Readers of this blog know that though I value kindness, and I value fighting for the oppressed, I don’t put a high value on civility. What you may not know is that was a conscious decision; I actually can write entire pages without once using the word “fuck.” But when I started this blog, I did so because I looked around and could no longer be silent. What I saw made me angry and afraid, and I decided to use language powerful enough to reflect that anger and fear. Let others be polite, I thought. No one is paying me for this. I don’t have an editor I have to please or subscribers that make me money. This is a labor of love and above all else should always be honest. And honest, in 2018, means saying “fuck” an awful lot.
Now it would seem that I have quite a bit of company in my rejection of unearned civility, and right on time, the tone police have taken to clutching their pearls.
On June 19, almost a week ago, Secretary of Homeland Security and Head of the Gestapo Kirstjen Nielsen was run out of a Mexican restaurant by protesters for her role in the immigration debacle down at the Mexican-American border. A few days before that, Grand Poobah Racist Stephen Miller was called a fascist at a Mexican restaurant in the DC area. Three days ago, Press Secretary and Chief Liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA. And now, as if by magic, pundits from all over the political map are decrying the lack of civility on the part of the left.
The lack. Of civility. By the left. Those complicit motherfuckers can shove their calls for civility right up their rarefied asses.
FIRST OF ALL, we have THE most uncivil president in American history. He calls people names, he threatens people with prison and physical harm, he’s racist, he’s misogynist, he’s the fucking WORST. For the past few days he has literally been saying we need to ignore the rule of law when it comes to immigrants. And he is the most powerful person in the country right now. So everyone tone policing the left can fuck right off because most of them ignore the shit he does every single day.
But this isn’t even about that. This is about two things, as I see it.
The first and most important is that every day, this administration slides further and further into fascism. (Fascism, by the way, is by definition a right-wing ideology, the most extreme right-wing ideology. It means cleaving to an image of nationalistic purity that does not exist. It is always a nation at war with itself. The most powerful blaming the least powerful for all the problems the country has, usually on racial or ethnic grounds. A leftist can never be a fascist. That is important. Words mean things.) Before Trump took power, we had been sliding toward the fascism pit slowly but inexorably. The religious right and the rich had taken over the GOP, and while things looked okay if you didn’t dig too deeply, they in fact were anything but. And then when Trump took office, these fuckers thought they had it in the bag and let that fascist flag fly. So now we have a government that openly embraces white supremacy, openly advocates for their toxic brand of Christianity to be centered in what is supposed to be a secular government—and now, NOW, they are separating applicants for asylum at the border, caging up families, taking children away and putting them who fucking knows where (because just FYI, nobody knows NOBODY KNOWS NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS where the girls are, although any reasonable person is afraid they’ve disappeared into child sex trafficking hell). He’s turning ICE into his own private Gestapo, trying to make them judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to immigration. And whatever else he wants, I’m pretty fucking sure. Think I’m being too extreme? Look at what he tweeted just yesterday.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1010900865602019329
Up to this point, there have been no legal consequences for the evil jackholes at the head of this wannabe dictatorship. I don’t doubt that someday it will come, but for now, there has been very little (except for the many indictments Mueller’s team has come up with so far; those are super great, but still leave most of the fuckery unaddressed). So what they’re beginning to feel now are the social consequences of their actions. That’s right, their actions. Not their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or anything like that. And you know, we all hope that that’s enough. That being made to be uncomfortable will shame them into acting like more decent people. Or at least make them realize that the good people of the USA will not be complicit in the gutting of our country, in the further terrorizing of black and brown people, in the subjugation of women, in the othering and persecution of LGBTQ persons. WE WILL NOT ROLL OVER AND LET THEM DO THIS.
That brings my to my second point, which is this. Democrats, with their well-earned reputation for being far, far nicer than their opponents, to the point of being milquetoasty and ineffectual, have finally had enough. Not only that, we are doing the thing that humans are so very loathe to do: we are learning from history.
What does history tell us? History tells us that the number of dictators and wannabe dictators who have been won over by civility and niceness and just decided to be better people on their own is *checks notes* zero. Yes, that’s right. Being nice to dictators and fascists only benefits *checks notes again* dictators and fascists. When you are nice to dictators, you just enable them. You give them confidence. You make life harder for their victims. We want them to not feel confident. We want them to feel afraid to piss off the American people en masse.
Look, we did not end 250 years of chattel slavery by “being nice.” We ended it with social outrage and military action.
We did not end the prohibition on women voting by being nice. We ended it with social outrage and social action.
We did not end the Holocaust by being nice to the Nazis. We ended it with social outrage and military action.
And in all those cases, ALL those cases, we tried civility for way too long before we went further. In doing so, tens of millions of lives were lost. But we’re learning. Yes we are. We refuse to stand idly by and just let fascists win; if the government will not institute legal consequences, we will institute social ones.
Fuck civility. This is a goddamn revolution. This is America.
