After deciding on a whim to celebrate my birthday in NYC this weekend, I immediately went looking for a show to see. I am so glad I was able to catch Alex Edelman’s excellent one-man show at the Greenwich House Theater, Just for Us, before it closed. After my own recent experiences with Christian Fascism back home, I’ve felt driven to learn about other people’s experiences with the same sort of thing. Seeing this show was pretty cathartic on that count. Of course it was funny–Edelman’s a comedian–but it was also fascinating, poignant, illuminating, and extremely well-crafted. And just like the best shows of its kind, it raised more questions than it answered. I’m still pondering a few of them. The biggest question I’m wrestling with is exactly where the limits of empathy towards Christian Fascists and other white supremacists should really lie, and why.
Edelman’s show focuses on that night in 2018 when he low-key infiltrated a meeting of white supremacists in Queens. He took that insanely ballsy risk because he wanted to see if he could empathze with them–or at least understand who these folks are and why they carry such hatred towards Jews and other marginalized people. Edelman explained in great detail how empathy is one of his cardinal personal values–one he learned from growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family who were deeply engaged with their community and their religious practice. That honestly makes sense to me from both a spiritual and evolutionary standpoint. To my knowledge, the Jewish people have been run out of literally every place they’ve tried to call home for the last 5,000 years. It’s an extremely good idea to empathize deeply with your oppressor. It makes you a better and more generous person, but it also gives you the knowledge to de-esalate their rage and predict their next moves. You go longer between forced relocations that way.
I’ve always defined charm as goal-oriented empathy. At one point in the show, Edelman admitted that he’s “professionally charming,” which not one audience member would disagree with. Edelman had held us laughing and spellbound for over an hour intertwining stories from his life with the narrative of his slow success in building rapport with the other meeting attendees while managing to avoid the suspicious ire of the meeting leader “Cortez.” Of course, Edelman’s charming and empathetic efforts came to naught, and when that happened, everything about that night changed. Why did that happen, when he’d been so nice and charming? He had taken great pain to develop great empathy and compassion for the attendees, who were very clearly “not life’s winners.” Yet they did not reciprocate that empathy, and their confusion and outrage at his presence among them merely fueled their hatred and bigotry. Well, Edelman pretty much nailed it when he eventually told us that white supremacists are hateful bigots “who want all of us gone,” especially those of us white folks who bought tickets to support his art; “you’re the worst of all,” he told us. I muttered under my breath, “because we’re race traitors.” immediatley after which Edelman seemed to confirm, “because you’re traitors.” It has been my experience that Edelman is 100% correct on this point.
Empathy is the radical humanization of another person, by seeing them as a unique individual who can and should be related to as another, equal, human being. White supremacy is the radical dehumanization of entire groups of people who they think can and should be summarily eliminated from white society. America IS “white society” to them. Empathizing with the root frustrations of white supremacists doesn’t work because their root frustration is the presence of non-white people mucking up their ability to scale the social ladder. Objectively that is an egregiously false assumption, but they aren’t thinking rationally. They are reasoning out of a paradigm of hatred. No amount of charm or empathy can cut through that. The show made me curious to find out what Edelman thought, it anything, about the Christian Fascist white supremacists who are sweeping through the red states south and west of New York. He invited us to ask him questions after the show, so I decided to try that. Unfortunately, I am 100% autistic and incredibly socially awkward, so I had no real idea how to go about accomplishing that.
Outside, I saw him standing amidst a group of happy and satisfied audience members who wanted to let him know how much his work meant to them. And selfies. They wanted selfies. And then there was me, asking, “So, I’m curious. What is your take on the Christian Fascists? To which he reasonably and carefully replied, “Well, there is a spectrum of white supremacy.” Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “Well, I moved here two weeks ago because they were making threats on my life back home, and I feel like they’re pretty serious.” To which he carefully and reasonably replied something to the effect of, “Yes. They’re terrible.” The very next moment, the hand of God reached through a happy audience member and pulled Edelman into the relative safety of a group selfie before I could ruin more of his night with weird questions. So I did what any other socially inept autistic person would do, and I toddled off into the night to think about the show. Then I toddled back to my digs to write about it, and this blog post is the result of that.
It can’t be stressed enough that Edelman is absolutely correct that there is a spectrum of white supremacy. Actually, I see white supremacy as more of a panoply of hatred with certain groups of people choosing to prioritize one aspect of it over any others, but I digress. On one end of the spectrum are the Christain Fascists. Where I’m from, white supremacist evangelicals are the core demographic for Christian Fascism. Their destruction of free speech, the public education system, and human rights is based on a heavily distorted Christian lens. In Boston, where Edelman is from, the white supremacists have been seeking to terrorize the Jewish community through mapping and publicly doxing their businesses and homes to facilitate violence against them. In Queens, New York, it seems that the white supremacists are just a group of malcontents who can’t get their shit together and thus they seem pretty invisible socially. The presence of religious motivation within white supremacy seems to be negligible in both Boston and Queens, which is a key difference among groups. Yes, There IS a spectrum of white supremacy.
But does that really matter? Honestly, these folks are orgiastically participating in a hootenanny of murderous hatred and they want all the rest of us gone. This world is just for them, in their opinion. Whatever their differences in political mechanisms and religious motivation, these diverse groups will embrace whatever tactics they deem useful and necessary toward end of ending Jewish people, LGBTQI+ people, People of Color, and EVERY other marginalized person they can get their grubby hands on. Despite ideological or doctrinal differences among white supremacist groups, they will support and affirm each others’ efforts and actions. The tactics of Fascism work very well to accomplish those goals, and that is why I suspect we will begin to see more and more white supremacist groups embrace the political mechanisms of Fascism regardless of what flavor of white supremacy is their jam.
I’m not willing to expend further empathy understanding these people because I know perfectly well what they want. I also personally know what they are capable of doing to an innocent person who loudly and persuasively voices dissent. So my personal answer to the big question Edelman’s show raises is: why am I empathizing with people who seek my destruction and who are inured ot the humanizing influence of empathy because they have poisoned themselves with hatred? My time is better spent steering clear of them, shutting them down when I can, and reaching out to others who are being put through hell by these groups to try and create support networks.
Empathy with overt, hostile racists who are actively trying to destroy me does not help me resist annihilation at their hands–but then again, most people are not committed and engaged racists. Maybe it is more useful to say the white supremacy spectrum has a LOT of unconscious, naive racists on one end and engaged white supremacists on the other. There is a very large group of people who have unconsciously inherited systemic white supremacy and naively reproduce it. Possibly they can learn differently through encounters like the one Edelman generously provided that group in Queens. But then you have that smaller but far more committed group of conscious, overt racists such as those who attended that meeting with Edelman and actively rejected the moral and spiritual opportunity presented by actually getting to know a him as a person. I will make time to empathize with the the former until they give me a reason not to, but I’m not about to waste one second of empathy on the latter because my time is better spend planning my own survival. And THAT last thought is the one I’m left with. It’s dangerous to confuse the large mass of unconscious racists with the smaller groups of committed white supremacists and thus waste time empathizing with people who hate you and want to destory you.
The problem is, I honestly don’t think anyone in New York City really understands this, because they are so used to living in a multicultural, integrated, and CROWDED urban space where racism just doesn’t help society to function in any way whatsoever, which is why white supremacist groups have a tough time gaining traction. The discussions of implicit bias, systemic racism, microaggressions, gender representation, and civil liberties, etc. that form the core of NYC discourse about white supremacy in all venues public, private, and civil, keep treating it like it’s this toxic, omnipresent, villainous, yet an amorphous and vague thing we can and must educate or legislate ourselves out of. In Oklahoma, where I’m from and where I used to teach high school English, any teacher having a conversation about any of those topics inside a school building, in any context, can put an entire school district at risk of losing accreditation–and cost them the teacher theiir teaching license.
New Yorkers need to recognize that they breathe rarified air that is free enough to have these discussions. An increasing number of other Americans don’t have this luxury. I suspect that the only reason my old district did not pursue me further after my very splashy and loud resignation is because the superintendent did not want to prosecute a person who resigned for health reasons and only violated the state’s Ant-CRT laws in their farewell video to the students. I do know that our superintendent resigned in December following my late October resignation and was replaced by a Trumpist man who had been a coach and administrator from early in his career. Oklahoma is experiencing that first crush of institutionalized Christian Fascism and I’m just one of the earliest and most egregious casualties. There will be more to follow. Folks living in safe cities really need to pay attention, because sooner or later our problems will start really affecting you. Seeing stories like these from places like Oklahoma and then responding with “well, they’re just like THAT, right? It has nothing to do with me” is an ill-advised position to take.
You see, the Anti-CRT laws passed last year by OK’s state government came about because teachers like me leveraged the pandemic to finally bring discussions of unconscious bias, microaggressions, gender represenation, civil rights, etc. into the classroom and actually bring some needed change. With this, the Republican Christian Fascists swiftly and brutally shut us down. A few weeks ago, two entire school districts were found in violation of the state’s Anti-CRT laws because of a prepackaged implicit bias teacher training module from Pearson, and an anti-bullying exercise conducted as part of a socio-emotinal learning activity in a classroom. Both districts were given an official warning that they will revert to probationary accreditation status if they have another Anti-CRT law violation incident. This decision came after many hours of discussion that should have been spent strategizing how to handle the 3000-teacher shortfall that is plaguing Oklahoma schools. That issue was never even mentioned.
That decision by the OK State Department of Ed sent one hell of a warning to every school district in the state: “If even one teacher or administrator in one school is found in violation of this poorly written and vague law, every student and every school in the entire district is punished. Your school’s ability to actually provide and education from qualified teachers is absolutely irrelevant in comparison.” This type of short-sighted, sweeping, damning, retaliatory, and authoritarian punishment in response to minor offenses is a hallmark of Fascism. Fascism is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet. Every time you see another state pass Anti-CRT legislation, understand that it’s one more piece of America that has become overtly and damningly white supremacist and Christian Fascist.
That’s the part that will eventually affect New York City–and other coastal bastions of blue freedom. The problem that Fascist red states pose for all of America is that since Oklahoma and other red states are becoming functionally and institutionally Fascist at the state level, they will soon export Republican Christian Fascist senators and congresspeople to Washington, D.C. to start attacking all American civil liberties at the federal level. The Christian Fasist enablers on the Supreme Court are already in place to facilitate this. And while Mitch McConnell is positively mephistophelian, I fear he has absolutely nothing on tech billionaire-backed J.D. Vance. After November 8th, all of America is likely to learn that. This includes those beautiful blue metropoles.
I understand that New York, for example, is big and rich and powerful and independent and cosmopolitan and internationally important. For all that, it’s unthinkable that New York City would really fall prey to whatever Christian fascists dish out at the federal level. But I also know that a shit-ton of money to finance the operation and administration of the city is funneled to it through New York state, which receives an incredible amount of federal money for just these sorts of things. If–or when, to be honest–the Christian Fascists get into power, THAT is the first pressure point they’ll hit. In order to force New York to comply, the Fascists will squeeze the purse strings at the federal level. Then will come the thinly disguised boutique legislation targeting New York City and other blue major cities to break them down further. In saying this, I’m simply reiterating what I have already seen play out on Oklahoma and applying it to the circumstances likely to emerge if and when when the Christian Fascists finally manage to wrestle control of the entire United States of America. New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and other blue bastion cities like them will feel the crunch of Fascist pressure. The question is, can these cities really resist the crushing blows Fascists will try to dish out?
On the surface, the answer to this question may seem to be “Hell, yes. They’re not sad, culturally bereft backwaters, after all.” There are a few reasons I’d invite folks in New York City especially to reconsider that stance. First off, Mayor Adams is a massive proponent of drone surveillance for the purpose of fighting crime. The likelihood that the police will use the drones to circumvent Amercans’ fourth amendment protections is pretty high, as is the likelihood that the less affluent neighborhoods where marginalized people live will be policed by drone significantly more often than the wealthier, non-marginalized neighborhoods. We already know that poor neighborhoods where people of color live are policed more brutally and at significantly higher rates than white neighborhoods. Drone surveillance is likely to repeat and extend that pre-existing pattern.
The issues surrounding wealth inequality, access to resources, and costs of living already plague New Yorkers on a daily basis. As Christian Fascists ratchet up the the federal pressure and crack down on New York City, crime will rise right along with these tensions. Eventually, affluent, powerful New Yorkers who benefit from a privileged relationship to government will begin to vigorously demand more measures to secure their safety and property. They will start publicly and loudly supporting the drone-enhanced policing of neighborhoods where poor and marginalized people live. Such measures don’t harm them and seem to keep the poors in line, so it’s all to the good as far as they are concerned.
Then, they will increasingly demand that the city comply with Christian Fascist federal pressure regarding the education system, access to resources, and the civil rights of marginalized people in the city because all this drone surveillance policing needs must be funded by something other than higher municipal taxes that they don’t want to pay. Fascism is essentially the collusion of business with the government to the detriment of the common citizen. Wealthy people colluding with Fascist oppression to save your their own skins is the epitome of Fascism, and New York City is primed for that circumstance.
On top of this, New Yorkers put a lot more faith into group solidarity than they should. Collectively and individually, marginalized groups make up much of New York’s citizenry. However, when conditions in the city worsen due to pressures inflicted by Christian Fascists at the federal level, affluent New Yorkers will probably follow in lock-step with other affluent New Yorkers. One would think that, for example, all of us LGBTQI+ people would be solidly against caving to the pressure of the Christian Fascists who are actively trying to eradicate our civil rights and our participation in American public life. Yet what we are likely to see is affluent LGBTQI+ New Yorkers increasingly support the harassment-by-drone and oppressive policies and the Fascist policies being shoved down New Yorks; throat in order to fund all that policing.
They’ll do it because it is in their best political and financial interests to do so, and their support of these measures is unlikely to affect them negatively on a personal, financial, or professional level. If, for example, Peter Thiel can back replacement-theory Christian Fascist J.D. Vance for election to federal office, then any wealthy LGBTQI+ citizen of New York can and will choose to do the same thing in the interests of protecting their affluence–and I’m betting that they will. THAT is what it looks like when the wealthy close ranks and look after each other. The only real loyalty they have is to others of their own status.
In fact, I think it is entirely possible that affluent yet otherwise marginalized New Yorkers will increasingly be put in this position. Worse yet, they are likely to find that choosing NOT to support these pro-Fascist measures that they really don’t care for would be personally, financially, and professionally deleterious. Some of them doubtless already have found this to be true. How else can one explain possibly Jared Kushner? This man proudly–and by some accounts loudly–performs his Judaism for the world to see. Yet he deadass sat by and watched Nazi sympathizer Stephen Miller plan a hatred hootennany of a Trump rally to take place on Juneteenth in a city that was gearing up to commemorate the centennial anniversary of possibly the largest and worst race massacre in Amerian history. THAT stunt had to be the greatest and most obvious dog-whistle in Americna history. Kushner said absolutely nothing at all. Maybe he wondered why he should risk his power and status speaking out against a Nazi sympathizer’s purile efforts in order to help the Black people in some red state that his father-in-law already had control of?
Well, he should have said something because Fascism is bad and historically lethal to the Jewish community, and allowing it to fester in enough cultural backwaters guarantees that it will eventually come home to roost in your his own backyard. And when it gets there, you can only hope that your affluent, non-marginalized friends don’t find it in their best self-interest to turn on you. Kushner already has several backyards full of Christian Fascism at his properties in Florida, so you’d think he wouldn’t want more of it here. But since Christian Fascism has served him professionally and financially, it’s possible he just can’t recognize those other truths.
But what about all the other New Yorkers? Those who aren’t affluent. Those who are acutely marginalized? They have numbers, and they might be able to mount an effective resistance of some sort for that reason. Perhaps they will be able to reinforce and support the resource pool distribution and neighborhood safety measures being taken by their own communities. But then again, these are the same New Yorkers who will witness the increase in police brutality against their friends and neighbors in the name of keeping New York City safe. What they see will tell them that compliance is the only safe option. They will comply with intolerable laws and an intolerable situation if they want to avoid being targeted themselves. That, my friends, is the full bloom of Fascism.
My sense is that the people of New York City are clueless to the actual risks that they are facing as America becomes overrun by Christian Fascism. In order to realize these very real risks, they’d have to start empathizing with marginalized people trapped in Christian Fascist red states. People like me and my cousin Celeste and my brother Larry and my nephew Nate, for example. Stop blaming the inadequacy of our political viewpoints and cultural awareness for the campaign of Christian Fascist terror being unleashed upon us. We WERE making progress in this regard, I assure you. In fact, I stood up and fought for what was right as regards marginalized Oklahomans, our civil rights and right to exist. I got run out of my teaching career and the home I inherited from my grandparents, and had my life threatened on more than one occasion. This is happening to me because marginalized people in red sates have been utterly abandoned and ignored by those who set the political agenda for left-leaning America. This is what has allowed the Christian Fascist overrun to take place.
Only through empathy would those privileged enough to live in places like New York and Los Angeles be able to do something truly helpful to stop this Fascist menace: kick the Democratic party in the shins until it commits to funding and following through with state and local elections in red states. The truth is that the interests of places like New York City and Los Angeles tend to set the agenda of the Democratic party, and it’s up to them to convince the party to actually address the socio-economic issues underpinning Christian Fascism in red states. Supporting viable candidates (they exist) in winnable electrons (they also exist) in those states will help lessen the support base that increasingly exports Christian Fascist politicians to Washington, D.C. where they can harm ALL Amerians. I doubt that anyone living in New York of Los Angeles or San Francisco or other blue cities is capable of empathizing with people like me enough to make a difference. It’s too much work and we’re all backwoods racist rednecks as far as they’re concerned. But if they would just spend as much time empathizing with margnialized red state residents as they do the white supremacists in their own midst, things might actually change.
About the only thing I feel I could realistically hope for is that folks fortunate enough to live in places like New York City–where entire school districts aren’t warned about losing accreditation because of a 20-minute implicit bias training–stop taking their security and freedom for granted. At the very least, they have got to stop pretending that what’s been happening in the Christian Fascist red states can’t possibly affect them, and that Christian Fascists at the federal level won’t be an absolute travesty for the entire country including themselves. That in and of itself might be a significant enough change to prevent New Yorkers from being victimized by Christian Fascists in their own neighborhoods. So…I guess even the slimmest hope will have to do.
