Ignoring the Obvious: A Response to "How Hitler's Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany"

Nazis burn the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Opernplazt, Berlin. 

            While I appreciate Prof. Browning’s history lesson on “How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy In Germany,” I was left utterly bewildered by the argument he furthered therein: Americans should be suspicious of using the term “fascism” to describe our current historical moment, even if the fate of the Weimar Republic does provide “some instructive parallels and important warning signals” as regards what is happening in our own ailing democracy. In other words, he’s telling us that yes, American democracy is under threat, and yes, there are parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of Trump, but no, there is no reason to think that problem might actually be fascism because America is too different from interwar Germany to ever become a Nazi dictatorship. While Browning’s position may have merits, there are serious gaps in his reasoning that should leave any reasonable person unconvinced. 

“Fascism,” Browning reminds us in the second of two instances where he uses the term, “openly condemned parliamentary democracy.” Well, America is proud of being a democracy. According to Browning, America is much more prone to adopt the “illiberal democracy” being forwarded by Western authoritarians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán than we are Nazism. These “illiberal democracies,” Browning says, prefer to exploit the appearance of free and democratic elections as a legitimizing force for their agenda while consolidating their power through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the like. In essence, Browning would have us believe that fascism just isn’t America’s style and that is why we aren’t actually facing the threat of a Nazi dictatorship. 

Throughout the article, Browning’s argument relies heavily on an equivocation of the term “fascism” with the term “Nazism.” “Fascism” as such is only mentioned twice, as the article is primarily concerned with Nazism–a specific for-instance of fascism that arose in interwar Germany. The result of Browning’s equivocation is to create a sense of ridiculousness at the idea that America could become a Nazi dictatorship, which in turn obscures the possibility that we could very well still end up with fascist authoritarians as the political majority in D.C. It’s easy to point out how different contemporary America is from interwar Germany and claim that as a reason that such a thing will never happen here. It’s much more difficult to look closely at what is happening legislatively and socioculturally in America’s red states and deny that they are clearly being overrun with Christian Nationalists pushing a punishing and oppressive fascist agenda. By sticking to Nazism in his argument, Browning can sidestep reckoning with the fascist impulses that are steadily growing in red states and still claim that America is not threatened by fascism. 

Browning’s equivocation also obscures the facts that fascism was born in Italy, and that Hitler created his Nazi ideology by borrowing some ideas from Italian fascism. He took those ideas and applied them to the historically and culturally specific context of interwar Germany to create his Nazi ideology. Hitler’s creation of Nazism is proof that fascism is a protean ideology; any sufficiently motivated person can adapt it to their purposes. Indeed, when one looks closely at the suppressive laws and oppressive agendas being passed in red states by the Christian Nationalist regimes that have come to dominate the GOP, that is exactly what is happening here, now. These American fascists have borrowed parts of their tactics and ideology from both Mussolini and Hitler, but they are mixing it with heaps of jingoism, evangelical Christian authoritarianism, Adam Smith, and ill-informed constitutional literalism. Browning might be right: perhaps Nazism is impossible in America. That hasn’t stopped Americans from creating their own version of fascism in the same way that Hitler created Nazism. Nazism is indeed a strain of fascism, but not all fascists are Nazis. Some fascists are American Christian Nationalists, and Christian Nationalism is very much the GOP’s preferred style of fascism, if not all of America’s. 

Of course, anyone reading Browning’s examples of how the Nazi party exploited the machinery of German democracy to wrest and consolidate their absolute power cannot fail to notice that the ultimate goals of American “illiberal democracy” under the GOP aren’t really all that different from those of the interwar European fascists. The Christian Nationalist wing of the GOP has been in the ascendancy since 2015, and they want to consolidate as much power at the state and federal levels into their hands as they possibly can. So far, it’s been pretty easy: several influential GOP stalwarts–Graham, McConnell, Jordan, Cruz, and Rubio among them–have openly embraced the discrimination, nationalism, misogyny, theocracy, and authoritarianism that have come to characterize this subset of the Republican Party. Just as Germany’s traditional conservatives cast their lot with the Nazis to gain power America’s GOP has cast their lot with the Christian Nationalist fascists to achieve the same end–a fact that Browning practically admits.

Is it really so impossible, then, to think that the GOP would likely go much farther than “illiberal democracy,” given that one of their main objectives is to have enough states in their camp to call a constitutional convention? The interwar fascists in Italy and Germany won legitimate elections to get into power, and as soon as they were in office, they brought out the authoritarian sledgehammer to rewrite their constitutions in the image of fascism. Is it really so ridiculous to think that the Christian Nationalists in the GOP will try exactly the same thing when they get the chance? 

There is one particularly instructive comparison between 21st-century America and interwar Germany that Browning makes–a “big lie” has victimized both. Hitler’s early propaganda campaign was a “big lie” intended to delegitimize the Weimar Republic: he claimed that the republic had been installed by the “November Criminals” to enrich themselves and destroy the German people. Trump’s “big lie” came in 2020, as he claimed that a rigged election had cost him the presidency and America was laboring under an illegitimate Democratic administration. 

The goal of Hitler’s “big lie” was to undermine the Weimar Republic. His ruthless excision of any democratic impulse within the German state came only after he had come to power. The goal of Trump’s big lie was to delegitimize the institution of voting, without which we cannot have democracy. Of the two lies, Trump’s was the bigger. Hitler’s “big lie” destroyed a democratic republic; Trump’s big lie destroyed the only means by which a nation can achieve and maintain a democracy. If this lie doesn’t display the hallmark fascist contempt for parliamentary democracy, I don’t know what does. 

Despite this obvious circumstance, Browning assures us that America is not under threat by fascism because “Trump is no Hitler,” He goes on to argue that, “compared with Hitler’s national-socialist ideological fixations, which led to brutal dictatorship, war, and genocide, Trump’s preoccupations seemed mainly to involve attention, adulation, and fundraising.” The only way that Trump’s “preoccupations” could seem so anodyne is if one utterly ignores the massive waves of authoritarian hate speech that have been spewing from Trump since he hit the campaign trail in 2015–as Browning clearly has. 

A massive number of the January 6th rioters honestly believed that they were acting at the behest of Trump; some believed they were following his direct orders. The Proud Boy militias no doubt think the same thing whenever they march, armed to the teeth, into libraries to terrorize families and library patrons who are enjoying public programming offered by the library and minding their own business besides. I’m certain that the 31 heavily armed Patriot Front militiamen also believed that they were acting at Trump’s behest when they decided to violently demonstrate their opposition to a public Gay Pride event last June in Idaho. The fact that Trump is “no Hitler” doesn’t really matter. Trump IS Trump, and what he has done has eroded America’s democratic institutions and civil liberties. Trump doesn’t have to be Hitler; he just needs to command the same loyalty from his followers, who he knows will act–with certainty and violence–on the hatred he habitually vomits forth. No Hitler comparisons should be needed here to recognize Trump as the dangerous, pro-fascist force that he is.

In all honestly, Browning is probably correct in surmising that Trump has no chance to take back the presidency in 2024. To be honest, Trump currently serves the GOP as a figurehead and a propagandist who spurs Christian Nationalists onward toward committing acts of terrorism and violence against their neighbors and the children of their communities. Trump’s hatred and his minions’ vicious antics distract the rest of us from paying any attention whatsoever to the clever pro-fascists currently working over the leadership of the GOP. At this moment, there are at least three major pro-fascist front-runners who are jockeying to take the Republican nomination in 2024. Former Trumpist and current autocrat Rick DeSantis is a darling among Trump supporters. White supremacist replacement theorists J.D. Vance and Blake Masters–who are both backed by a shadowy, foreign techno-elitist billionaire–are practically champing at the bit to take that nomination. We need to start paying close attention to them.

Unlike Trump, these men don’t act out in piques of cranky toddler narcissism, and they are far better at building alliances with the traditionalists and moderates within the Republican Party. Any of the three of them would take the task of enshrining Christian Nationalist fascism in our constitution quite seriously indeed. And they would all make certain that we were too busy reacting to Trump’s antics to notice what they were doing until it was too late. Trump is no Hitler, but that is no matter. DeSantis, Masters, Vance, or some other pro-fascist figure will be very keen to institute policies at the federal level in service to this newly emergent American strain of fascism as soon as they can get away with it. 

Browning criticizes the “facile comparisons” being made between contemporary America and interwar Germany that invoke “fascism” as an “imprecise epithet” to describe the political tides currently drowning the American system. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really succeed in dismissing these comparisons altogether because he fails to define fascism precisely enough for us to recognize–or deny–those comparisons for ourselves. 

A user-friendly definition of fascism is clearly in order, and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary happens to have a great one. Therein, Fascism (“a term often capitalized”) is defined as 

“a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” 

Granted, some of the aspects of this newly emerging American fascism don’t much seem to resemble that definition at first blush. But just because fascism is manifesting differently in contemporary America than it did in interwar Europe doesn’t mean that that’s not exactly what is happening. One need only be willing to look past the pedantic in order to see the obvious. Despite formal differences, the underlying impact of Christian Nationalist fascism will more or less prove to be the same in America as was seen in interwar Europe. 

For example, one would be hard-pressed to deny that the Christian Nationalist fascists in the GOP exult national identification over individual freedoms. Civil liberties are one instance of a government preserving an individual’s freedoms and human rights. The red state GOP fascists keep passing laws to curtail the civil liberties of people they don’t like, or who are likely to say things they don’t like. They are in favor of any and every measure that would compel Americans to work with as few job and safety protections as possible, for as little pay and benefits as possible. They continue to champion the notion of socio-economic mobility as a justification for clinging to an economic system that has generated incredible socio-economic disparity and gutted the American middle class.

About the only aspect of fascism that doesn’t seem to be in place currently is the “centralized autocratic government aspect. Now, it is absolutely true that America is federal system built to ensure that any centralized federal government will not impinge upon the rights of the states to govern according to their leaders’ wishes. Logically, that should be enough to prevent a centralized autocracy from ever happening. However, it is instructive to remember that neither Italy nor Germany had an “autocratic centralized government”  before the fascists took them over. Indeed, the fascist demand for centralized autocracy was one of the things that both Mussolini and Hitler managed to heed as soon as they possibly could after they had seized power in their respective nations. There is really no telling what in our constitution would be rewritten if committed Christian Nationalists in the GOP managed to have enough power to call a convention and shape the future governance of our country according to their fascist objectives. 

As we all know, the constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any state laws that conflict with what is in the constitution are inevitably struck down. If the Christian Nationalist faction of the GOP were to achieve the super-majority they would need in both houses of Congress, they would absolutely change our constitution to reflect their bigotry and their priorities. In that case, blue states that have enshrined democracy, equal protection under the law, and civil liberties for all of their citizens in their state constitutions could very well end up having those constitutions struck down for being out of compliance with the federal constitution. Those states could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for infrastructure, social safety net programs, and education–and that’s just to start. 

In the face of such a devastating turn of events, how many of those beautiful blue bastions could successfully resist the demands of a federal government that has found them to be out of compliance with the “law of the land?” If any managed to resist at all, it would be very few who successfully could for any length of time. As it turns out, you don’t need a ready-made centralized government to inflict fascist autocracy upon the whole of this nation; you just need the willful and egregious tyranny of a pro-fascist super-majority willing to exploit the mechanisms of federalism so that they could force every state in the union to follow their agenda. 

Ultimately, Browning’s argument that America is in trouble, but not actually fascist trouble, falls flat because he fails to take his own warning signals seriously enough.  He’s right that America is unlikely to become a Nazi dictatorship. He is wrong to use that idea as a justification for dismissing the fascism already occurring in our midst and the very real threat it poses to all of America–not just the red states. America is in danger of becoming something far worse than an “illiberal democracy,” whether Browning wants to admit that or not. Fascism is already here in America, it just isn’t evenly distributed…yet. 

Doppelganger and Symmetry

 

It isn’t every day that you meet your metaphorical doppelganger, much less possibly acquire your next residence from them, but that’s exactly what transpired of late. As it turns out, Scott, the realtor who sold my friend W his house, is also a rental agent. Unbeknownst to me, Will asked Scott to help me out. That is how I came to see this cute little midcentury tract home. Now, it’s smaller than I would like, but it has a big, dry, basement. It also has a huge fenced yard. Both my cat and my dog will be very happy there. This is my intention for myself as well. Having a place of my own is just the foundation I need both personally and professionally to get back on my feet and hit the floor running. 

Perhaps the best part of all this is that the owner of the house is leaving most of her furniture behind. She’s relocating and renting the house out for extra income. Now, I have radically different decorating tastes than Mrs. B., that much is certain. However, as I basically fled East with my pets and a carful of clothes and other essentials, I have zero furniture to put in any house, anywhere. Having that stress gone along with my housing shortage is 100% worth living with Mrs. B’s cave-like, earth-toned abode until I can finally find my forever home. 

When I accompanied Scott to visit the property and see if I would want to rent it, I was rather surprised by both Mrs. B and her household. Mrs. B is about five years older and five inches shorter than me. I was dressed in a teal dress with peacock-feather print leggings. She was in sweatpants and a teal T-shirt. I noticed decorative peacock feathers arranged in a knot on the wall behind Mrs. B. I noted the interesting synchronicity, and then turned my attention to my potential landlord. 

Mrs. B is an army vet from the Dominican Republic. She’s also a retired vet who spent her post-military career as a staff veterinarian for the ASPCA. Her house was full of rescued animals. I mean, there were animals in every single room of that house including the basement and the bathroom. And I don’t mean just a jumbled menagerie of many cats and many dogs. Mrs. B. specialized in rescuing exotic birds from their abusive or neglectful owners. There were more birds than dogs in that house.

When she first invited us into her house, I was struck by the smell. It was literally the warmest, cleanest-smelling house I’d seen that day. In front of the window was a 50-gallon fish tank with Koi, Angelfish, Molly fish, Swordtails, Gourami, and a clown loach. They burbled happily just under the water’s surface in their own little school. Mrs. B must have just fed them. Pumpkin spice scent wafted through the living room, courtesy of a wax burner on the table just inside. Before pointing out any other feature, she introduced me to the trio of lovebirds who resided in a bamboo cage in the living room. Hero, Bruno, and Jose sat huddled together on the bar in the center of the cage. Their eyes were closed in what could only be described as cozy contentment as they huddled three abreast on the bar. I’ve never seen lovebirds huddle in a group of three before; they’re kind of known for being “couple birds” for lack of a better descriptor. Yet these three were in their own little world of happy, nestling close. Maybe it works out so well because they are all male. 

The fish scattered to the far side of the tank as we moved through the living room and into the kitchen. Before I entered, I noticed the 3-foot dark blue, green, and purple Macaw perched atop its open cage. Her face was a muddy purplish-blue color, and out from it shone piercing yellow eyes gazing upon us with absolute malevolence. Mrs. B introduced us to Marlena the Macaw by warning, “That’s Marlena. Don’t get too close. She gets testy when there’s a man in the house. She don’t like being separated from her boyfriend.” I had no idea what Mrs. Be meant by that, but I could see that Marlena was chewing anxiously on a chunk of a resin tree branch that jutted haphazardly out the far side of the cage. I honestly felt like she would rather have been chewing on my face. Gave me the willies. 

Scott and I made a wide berth of Marlena as we squeezed by into the truly tiny kitchen. Scott and I stood side-by-side mere inches in front of the Macaw habitat and listened as Mrs. B pointed out all the things she would be leaving behind for me to use, absent-mindedly remarking at the end that the stove was electric because she had just then realized a potential renter might want to know that. At just that moment, I felt a drippy heaviness drop on my shoulder. Splattered across my right shoulder was parrot crap. “OOOOH. I’m so sorry. She always gets like that when there’s a man in the house.” Scott is 6’5” and 300 lbs, and his build is indistinguishable from that of a grizzly…or a sasquatch. But for some reason, the bird shit on me, the nonbinary potential renter. I guess she saw me as more manly than the grizzly man beside me, and that thought kind of amuses me. It amused me more than scrubbing that shit out of my heavy velour jacket, I assure you. 

Mrs. B. handed me a towel to wipe it off and scurried to find some cleanser. Scott and I moved out of the kitchen and into the tiny hallway. Not long thereafter, Mrs. B emerged from her room–two doors down to the right–which was apparently where she kept the caca cleaner. Before she could step all the way out of her door, a small tidal wave of dogs rushed out from behind her to crash on the shores of my flocked peacock leggings. There were two chihuahuas, a husky, and a golden retriever. She called her yappy canine brood to go back into her room and be good. They reluctantly did, mostly because neither Scott nor I was going to pet them. I really wanted to, but given my luck thus far with pets in the house, I thought it better to keep my hands away from their excitable and yapping jaws. I looked to the left and saw the bathroom at the end of the hall. I moved past Scott to get a better look. On the way, I glanced down and noticed that my shins were matted with dog hair. 

My gaze fell on the pipe sticking out where the tub faucet should be and then stopped.  “I’m gonna fix that tonight!” Mrs. B assured me, as she moved past Scott to address my curiosity and forestall my decision to pass on the house. She knew exactly what I was staring at. I noticed a lonely, homely little turquoise parakeet in a sire cage hanging just outside of the shower. Under other circumstances, he’d have been a little gem of a bird. But after seeing a polyamorous triad of male lovebirds and a menacing if magnificent Macaw, this little gal was kind of…basic. “That’s Pedro. I’m pet-sitting him while my friend is in DR.” I noticed a faucet, a caulking gun, and an assortment of small hand tools were laid out on a faded magenta beach towel in the large, deep, gorgeous old cast-iron tub. I am a bath person, but overly complicated whirlpool tubs are lost on me. Give me one of these mid-century cast-iron tubs any day. The tools in the tub told me that Mrs. B really was planning to fix the faucet spout soon. I relaxed a little.

“Let me show you the basement!” Mrs. B said, gently grabbing my forearm and leading me back across the kitchen and towards Marlena. Mrs. Be lead us to the basement stairs and said, “Her boyfriend is down here. She don’t like being separated from him” Scott glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I just kind of shrugged and followed Mrs. B down the steps. As soon as I got to the bottom step, I saw what Mrs. B. had been talking about–or, rather, who. Perched atop an enormous iron cage was a 3.5-foot brilliant vermillion, saffron, cerulean, and white Macaw with a bright yellow face and eyes. He opened his wings to their full 3.5-foot width and flapped them briskly up and down a few times. He dipped is head twice and then stared me down with a level gaze before emitting a loud, screeching honk. His call was met and matched by Marlena, his erstwhile upstairs Juliet. “That Raoul. He misses his girlfriend,” said Mrs. B. Oh. Marlena the menacing Macaw was Raoul’s girlfriend. “I use to put them together, but then they made babies. I had to find homes for four baby parrots. Never again!” said Mrs. B as she moved in to show the basement. 

The bone-dry basement was huge, bright, and fully furnished. The furnace, water heater, and washer/ dryer set were all less than four years old. Could not say the same for the pristine but obsolescent fuse box keeping the lights on in the place. I loved the basement of that house more than anything else. I turned slowly in a 360-degree loop to survey the whole space. My eyes lighted on the cages next to Raoul’s. A smaller red, yellow, green, and white Macaw was inside his wrought-iron filigree cage, munching contentedly on a carrot. Next to him was a bamboo cage with a dark shape huddled in the center, staring out hauntedly. Upon closer inspection, I saw that he was an African gray parrot. 

Improbably, Scott’s phone rang. “I gotta take this. I’ll just go upstairs.” With that, grizzly man tromped up the basement steps, leaving me with Mrs. B. 

“Do you like the fish?” she asked.

As a matter of fact, I did, and I told her so. “Would you like to have a fish tank? Here with you?” No I would not, but I didn’t say so. While the rest of the house was ho-hum, the basement was fantastic and I could see myself just actually living down there most of the time. Between that and the yard–which I had only seen pictures of, by the way– I knew that this was the place my dog and cat would be happiest, and I already loved the bathtub–a major consideration for me, to be honest. 

“Why would you leave it?” I asked.

“Because it won’t make the trip to Kansas. They all die before we get there.” Having recently traveled to New York state from Oklahoma, Kansas’ neighbor to the south, I understood exactly how she felt and knew that she was 100% right. Getting this far in a car with a dog and a cat was pure hell and torture for all three of us. “If you rent the house, would you take care of the fish?” It was very hard to say no to that. Before I could say so, she added, “I can find someone to take care of them, if you can’t.” 

“That might be the best thing.” I responded, “I don’t know that I’d be able to keep them alive. I’ve only ever owned three fish and all three of them died within a week. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for being honest,” she added, sincerely. I asked where she was moving to.

“To Pittsburg, Kansas. My sister lives there,” she said. “I have cancer,” she added, “I’m doing chemo right now.” She paused a bit and then said, nodding emphatically, “I want to be near my family.” She went on to explain that her son lived with his family in Florida and that she didn’t want to burden him. 

“That is extremely rough luck, Mrs. B,” I said. “It couldn’t be happening to a kinder, nicer person,” I added ruefully. She cracked a smile at that. After a moment, I looked at her and said, “I truly wish you the best of luck on your journey to Kansas. You seem like the sort of person who really deserves it.” With that, Mrs. B got a bit of a look in her eye, like she was measuring me. Her eyes had become a bit misty, and she wiped at them before saying, “Let’s go. I show you the backyard.” 

We schlepped slowly up the steps in silence. As we went, I reflected on the uncanny coincidences at play. This woman was as hardworking and handy as I was. She had clearly done every bit of interior repair work on that house–much like I had my own home. I recognized the bathroom faucet as her desire to finish one last thing to make the house more appealing to a renter. I’d spent weeks doing the exact same thing to my old house before I left. 

Mrs. B took in stray animals and cared so well for them that her house smelled only of warmth and love. The only fur in evidence was matted on my leggings. Otherwise the place was spotless and yet completely accommodating of her much-loved menagerie. Both my furbabies are rescues. While the trip East would have been much easier without them, I was not about to part from them. You don’t dump animals you rescued from near oblivion, no matter how hard it gets. I knew for a fact that she absolutely did not want to leave those lovely little fish behind, either, but she knew as well as I that they had a better chance of surviving if she left them here and could re-home them. My being honest about wanting them to live long and healthy lives had actually sort of impressed her, it seemed. 

Mrs. B. stopped so abruptly at the bottom of the steps that I almost ran into her. She gestured to a small pile of tchotchkes and assorted small appliances. “That is all I am taking with me from the garage,” she said. “The rest is yours. If you decide to rent the house.” Mrs. B. then led me on a tour of her garage to see the abandoned DIY projects she must leave behind. She showed me a new Shower/tub enclosure with frosted glass doors. “I did not have the time to do that one. You can put that in, easy, if you decide to rent the house,” she said. She gestured to a perfectly vintage midcentury minibar that only needed to be restrained. “You can do that if you decide to rent the house,” she said. We stopped in front of a few more projects scattered around the periphery of the garage. It felt for all the world like I was walking the Camino de Santiago with a fellow pilgrim, and both of us had serious prayers to make at the shrine of our final destination. Finally, she takes me to the back door of the garage, behind which lies the enormous fenced yard. She gently swung the door open, and then stood aside so I could step through and get a better look. 

The yard has an enormous hill sweeping from the east to the northwestern edge. I was very happy that Mrs. Be was also leaving behind her a weedeater, two lawnmowers, and a snowblower because I was definitely going to need all three to keep up with that glorious yard. I noticed that a lovely little niche was created by the downward slope of the hill and the curve of the yard. A pit group and chiminea sat in the clearing. Mrs. B stepped in close to my left side. “I need to ask you a favor. For if you rent the house.” Having had to refuse the fish, I was hoping this was a request that I could actually accommodate. 

“Lay it on me, mama. What do you need?” I asked. 

Tears gathered in her eyes as she turned her face toward the far back of the yard. With a sweeping gesture, she pointed to a tiny tree with a wind chime hanging from its lower branches. 

“There. That’s where my first baby is buried. My chihuahua, Maria.” she then swept her hand across and down the hill to rest at what looked like a tiny grotto. “I put that pond in for her. She love it.” Mrs. B. stopped for a moment and stifled a sob. I fervently hoped that whatever favor she wanted, it was something I could grant. 

“Will you…look after her?” Mrs. B. looked at me, eyes pleading. “After her grave? Make sure nothing happen to it? If you rent the house?” 

Boy, howdy. Did she ask the right person for that favor. I smiled gently and told her, “Ancestors and graves are sacred to me. I’m happy to look after it,” adding, “If I rent the house.” She smiled widely and wiped her tears away. “I hope you rent the house, then.”

In that moment, I knew for a fact that although my life has been extremely rough for the past several months, I was still in a better place than she. “I would never trade places with her,” I thought to myself. A moment passed before I realized that in taking her house, I was doing EXACTLY that. A chill trickled into my spine and settled heavily on my limbs as the realization hit me. 

Mrs. B, like myself, had spent her professional career being referred to as “Doctor,” just like me. She was alone and bravely facing an uncertain and foggily dim future, just like me. She barely had anyone other than family to rely on, just like me. She was being forced to part from a home she loved so very much and had planned to live in until she grew old, just like me. She was being compelled to flee halfway across the country to avoid a dread, implacable, and deadly fate, just like me. She didn’t deserve to be going through any of it, just like me.  And to top it all off, she was moving to a Kansas town less than 2 hours from Tulsa. I’ve even been to Pittsburg–several times. My college theater department at NEO A&M had a reciprocal course-sharing agreement with Pittsburg State University that I took advantage of.

At that moment, Scott came into the garage. “Well, what did you two decide? 

I paused for a long moment, lost in thought. Mrs. B was most certainly my metaphorical doppelganger. We were both shedding dire circumstances and setting forth, cross-country, into an uncertain future with only the hope and intention of making a better life. Mrs. B knows that with me as a renter, her Maria’s grave will be respected and tended, and that thought lightened her mind considerably. The thought of having a mostly furnished place so accustomed to and accommodating of pets lightened my mind considerably. Given that zero of the other AFFORDABLE properties I had seen that day were actually habitable, much less safe for pets, I decided that Mrs. B’s place might be a trade I would have to live with. 

“Let me talk things over with my agent, and we’ll get back to you this afternoon,” I finally said. Scott was happy to escape Mrs. B’s feathery menagerie. 

“Ok. But if you rent the house,” she asked “you will take care of my Maria?” 

My gaze leveled at hers. Nodding slowly in the affirmative, I replied, “If I take the house.”

Ghost House Hunting

Photo Credit: Zillow

        Now, I've had a lot of strange experiences in my life, both positive and negative. I've always found that the best way to handle them is to reality test assiduously, weed out the mere fancy, and simply accept that the small remainder is best left as a mystery. Mysteries are good because you can always learn something from investigating them as a mental exercise without anything needing to have "really" happened. Maybe it did, and maybe it didn't, but what sort of wonder, or philosophical truth, or creative inspiration can I take from it? THAT is the only thing that matters, in the long run. But there are those rare instances that are so horrific that there isn't anything you really can take from them. This was house-hunting trip was one of those times.  

        As you might expect, I have a sort of a thing about old houses. They spook me because I've experienced creepy things at every old house I've ever slept in. Just visiting one of them can open me to powers of suggestion that I really don't need to be open to--ever. That said, my price range for a new place is definitely suboptimal, and the housing options match that. I've seen a lot of run-down old houses lately, is what I'm saying. And like it or not, I'm probably going to be stuck with one of them for a little while, at least. So I accepted the inevitable, weeded out the worse-looking ones and sent them to my hard-nosed housing inspector of a real estate agent, Carol. Don't get me wrong because she is frankly a DELIGHTFUL person. However, she will sniff out and find every bad roof, every wiring problem, and every other possible defect that could make your life hell if you bought the place, and she will TELL you all of it. 

        It had been a long, tough-love day of it when we went to the last house. To this day, I'm not sure why Carol was drawn to it and forwarded me the address to look up on Zillow. I saw the first half of the photos and decided it wouldn't hurt to see one last house on the list, even if it did get me home way past the time I had hoped for. I hadn't had any other luck that day, so I hoped maybe this house would be the one. 

        As we pulled up the steep driveway, my point of view sort of shifted. It began to feel a little bit like instead of sitting in a car being driven around by Carol, I felt like I was watching a play-through on Twitch of me being driven around by Carol. I recognize this odd feeling as the first twinge of slight disassociation. This can happen to autistic people who have been over-stressed and over-stimulated over a protracted period, and I had. I just did my square breathing exercises to quell the anxiety that feeling produces, and pulled myself back down to earth so that I would say close to my own head, if not all the way in it. 

        As we drove up the steep driveway, I thought about how awful that would be to deal with in the wintertime. Literally, my thought was, "I could probably slide right down that hill and into traffic if there was to much ice on that driveway. No way in hell and in backing down it, either." Strike one against the house. As we pulled up, I noticed the barn. It had a heavy feeling, like maybe it was a place a party might could happen. My attention stayed on the barn as I opened the door. As soon as I stood outside the car, the feeling changed. It was more like, it felt like there were people actually hanging out in the barn and not necessarily that there was a party atmosphere. When Carol called out to come over to the door, I snapped my head around and immediately followed her. 

        She was standing in front of the chimney. "It's pointed wrong," she said. Carol was gesturing to the left side of the old brick chimney. "They repaired it themselves rather than have a professional do it. You'd have to fix that, eventually." Strike two against the house. I am handy as hell, but actual masonry is beyond my stars.  Carol then took us to the door and unlocked it.

        We entered the mud room. I remember being amazed at how clean looking it was, all things considered. It was a good, spacious, uncluttered mudroom. Which was odd to me, because I had never till that moment considered even wanting a mud room in my house. It then occurred to me I was dawdling on the threshold of the kitchen, and I have never done THAT before in my life. As I entered, I noticed a door to my left. It was the doorway to a relativeely newly installed micro half-bath. that was only about 36"-48" deep and 36"-48" wide. For some reason, I marveled at that little half-bath for a few seconds before pulling myself away to go inside the kitchen. 

        When I stepped into the kitchen, I noticed another door immediately to my left. I knew it was the basement door, and for some reason was surprised that the doorknob was brand new and had no lock on it. I noticed that the kitchen had been somewhat updated,  especially the floor and the paint, but archaic electrics from the 1910's with the push-button switches were comingled with the updated sockets and switches on the walls. There was a large dining table shoved against the far right corner of the room. I had a vague sense of dour, serious men grimly eating dinner late at night, and huddled silently over their meal as if too tired from exertion to say much. 

        Overcome with curiosity, I ditched Carol and just went back to that basement. I didn't even tell her. I just was compelled to go over and see what was behind that door. Like when you jerk your thumb sharply on the controller to move your player character back to something he'd just missed. 

        What greeted me was an odd sight. The house roof angled sharply and narrowly down at a 45-degree angle. There was maybe 5-and-a-half feed between the bottom of the roofline and the surface of the stairs. It was a tight squeeze. Then, I noticed that the basement steps went from a 45-degree angle to about a 75-degree angle halfway down into the basement. That meant you'd shift from walking down the stairs to climbing down a ladder halfway into the basement. It honestly seemed like it would be tough to go down into. The strangest detail I noticed was the carpet of staples sticking out of the plywood panel above the stairs. And I do mean carpeted. Whoever installed the shingles on the other side really, really, wanted those suckers stapled in because there were maybe a thousand of them, matted along a 3-to-4 foot stretch as you went down that ended right before the ladder part. 

        By the time Carold found me, I was already halfway down into the basement. I was hesitating because I didn't have any light, and it looked tough to get down. I just sort of loitered there.  "You shouldn't buy the house if you're afraid to go all the way down into the basement," Carol said as she turned on her phone's flashlight app. I had forgotten my phone even had one. I decided that I wasn't afraid of anything, and to prove it, I was going all the way down into the basement. 

        I was surprised how gray and stark it was. There was an abandoned built-in shelf to my left. In the far right corner sat an abandoned bucket. In the far left area of the basement, I could see what looked like a surprisingly serviceable furnace. There was nothing else down there that I could see, not even cobwebs. I jerked forward a bit because I wanted to get a closer look at what was on the other side of that furnace, but thought better of it. I turned to go back up the stairs.

        The first few ladder rungs were not too bad, but right at the joint of the ladder part to the stairs part is where the overhead staple carpet loomed. I had to crawl up at a 45-degree angle with my upper body scraping the surface of the stairs. At one point, I got a twinge and my back. Just before I tried to straight up a bit, Carol barked, "be careful, you'll cut your head open on those spikes." I'd momentarily forgotten about the staple carpet. It took me at least a full minute to get out of that basement. As I approached the threshold into the kitchen, I had a mental flash of LaKeith Stansfield from Get Out. In fact, it was that scene where he told Daniel Kaluuya to "GET THE FUCK OUT!" As I began to straighten back up, my feet shuffled on the steps and I fell into the doorjamb-HARD. Like, it felt like I had been stabbed in the front of my shoulder. "Did this house fucking body check me just now?" I thought to myself as I lurched into the kitchen.

        Carol saw me emerge. I told her, "I think this house just body-checked me." She pursed her lips a bit and said, "I don't think this is the house for you. Do you even want to see the rest of it?"

        For reasons I cannot explain, I said, "Well, we're here. I don't think it's for me, either, but I'm awfully curious about it." As I said this, I noticed a weird push-button light switch beneath an ancient red night-light looking-contraption. I pushed the button and the light glowed red. "The power's still on," I noted. Carol was already halfway up the stairs. I rushed to catch up, repeating, "This is not the house for me." I noticed that the great room was half carpeted, and half laminate flooring. 

        The dining area and living room had been recently cleaned and redone. It looked okay, kind of. The tiny, stuffy stariwell lead to a dismal second floor. I didn't even go into an of the rooms, I just loitered in the tiny foyer at the top of the stairs. I was only curious enough to peek out the windows of each room to get a better idea of how the hosue was laid out. I barely peeked into the master bedroom. I guess it was a master bedroom because there was a bed in it. Not for me, I finally concluded. As went back down the stairs, an odd thought occurred to me. The stairs on which I was standing were exactly parallel to the basement stairs. I thought that was strange, but couldn't say for sure why it was. 

        We wasted no time in getting our of that house. As I walked past the broken chimney once more, I realized that I had not at any point seen a fireplace on the other side of it, inside the house. It also looked like the chimney was immediately on the forward side of the rear wall of that microscopic half-bathroom. But I did not see a hearth in the great room with the half carpet and half panel floor, and I should have.  Given where it was positioned, it really should have been on the first floor above the basement and near the wall of the house. I did not see it, and the pictures on Zillow do not show it. On the way back to the car, I avoided looking at that barn. Carol and I drove back to the office and bid our farewells. I continued in a slightly disassociated state until I pulled into the sideyard at the house where I am staying with a friend. 

       I went through my closing of the day routine at record speed. All I wanted was to get in the shower with an entire container of kosher salt and scrub the day off of me. Especially that last house.  About halfway into my shower I started having these images in my head. My highly suggestible and even more highly spooked unconscious had begun patching my observations of that house into a series of phantasmagoric images. It wasn't a party in the barn, it was...people burying something, or something. It happened a long while back....it might have happened more than once. 

        The basement door was grimy with faint streaks of a dark rust color smeared in places. It was an old doorknob with a lock of the sort that took a skeleton key, and there was a key inside the door. I opened the door, and all of a sudden, I was standing in front of myself. It was earlier that day, and I was watching me crawl up the steps. Simultaneously with this image, I was also reliving walking up the stairs. My feet did not shuffle clumsily on the stairs. I was shoved into that door frame. From this dual vantage point, I could see it was some small, dark grey mist-looking thing. The overwhelming feeling coming from it was fear. At the top of the stairs, I looked myself in the eyes and said, "This is not the house for me." Then, I had flashes of walking through the rest of the house and noticing weird details like a grimy footprint in an otherwise clean carpet. A floor that was splotchy with rusty red circular smears. The floor in one room tracked red smear all the way to a doorway. 

    At that moment, I summoned all of my attention and focus and said loudly, "I don't want to see this."  Then, I rooted around for some image to snap me out of it. My brain spat out the snippet after the end of Pink Flamingos when Divine eats the dog turd. As I watched Divine drop it in her mouth, I could feel the water coursing on down onto my skin as the smell Dr. Bronner's Liquid Peppermint Soap I'd used to scrub myself clean waft up to my nostrils. The images were gone.  I held my head under the shower for several long minutes, as if I was literally washing that nightmare off of my head. 

        As the waking nightmare channeler in me receded, my inner Sherlock Holmes came out. That is the slightly psychopathic part of me that is single-minded and absolute in its pursuit of quarry. I call him my inner Sherlock Holmes, because he only ever comes out when there is a puzzle to figure out or a dire problem to solve. I really like this part of myself because he doesn't deal in fantasies or speculation. He deals in observing the minute details and their specific contexts and then strings them together to build a picture of what is going on. He is relentless. He does not stop until he gets to the bottom of whatever he's hunting. He's sharklike that way. 

    Inner Sherlock fully ascendant in my psyche, I went out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and think. After at least half an hour and three darts, I reached one conclusion and several questions. Conclusion:  There is 0% chance That my nightmare daydream was anything other than fancy. It's certainly something my unconscious dragged up in response to the details I observed at a creepy-as-hell house. 

These were the questions: 

1. Why have your stairs be at a 45ﾟ angle until halfway down, And then change them to a 75ﾟ angle like a ladder?  Why would you want your basement staiers so hard to navigate?
2. A bucket in a basement is not unusual. A bucket being one of only 2 things in the basement is kind of unusual. Why was it there in the corner, and what was it used for?
3. The roof shingles explanation I improvised on the moment was obviously false.  That thing would really hurt somebody if they came up the stairs too fast. Why would you want to slow people down if they're coming from the basement?
4. The kitchen floor had been sort of redone, and the living room had been modernized a bit. But the upstairs sure had not. Half of the archaic electrics had not. The stairs were still in that condition. Why only improve the kitchen floor and some of the downstairs and not there is the house, especially your basement?  Why would the most recent tenant leave it that way why wouldn't they have changed it to make it easier on themselves?
5. Why go to all that trouble to refresh the inside of the house and not fix that chimney properly, at least for aesthetic value? Why fix it yourself if you aren't even using it because you walled up the hearth and covered it.
6. Where in the fuck did the fireplace go? Obviously it was still with the house, but where, exactly, was it located inside it? I saw all of the first-floor rooms and that is where it should have been. Where was the hearth walled up?

In answer to these questions my inner Sherlock concluded:

        The only reason to have basement steps built in that way is to slow down somebody who wants to get out of it. Without doubt the contraption mounted mounted right above the stairs was meant to cause grievous bodily harm to anybody coming up from the basement. There is literally no other reason for something like THAT to be THERE.  That basement was certainly meant as a place of torture for somebody trapped in it to be unable to get out of. 

        That would explain why the furnace and the bucket were the only things in that basement. You don't necessarily want human excrement piling up in the basement because then the house would smell. the kitchen would smell, because it's right there by the kitchen. And that would be the only thing down there other than the furnace because you don't want new lovers down there to be able to clover you or get help or get out. They won't be touching the furnace cause it's always hot were just dangerous to go near. And it's not like they're strong enough to rip something off of it and beat their assailant. 

        Those thoughts settled on me about as you might imagine they would: Like 20 pounds of lead buckshot and arsenic packed in the gut.  The things I imagined maybe didn't happen, but after thinking through the details, I would bet anything that something awful did. 

    The 99K price tag for that place was ridiculous given that only half of the house was redone, and poorly at that. Any house-flipper worth their salt would have finished the job. So it wasn't a house flipper that did it. The reason why could only be that whoever had lived there never received enough visitors to justify refreshing the rest of the house. They only "lipstick-on-a-pig"-updated the part of the house that was visible to visiting outsiders. 

   Moreover, there is clearly 4-foot to 6-foot cavity between the staircase wall and the exterior wall where the hearth of that fireplace should be located. Walling it in on one side is the rear wall of the great room. Walling it in on the opposite side is the micro half-bath. On the other side of the innermost wall of that cavity is the basement.  The fireplace hearth is awfully small to wall-in like that. 

The last big question to come from all of this observation was this:

     Parts of the house had been redone and made nicer, sure,  but why didn't whoever lived in it between the monster who built that basement and this past week change those torture stairs, at least?  The thought that came next chilled me to the bone. 

        "Because, my dear Watson, the person who died in that house before it hit the market is the monster who did awful things in that basement." Literally, anyone else who bought that house to flip it properly would have taken care of those stairs at least. They also would have finished refreshing the rest of the house and updating the electrical system.  Maybe the kitchen floor was replaced because there was stuff on it that the owner didn't want seen but could not get rid of while he was alive. Maybe that's also why only half of the great room is carpeted. Either way, the last guy who touched those stairs is the same guy who built them in the first place. 

     That last thought dropped on me like an anvil. Whoever did whatever they did to at least one innocent person in that basement got away with it. I suspect that whoever passed this house along to a realtor after the original owner's death might know more than they are telling about that house. There are no laws in New York State to say that a person selling a house has to disclose anything about it--even murders that happened to the house. That's even if anybody officially knew anything about what went on there, which I am pretty sure they don't. 

        So I sat there, smoking a cigarette on the porch amidst the loud droning of the cicadas, almost completely certain of some horrible crime and torture being done to an innocent person in that house, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about bringing it to Justice. What the hell would I even say to the police? "So I'm moving to the area, and toured this spooky house and saw all these creepy things, and then later on in the shower I had a waking nightmare hallucination about murder and torture, and then I realized all those things meant there might have been a murderer or something in the house. Can you go and find out?"  That is completely bonkers and might have earned me a mental health wellness check from the police. We know how well those tend to go...my eyes watered as I realized that there was literally nothing I could do. 

        So I did what I usually do in times like this: I prayed. I didn't pray that Justice would come to whoever that monster was. In my experience there's not any such thing as Justice in the world. Evil people do things every day and they just get away with it, and there's nothing I can do about that. Hell, this GUY definitely got away with it whatever the fuck it was--and it was bad.  Even at the best of times, I'm not sure there is any point in praying that the evil will pay for their deeds. It would not have made a difference in this case. 

        But one thing I know for certain is that you can pray for the innocent.  So I did. I prayed. I prayed that whatever horror and pain and trauma and suffering had been mercilessly and unjustly and evilly set upon the innocent people trapped in that basement would be lifted up from them. That whatever horror and agony from that torture would be cast off from them and that they would he would be free and at peace.  Because while there may not be any point in praying That Justice finds the guilty, I can always pray that Mercy finds the innocent. So I do. And I did. 

        Sometimes all you can do is send up a message and hope it does what is intended.

Just For Them

 

 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.