recognized him for who—and what—he was and the subsequent four years and even beyond became a kind of slow, cold war of ideas with the people who I knew had obviously lost their way. Those of us who did not fall for Trump’s ‘charisma’ have long lamented the almost religious zealotry that Trump followers lavish on their god/man guru. Despite his obviously being a phony, a rapist, a conman, a corrupt criminal and a thief of super secret documents, they still hope for him to take office yet again. They continue to send him money, despite the fact that he unrepentantly attempted to break the laws of succession in order to stay in power. And I now believe that these people do not or cannot see their own complicity.
It has become so much like a political version of the old cliche about televangelists: the TV preacher is caught in (in Trump's case) several compromising positions, showing just how abjectly immoral and unethical he is and yet the people continue to tune in and send him money and vote for him, totally buying into his false promises and raging at the people he says to blame because they believe his promise of a political miracle—all the while knowing in their hearts it can never happen. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
The man with the letter has become in my mind a prefiguring of this mentality. He was, as I said, a larval stage of the final, venomous MAGA form we have now. Even non-MAGA conservatives have begun to see the insanity and inanities of this final version, but to no avail. The man with the letter is like an Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) prophet, bringing his vision of the wrath of his political god to a small Southern town and deciding that I was a living example of everything wrong with our society. Today, there are masses of people just like him and they not only are completely dyed-in-the-wool theocratic fascists, they freely admit that they want to trash our country's Enlightenment ideals and democratic principles in order to set their hero in power in perpetuity.
As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird, "A mob acts out of emotion, absent facts, absent contemplation, mostly absent responsibility. What they get in return is anonymity. Conscience can be exhausting. It'll keep you up at night. [A] Mob's a place where people go to take a break from their conscience”. The gods know that I have my own political beliefs, like almost everyone does. Why hide the fact? Why not discuss and allow those ideas to be purified in the crucible of rigorous public discourse? If I were confronted (and I have been) with challenges to my moral or ethical position, I might need to reflect for a while. Why wouldn't other people be willing to reflect about their own positions and change if it meant harm to their country? But then, I forget that we cannot reason with the irrational, and the MAGA movement and its former tea party variation have always been based in irrational quicksand.
Perhaps I was wrong for writing that on my friend's post. Maybe I was caught up in my own mob mentality. Maybe my comment on that man's post was a stinging lash to his already distended illness. Maybe he responded so viciously because he realized that someone (myself, my friends and others) could see what he hoped to hide behind a wall of utter gibbering nonsense. Sometimes, when I reflect on my interaction with that man, I remember that his reaction was because he both hated and feared me. What if calling me a communist was his way of compartmentalizing what he felt was the most horrible and nightmarish possibility he could ever imagine: that he was completely wrong in every aspect of his life and that his hypocrisy was on full display?
I've shared this story, not to teach a lesson and not as a platform upon which to place my own apparent self-assured worldview. It is merely a tale of how a lone individual with untreated paranoia and a few other cerebral maladies fixated on a lowly librarian and how, by doing so, became an allegorical representation of the more recent and far worse political movement he so would have loved. I know that it is unreasonable to expect those reading this who may support Trump to change their affiliation, for whatever reason. I wish it wasn't so difficult to convince people, but then, that is up to them, not me.
However, maybe they can see that the side they have chosen is lathered up with the worst of humanity and that, like evangelicalism and other extremist movements, it draws from an entire sea of deeply unwell and miserable people who are easily swayed into mob behavior. This realization alone might get them to second guess their red hats and financial contributions, but it is beyond time for straight talk regarding their support of Donald Trump. Far more is at stake than just an election.
My story is the least of a hundred that are happening even as you read this account, right here in my state and all over the country. Goons of the worst possible kind at every level of local and state and national government or who are affiliated with insidious groups are trying to convince voters that librarians are corrupting your children or taking over the elections and promising violence in response. Many of my colleagues at the state level have had to endure far worse than me, but my story happened at the beginning of this movement.
There were many contributing factors that led to the man coming to me. I blame the former editor of the paper, most. Her delusion about being “unbiased” allowed him to feel justified in his behavior and gave him a platform. It is a good thing that she no longer holds the key to who can contribute. I also blame social media and cable TV news channels for their undue influence and emotional manipulation.
Had Trump's followers, as I have said a million times before, been able to see through the tissue paper cons of a snake oil salesman, they wouldn't have to double down every time they are challenged in order to prop up fictionalized worldviews and conspiracy theories. Neither would they need to promote their own doubt-filled beliefs with hats and shirts and specially made Bibles, which they truly hope hide the truth of their own complicity and credulity and hypocrisy.
Trump is on trial for misuse of campaign funds to cover up a sexual affair. He may go free. Even if convicted, it will not stop him from running for office. The man with the letter, had he lived, would be a pious supporter of Donald Trump. My hope is that after my description of that terribly unwell individual and his hateful deed, supporters of the MAGA movement that I know who read this will be more reflective about their position and decide that they do not want to follow in that train of goons and thugs. Again, I may be naive, but, part of what has allowed me to heal from the experience is an unquenchable hope that people will depend on their better selves rather than continuing to be duped. Ultimately, whatever they choose will decide how and if our country survives.
Although it might seem that I am making a play for the other political party, I hope that my standard motifs will make clear that, though this is an issue which resides in the political realm, it is actually a moral issue. To the argument that the other side or other candidate is just as bad, I merely shake my head. It is a false dichotomy. Given the choice between a man with the propensity to burn down my neighborhood and a man who is actively gathering gasoline and matches (and who is already in trouble for having attempted arson several times before) I'd happily choose the former every single time with no questions asked. The people who put a strong man in power, hoping that his authoritarian disposition will end their social maladies are historically always the first to be clapped in irons by the power they create. Never in history had a dictator willingly rescinded his power once he had it. Donald Trump is making plans to burn down America and his MAGA faithful are hysterically gathering the kindling. The people who are not MAGA goons and yet still plan to vote for him are no different morally than the people who busted into the Capitol building. They may not go to rallies or put flags on their cars, but their financial and electoral support are essentially no different than if they had done so.
It’s time to call the MAGA movement what it is and it is time to hold those supporters accountable for what they want.
It is that simple. The choice is theirs, but whether or not they are willing (or able) to finally cast off their affiliation with authoritarianism through Donald Trump’s MAGA movement will depend if they can face being held accountable for their participation as accessories to the downfall of democracy. If he regains power, that is surely what awaits us. He’s even said that himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment