Ann Coulter Wants to Kill Native Americans (So Do Some on the Left)
Ann Coulter, Youtube screenshot.
The live music had come to an end, and my friend Janene Yazzie, a brilliant organizer with the NDN Collective, looked up from her phone in disgust, horrified by what she had just read.
Someone wished her people dead.
A group of us were sitting around a small wooden table at an old watering hole in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood when Janene was alerted to a tweet by the vile Ann Coulter that went beyond the usual provocations. While she’s known for repulsive commentary, this one from Coulter’s polluted mind revealed her as the murderous zealot she’s long been accused of being.
“We didn’t kill enough Indians,” Coulter raved in a post on X in response to a video of a well-known Indigenous activist at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago.
Never mind that the video was not recorded at Socialism, which we were all in town to attend, but from a completely different, earlier discussion on Palestine. No matter, too, that the activist in question, a fellow left traveler, was rightly condemning settler colonialism, U.S. complicity in genocide, and the importance of resistance. But Coulter is not one to fret over such matters. It’s more advantageous to misconstrue and levy death threats than it is to listen and absorb the stories of empire’s victims — tsk-tsk to such “woke” trivialities.
Madam Evil wasn’t just calling for the murder of the activist in the video, but of all Native Americans, especially those who stand up to their colonizers.
We were shocked at her bluntness, but perhaps should not have been, as everything is fair game in Trump’s dystopian America. As Coulter has made clear, those swimming in the MAGA cesspool want to finish what our European ancestors started. This sick racism, simmering in many households across this stolen land, is now openly discussed without consequence. In fact, it’s celebrated (the tweet has been liked over 1,000 times). Coulter was just stating the quiet parts of the right-wing American psyche out loud.
The tweet quickly went viral, drawing the attention she no doubt sought. As of this writing, Coulter’s words have not been deleted or removed by X. Apparently, calling for the murder of an entire group of people doesn’t qualify as hate speech.
As grotesque as Coulter is, what’s just as horrific is that the genocidal violence she advocates has never actually ceased. The legacy of uranium mining, not far from where Janene lives, continues to harm the Navajo Nation and her people; over 500 abandoned uranium mines remain unremediated, posing endless radioactive dangers. Groundwater contamination from uranium mining, in particular, heightens the risk of kidney disease, diabetes, and other severe health issues. This is especially true for the 30-40% of homes on the Navajo Nation that lack access to clean running water.
For those residing near abandoned uranium mines, the myriad impacts from these sites are not contested—it’s their lived reality.
“It’s really a slow genocide of the people, not just Indigenous people of this region,” the late Diné activist Klee Benally told Amy Goodman in 2014. “[It’s] estimated that there are over 10 million people who are residing within 50 miles of abandoned uranium mines.”
Klee was highlighting a critical issue that many in the pro-nuclear movement downplay or flat-out ignore: the effects of uranium mining in areas like the Navajo Nation, which some have called a genetic genocide.
Prolonged exposure to radioactivity (like drinking contaminated water or breathing in dust from mines and mills) can damage DNA, resulting in gene mutations that may be passed down through generations. Research indicates that “virtually all mutations have harmful effects. Some mutations have drastic effects that are expressed immediately … Other mutations have milder effects and persist for many generations, spreading their harm among many individuals in the distant future.”
Three uranium mines in the Southwest have reopened in recent years, located relatively close to the White Mesa Mill processing facility, situated next to the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation in southeast Utah. One of those mines, the Canynon Mine, is a mere six miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon.
“The White Mesa Mill has done just extraordinary amounts of damage,” explains activist and filmmaker Hadley Austin, who recently directed the documentary film Demon Mineral, which explores the history of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. “The White Mesa community, a small tribal community, has been working to literally survive in this proximity to the White Mesa Mill since it opened.”
Uranium, now considered a critical mineral by the Trump administration, is in high demand (and highly profitable), primarily driven by the ravenous appetite of AI data centers. If the major tech companies propelling the AI surge—including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon—have their way, nuclear power production will increase in the years ahead. Any such growth would, in turn, boost the demand for uranium, a vital fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. This is alarming news for communities near current and proposed mining operations.
On the Navajo Nation alone, 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted between 1944 and 1986, with tragic consequences. It’s estimated that 600,000 Native Americans live within six miles of abandoned hard rock mines, resulting in severe health disparities. Cancer rates, for instance, doubled on the reservation from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Opening new mines while permitting old ones to keep polluting Indian Country is the real-world manifestation of Ann Coulter’s plea to kill Natives. Sadly, some on the “tech bro left” have little problem with this persistent, methodical genocide, and have called for increased uranium mining and resource exploitation on Native lands, based on the fatal assumption that nuclear energy has the potential to solve the climate crisis. It does not.
“All of the impacts from nuclear colonialism can be simplified by explaining it as environmental racism,” says anti-nuclear Diné activist Leona Morgan, who organizes with Haul No!. “My family lives in areas where there was past uranium mining. We’re still dealing with the legacy of all of the mining that fuelled World War II and the Cold War. This legacy is still unaddressed — not just in New Mexico, but in the entire country.”
The genocide of Native Americans is ongoing, and we should be just as outraged at those who endorse nuclear colonialism, along with the death and destruction that accompany it, as we are with Ann Coulter.
Why Hate Has a Home Here
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind…In these communications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oversoul
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not…. a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade [men] society can be maintained without artificial constraints. Strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectititude to inspire him [to renovate] the State on the principle of right and love…on the simple ground of his own moral nature.
– Emerson, Politics
I’m looking at the different ways people use to deal with rising levels of anxiety, even terror, in the current context of rampant insecurity affecting everyone except maybe the billionnaires. They- the billionnares – can limit their worry to the next Luigi Mangione or, more lawfully, to the rise of a smart social democrat like Zohran Mamdani, and it would be pleasant to imagine they do. But looking at this, and the fact it’s fully reasonable people would seek after some sort of relief, it’s not surprising there’s such an array of industries organized to meet the need for narcotization.
I’m being neither sarcastic not provocative for its own sake in suggesting we perhaps need to re-evaluate that once popular narcotic that has fallen so far out of favor – not, I hasten to add, to interest people in taking up smoking, but to appreciate more fully the underlying terror, coming before threat of nuclear war, before threat of mass extinctions, before mass shootings and rising fascism, way before Donald Trump, that, unaddressed and unaccounted for leaves people with no way to think other than along the same old channels; in other words, that leaves the liberal world with no way out of conformity. I’m speaking of existential terror, in the soul, which is mainly unaddressed and untreated; practically, it leaves a vacuum in which menacing forces can grow stronger unopposed. That is, without a “counterforce” of identity pinned to a higher or wholer vision, threats from outside – particularly for those of us contained in reassuring liberal reality – while we worry about them plenty, at the same time they never are real: “not in my lifetime, not in my neighborhood, not in my world,” etc.
I bring up, for evidence, the signs that proliferate on well-tended lawns in the nearby college town of Clinton, proclaiming“Hate Has No Home Here,” expressive of a certainty that could exist, I feel, only in imaginations that have not allowed too-close horror to be included. Likewise, statements such as “I can’t believe this is happening in my country,” or, “this is not my country,” betray a delusional distance from evil which comes not just from ignorance of history, but from lulled or “canceled” imaginations, the lack of capaciousness of mind that allows for evil to be known – in one’s own consciousness – as real.
The real existence of evil is in the very denial of it. There could not be such certitude about hate’s “home” being elsewhere unless something were being denied. I argue that something is terror left in the soul by trauma, no longer limited to extraordinary cases of abuse or wartime (which of course were not extraordinary for the majority of people in history). It arises out of modern, strictly rationally-based thinking and the capitalism-syntonic, me-first, isolating lifestyle that no longer can imagine being (only doing). Thus, crucially, people fail to imagine the radical, uncompromisable need of infants for safety not just from accidents but in their beings that require, animal-like, constant, excessive reassurance of warmth from human contact. Such constant reassurance, conventional, logical “wisdom” tells us, is plain impossible given the economic reality in which we make our lives. Perhaps so, given all the exceptions to constancy of direct physical, non-conflicted care that now are normalized, from violence and wartime conditions mainly affecting underclasses, to abusive or neglectful parenting, to even well-informed by-the-book liberal parenting. Nevertheless, the consequence is trauma, as inescapable an aspect of human biological life now as dioxins in mothers’ milk and an effective means of normalizing the illusion of innocence.
Repressed, as trauma must be, it transforms into that “closed door” in the mind that, in fairytales, the hero is forbidden to open. A society reading fairytales in order to keep itself awake to the real, mythic forces at work, might offer some clue as to what’s to be done! But in a society in which imagination is not real, trauma denied, the shadow area becomes disproportionately terrifying. This terror makes monsters out of some, deluded liberals of others, the “center cannot not hold.”.
For conformity is universal, and it’s socially acceptable. And, with religion out of fashion, gone is the possibility given in belief – that nonconformity on behalf of a larger good is also universal, given in the soul (in imagination). As Emerson’s teaching is evidence for, or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, or Gandhi’s, the soul’s orientation is up “high” toward goodness, truth, beauty; hence the popularity of the means for numbing it – the substances, activities, distractions – are incredibly effective for suppressing dissent, preventing honest disruption to the status quo. Some of such means are less obviously destructive than others. But in the soul, all have the same effect and must be judged accordingly; no matter to what “good uses” we may put them nor how completely normalized they’ve become, nor how much we need them to keep the economy going they inhibit the priceless experience of unmediated joy that is “the influx of the Divine mind into my mind.”
To be less the creatures of our habits of numbing and narcotizing, judgment will have to be widened to include our way of life, for that is what we numb against! Only the sovereign soul is capable of making such a radical judgment, and it only is capable of the “perception of joy” that makes obedience to it – rather than to the overwhelming power of conformity – as natural as following heart’s desire.
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Every once in awhile, a situation arises in which I have to confess to somebody – such as a bank official, or some customer service representative trying to help me change a password – I do not have a mobile phone. I make no assertive announcement of it; I am all too aware of how my choices have severely limited my life in ways I still struggle to accept. But as well, the severe limitation, like being mute or deaf, gives me an unusual perspective from which I may as well speak, as if my lifestyle choice were at very least, my right, and, possibly, my duty to the soul’s truth! Not invariably, but it still happens sometimes that the person I’m speaking with responds, almost automatically, as happened recently, “Good for you.” But they never say more, and today I’m realizing I really really want to know: Do they truly think there is something admirable in holding out against having one of these devices when every person under the sun, across the globe, 15 years of age and over, rich and poor, has one? When practically every agency, business and customer service one has to deal with in life expects you to have one, to be able to use QR codes, and to tell friends who don’t have a doorbell you’ve arrived at their door? After President Obama, realizing they were now as basic a need as food, water, or electricity, made them available for people who otherwise couldn’t afford them?
Why, given all this reality, do they say those words a part of me longs to hear: “Good for you!” Do the words come from their soul, I wonder? For, surely, their soul has her reservations! Have they accepted a resignation about it as we must do about so many practices we know are not good for either social or biological environment or both? In some people the resignation is real – they manage their phone use like a social drinker manages her drinking – gotta participate, but in moderation. But in many others, there is no moderation. To return to the comparison with smoking: we no longer have to worry about Joe Camel, but should we not worry that the same motivations that drove the tobacco industry also drive the social media industry, and thus the same unconscionable tactics, preying upon peoples’ weaknesses, will be used? And would we allow this to happen if we feared loss of soul as we do weight gain or end of life?
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When Emerson preached against conformity in preference for “self reliance,” or self-trust, he knew that failure to escape from conformity meant men could never be inspired to deny “the authority of the laws” on “the principle of…love.” My interest is not to rant against social media, or the new internet-based consumer world, though as I said, I’m in a unique position to critique it because I’ve abstained, maybe from warped principle, or maybe because the phone use that has invaded my social environment enhances my feelings of discardability. Unlike smoking behavior, which still allows for eye contact and words exchanged, screen-watching feels to a non-participant almost passive aggressive, my presence unwanted. Even so, I do not make futile war on screens. My “war” is against social conformity, from which to my mind there is no effective weapon except a sovereign demand for peace attainable for those whose first devotion – by means of creativity – is to the radically extreme, “sublime emotion” of joy.
Nobility, honor, duty – those attributes that draw so many people to the great myth-based stories that emerged in popular movies as if specifically to get us thinking about those heroic qualities: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, many prequels and sequels – how am I to understand them – as just grand adventures for my entertainment? Worse, are they to be left to be taken seriously (as I read recently) by Trumpist billionnares, providing reinforcement for their certainty- or at least of the banner they wave in front of their Christian supporters – of theirs being the good side fighting the bad guys trying to replace us? We can say this is nonsense, but at the same time, fascism gains ground and the liberal left does not.
Or might the powerful attraction of these stories have possible reference to a different realm for heroism in the post-modern reality? In The Lord of the Ring, the protagonist hobbit Frodo – against the staunch opposition of his most loyal comrade, Sam Gamgee, includes the untrustworthy and loathsome Gollum in their quest to fulfill the larger purpose of the Ring that includes all the kinds of inhabitants of Middle Earth – elves, dwarves, hobbits, men. In contrast, the liberal left, having dropped its sword of discernment in favor of security at any cost, merely knows it is against evil – “Hate has no home here.” When inclusive “God” reality, from which even evil is not excluded, remains exiled in the unconscious, the dark side wins.
Recently I watched The Scarlet and the Black (1983), a movie about the heroic actions of a Vatican priest during the Nazi occupation of Rome that began in 1943. Like many other people, my simplified understanding had it that Pope Pius XII (in this movie played by John Gielgud), through his compromises, had made his church complicit with Holocaust evil. In defiance not only of the SS commander in Rome, Colonel Kappler (played by Christopher Plummer), but of the Pope (though not without the Pope’s knowledge), Monsignor O’Flaherty (Gregory Peck) quite astoundingly and heroically saved the lives of several thousand Jews and prisoners of war. The movie shows the activist priest not only in his incredibly risky rescue operations, but in his private devotions, visible images standing for the invisibles upon which he leaned in order to accomplish the extraordinary.
Two scenes in particular stood out for me: in one the Pope takes O’Flaherty through the Vatican’s “glories”, all the art and documents collected over 2000 years of history, now stored safe from bombs in an underground chamber behind steel doors. He makes plain his duty as he understands it is to preserve these treasures, the history, the art, and the continued existence of the church in its separate reality from the political. He warns O’Flaherty against giving the Nazi’s an excuse to invade the Vatican.
The other scene comes at the end, after liberation. The pope confesses to the priest he may have been wrong in valuing so highly the treasures stored in the bunker. “The real treasure of the church,” he says, “is that someone comes to it like you.” The relationship between pope and priest, both of them on the “good” side, each needing the other, fascinated me: without the protection of the Vatican the priest could not have saved lives; without the priest church would be about sanctimony rather than love.
That many liberals no longer can accept religious authority is understood. But by what authority then may we escape near total uniformity and conformity, completely disabling ourselves from the capacity to build the better world? It seems to me we must acknowledge uncomfortably the real existence of evil, beginning in oneself, that in turn leads one to the real existence of the Good, in the dimension opened through imagination.
The movie’s reconciliatory scene, between the authentic conservative and the courageous activist, helps me envision my work locally: that of keeping the nonprofit The Other Side – having the same spiritual point of origin as our late, mourned Cafe – as a protected space in Utica. Activism on the left, we’re given to understand, does not need religious sanctification. Perhaps. But it needs safe spaces, often those protected by churches. There is, in other words, a place for a quite fully conservative sense of purpose, protecting the invisibles, so relationship with the radically inclusive sense of the sacred can be preserved. Otherwise, how can activism lead to anything other than more traumatized souls?
Fourth of July Reflections on Fascism,
Resistance, and Interdependence
I don’t know about you, but personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the 4th of July. This was a particularly difficult one, though. I’m not going to brightside you on that. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to remember a 4th that felt as bleak as this one, what with flood waters ripping through a church camp in Texas, and Donald Trump going full Lex Luther, gleefully grinning as he signed off on a bill that strips millions of healthcare and literally takes food out of the mouths of babies to give tax breaks to billionaires. Then there’s the small matter of gutting FEMA and the massive boost in funding to ICE that will swell the ranks of the jacket-booted masked agents who seem well-positioned to become Trump’s own personal Gestapo.
If you didn’t catch the part about the explosive overnight growth of ICE until it was too late, it may well have been due to the fact that Democratic party leaders found a perfect way to cap the spectacular party failures that led to the election of DT. According to The Intercept, party leadership, in their infinite wisdom, counseled fellow Dems to focus almost exclusively on cuts to the social safety net, and stay mum on the obvious and growing parallels between ICE and the Gestapo. And if you’re looking for a scholarly source to illuminate the links, you might check out Robert Gellately’s book The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-45 (Oxford University Press, 1990).
The Dem’s relative silence on the massive ramping up of funds for ICE ought to go a long way toward dispelling the myth that the Dem party leadership is in a particularly strong position to defend “Jewish safety.” It’s a given that party leaders seem to have learned little to nothing, from Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular victory over Andrew Cuomo in the New York primary, but what more evidence could we possibly need that they also appear to have learned little to nothing from the Holocaust?
Now millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that per a July 2 headline in Newsweek,“The Ice Budget is Now Bigger than Most of the World’s Militaries.” So if you were wondering how DT could afford to sign off on a bill that so profoundly undercuts his own voters, that ought to pretty much answer the question for you. The long predicted “imperial boomerang,” we are now witnessing, has been a long time coming. And now friends, we are well and truly in a sticky wicket. And we need to be scouring the annals of social movement history right now for lessons on how to gum up the works, how to stop the Furor and ICE from hiring thousands more agents.
I was reminded this past weekend of the first 4th of July I spent in Seattle. The day started out like pretty much any 4th, with me immersed in the annual rite of dodging TNT-wielding frontal-lobe-free teens bent on reenacting an albeit less lethal version of bombs bursting in air. And, all of a sudden, massive jets come thundering out of nowhere. I had not at this point ever heard of the “Blue Angels,” let alone been enculturated to celebrate the sight of carbon and ear-drum blasting-death-delivery-vehicles doing aerial aerobatics so perilously close to neighborhoods and rooftops. Hence, I immediately found myself in the throes of a panic attack and jumped to the obvious conclusion: Ronald “Bedtime for Bonzo” Reagan had declared martial law.
That conclusion may sound like a stretch to you, but to me it seemed fairly logical at the time, given especially that the year was 1984, and a good portion of my childhood was spent listening to stories about death camps and my father’s childhood flight from the Nazis. The latter fact may also go a long way toward explaining why, to this day, I can’t set foot in a Krupp’s elevator without wanting to denazify it. And don’t get me started on their coffeemakers.
My perspective on high tech aerial displays over densely populated urban areas is no doubt also rooted, in some measure, in having grown up listening to my father tell such classic bedtime tales as The Story of the London Blitz. As a 13-year-old boy, he – and his family – narrowly survived a bombing that blew off the top stories of the hotel where they’d taken refuge for the night.
It is definitely a measure of their privilege as wealthy white Catholics that they were, in fact, granted refugee status in England, while an estimated 6 million Jews died in the camps, alongside Roma, Poles, Black people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, communists, trade unionists, anti-fascist resisters, and so many others the Nazis deemed subhuman and unworthy of the right to life. But had my father’s family stayed in the Netherlands, their history of resistance, together with the fact that the “younger” of my father’s twin brothers – my uncle Pierre – had suffered brain damage at birth, would likely have put the whole family at high risk of being subjected to sterilization, “medical” torture, and dissection at Auschwitz.
After the war, my uncle Pierre moved to the Hague, where he took daily pleasure in the ocean view along with a glass of port or two. He would go on to work for decades as a file clerk, becoming the company’s longest running employee. And who knew until his death, that all that time he was saving up money to leave a bequest to each of his nieces and nephews? The money my uncle left me was enough to liberate me from the student debt I racked up in grad school.
In 1940, when the family arrived as refugees in England, my father’s older brothers Puck and Paul promptly joined the RAF and became fighter pilots. Paul, Pierre’s twin, was all of 21 when his plane was shot down over France. And this family history no doubt explains at least in part why I’m funny that way about military jets and the rooftops of houses. I just don’t think they’re a good mix. And I’m pretty sure a fair number of vets, my lovely spouse included, would agree with me on that.
It’s just a guess, but when it comes to 4th of July rites, I’ll venture that a sizable percentage of U.S. vets – and combat vets in particular– given the choice, would opt out of spending the day being administered IED-like blasts at random intervals.[1] And Trump’s bombing of Iran has generated vocal criticism from the far right. Across the country, where reps still have the temerity to hold townhalls, voters are voicing their preference for food, healthcare and VA benefits over funding for yet more wars. Americans – including the majority of Jewish people in the U.S. – are critical of the U.S.’s role in turning Gaza into a hightech human shooting gallery.
And as for the millions of people who live anywhere near one of the more than 800 U.S. military bases worldwide –from Okinawa and Vieques to Bagram and Pituffik – and you can pretty much assume they are also far less than enthralled by daily displays of the U.S’s “silver gleaming death machines.” But plenty of people living on or around U.S. bases stateside are also less than thrilled with being daily throttled and barraged by noise and chemical pollution, including most notable from “PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ from firefighting foam, industrial solvents used for cleaning, and unexploded ordnance from training exercises.” Anishinaabe writer/organizer Winona LaDuke’s book The Militarization of Indian Country provides a cogent and accessible primer on the impact of nuclear testing and waste on Indian reservations across the country.
In 1984, anyway, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch to imagine that domestically we would be sucked into some version of the authoritarian violence that the U.S. was busy helping to mete out across Latin America and well beyond. As the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara, famously observed, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” From farmworkers and trade unionists to teachers and professors, folksingers, nuns and priests, anyone who took remotely seriously any portion of the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. “You cannot serve God and money” and “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…”) was labelled a communist sympathizer, and fair game for U.S.-sponsored and trained death squads.
MLK Jr’s adage “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” has always seemed to me to be a kind of koan, an endlessly refracting moral, religious, political prism. The Reverend Dr. King’s koan is as much an ecological truth, and a basic law of nature, as it is a moral one. According to a study in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, just the first two months of the Israeli bombing of Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 exceeded “the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations….”
The massive military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower warned of in his 1963 speech has since become even more menacing globally and in the U.S., sprouting more and more tentacles, more poly-hypenates. For far too long, those surplus war toys have made their way back to our own communities and for decades now[2] have been wantonly and routinely used disproportionately against BIPOC brothers, sisters, and trans and nonbinary kin, along with people who struggle with mental illness, people with Downs, people with dementia, with epilepsy and with autism, people in wheelchairs and on and on. And don’t even get me started on the massive web of surveillance and security apparatus that’s been spun out and around us since the passage of the Patriot Act in the wake of 911.
But now Pegasus has come home to roost and the snarling dogs are at the door. We seem to be pretty much at that moment the State Department’s George F. Kennan anticipated when he recommended in a 1948 top secret memo that the government “cease to talk about vague and…, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off,” Kennan urged, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” In Frank Zappa’s more theatrical rendering, we seem to be at the moment when “the illusion of freedom” is no longer deemed sufficiently profitable, when the leaders are ready to “take down the scenery, …pull back the curtains,… move the tables and chairs out of the way [to expose] the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
But let’s be clear that for overwhelming numbers of BIPOC in this country, and exploited white workers, freedom has never been anything but an illusion. Still, who isn’t chilled by the recognition that the Furor’s enemies of state list seems to be ever-expanding at the same time that so many Americans are finding themselves buried in “AI slop.” That is if they’re not busy dealing with much more literal forms of sludge, as more and more rivers jump their banks, and sea levels go on rising.
What lies ahead of us may well be frightening, but let’s be absolutely clear: burying our collective heads in the sand is the surest path toward getting our collective asses blown off. And in the wake of one of the bleakest 4ths on record, we can take comfort in the results of the NYC primary, and in the fact that all that stuff about “independence,” about rugged individualism was always an illusion. NYC and LA are leading the way, as all around the country, people of good will are doing their best to hold fast to principles so many of us learned in kindergarten if not before – about the Golden Rule, the importance of sharing, of holding each other’s hands and watching each other’s backs when danger seems close – whether it’s a car at the school crosswalk or masked men in unmarked cars bent on disappearing our neighbors.
And everywhere across the country, people across parties are mobilizing to feed and shelter their neighbors, to build stronger, broader, more inclusive coalitions, stronger webs of resistance. People are flooding the streets, daily putting their fragile bodies on the line to demonstrate the essential truth that we are all kin, all connected, and that no one is expendable. The sooner we internalize the fundamental principle, “Never again for anyone,” the safer we’ll all be.
The preceding opinions most definitely do not represent the opinions of my employer Washington State University Vancouver. Thanks are due to Linda Cargill, Mikel Clayhold, and Frann Michel for reading and commenting on drafts. All errors are my own.
1. No doubt survivors of school shootings and other forms of gun violence may also find July 4 fireworks triggering. ↑
2. Case in point, in the course of looking for sources to back up the preceding claim, I stumbled across a company called “Black Ops Toys,” which looks like it could be Kristie Noem’s and MTG’s favorite go-to joint for one-stop Christmas shopping. ↑
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