Apology Not Accepted
Apology Not Accepted
How to heal a hateful spirit that has gripped tens of millions of broken people? Reclaiming lost humanity by finding unacceptable things unacceptable.
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I woke up yesterday morning to learn that Don Trump—the famed rapist, convicted felon, and white christian presidential candidate—had mimed performing a blowjob on his microphone stand to the clear delight of his crowd.
There's a famous Christian thinker named Jesus H. Christ who you may have heard about; people will often say his full name when they see things like this.
Jesus was big on miracles, parables, and carpentry—he'd have been a major star on TikTok. Jesus told a parable once with three characters: a kid who squandered the family money and then came crawling back destitute; a father who loved his wayward kid so much that he forgave the lost wealth, and threw a party to celebrate the safe return of a beloved child; and an older son, who saw himself as more worthy than the spendthrift and therefore refused to enter the party. The party is meant to be heaven. The parable is called the prodigal son, and the older son represents the main point of the story, which white christians often seem to miss, since missing the point is sort of the point of Christianity for white American christians.
When my kid was very little she would sometimes cheat at games. She'd do it because she wanted to win. I also wanted her to win, but I had to explain to her that this wasn't the way to do it, because everybody else wanted to win too, and it wasn't fun for everybody when somebody gave themselves unnatural advantages. And I explained to her that if she kept cheating at games, her sisters would not want to play with her and I would not make them do so, and that would be sad because then she would feel lonely, and I didn't want her to feel lonely. I did not present this isolation as something that others would be doing to her because of who she was, but something she would be doing to herself as a natural consequence to her own selfish behavior, and something that could be reversed by ceasing that behavior. I did this for the simple and direct reason that it was true. I bet most parents have stories like this. I bet most people who were once children have stories like this. It's pretty standard stuff. I reckon it's a part of the way children develop empathy, if they do. Some don't. They become adults without empathy, which is an adult who is damaged in their spirit and their mind. They're out there.
I saw a story last night in Newsweek about how women are refusing to date men who support Trump, and how this was a big problem for men. I'm not linking to it. There will be another one of these stories today, and another tomorrow, and three more next week. The loneliness of men is a big problem for women to solve. The loneliness of women isn't the subject of many articles.
I see TRUMP/VANCE 2024 signs on lawns around my neighborhood, and when I see them, I know there is somebody inside that house who on some significant level cannot be trusted, a person who is either eager to bring menace and death to others, or else is willing to allow such things in order to secure a perceived unnatural advantage. And I know there might be some people inside that house who quietly fear that person, with good reason. There are tens of millions of such people. It's a bad feeling.
Why am I telling you these things? I don't know. It's election week. Let's see what's going on.
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Blowing his mic stand is not even the thousandth most repugnant thing Trump has done, but it's notable given that his crowd is a well-scrubbed gang of mostly well-off white christian supremacists who have spent the last decade demanding the exclusion and persecution and death of (among others) trans people and other queer people. They claim this is is because they want to protect their children from sexualized imagery and abuse and pedophiles. Never mind, though, when their hero sucked off his microphone they laughed and clapped and cheered. Oh and speaking of pedophiles, I guess there's over a hundred of hours of audio of billionaire child rapist Jeffery Epstein revealing his ongoing relationship with his old friend Trump well into the Trump presidency. We kind of knew Trump was still tight with Epstein (because why wouldn't the world's most repugnant men have remained buddies?), but now we have the evidence in hand, not because journalists uncovered it and broke the story in the interest of the public good, but because the journalist who had been sitting on it has a book to sell, so it's shocking-revelation time.
If the pattern of the last decade continues, none of this is going to change the manufactured media narrative that Trump is a normal candidate running a normal campaign; none of it is going to damage Trump's support with his supremacist gang of christian nationalists, even as it reveals that what they wanted was never to protect children or prevent trafficking or any other rationale they gave; they just want to bully and kill queer people. But that was already known. The murderous intent is as par for the course as is the hypocrisy.
That's just this week. Every day has another dozen stories like it, clear evidence that the Trump cult known as the Republican Party cares for nothing except for its own supremacy, of defending and expanding the domination of its whiteness and its maleness and the violent domination of a blasphemous religion they call "christianity" and which I will not give the benefit of capitalization. A small city in Pennsylvania had a Halloween parade that featured a Kamala Harris effigy being led on a chain from the back of a truck. Ho-hum, white supremacy and political violence with overtones of lynching and slavery. Par for the course.
And the TRUMP/VANCE 2024 signs dot my neighborhood. Maybe they dot yours. They're out there.
I don't think the human mind was meant to deal with this level of pure horseshit and hypocrisy and lies and menace. Honestly I don't know if the human mind is meant to deal with such things at any level. I say this because it seems to be traumatizing, evidenced by the fact that we're all traumatized, the bullies and the bullied, both in our own ways. There's just so much repugnance coming from the Republican cult every day, a desire to control our bodies and lives and subject us to hard use, a determination to roll back any positive progress for no reason other than to demolish progression, a glee at the fear and terror and trauma this evinces for the rest of us. There will be more today. There will be more tomorrow. The zone is flooded, and eventually it's all just more shit floating by.
I just want to make an observation: All of this is absolutely unacceptable in a decent society. It cannot by definition be permitted in a decent society, because a society that permits such things cannot be considered decent. This behavior cannot be tolerated.
Yet we do tolerate it. More than tolerate it; we enable it. On Tuesday maybe we are going to give it limitless power.
Trump held a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden last week, a probably deliberate mirror of the one that was held there back in the 1930s. This is an important story, because there's going to be an election, and afterward, no matter how the election goes, we're still going to be sharing a nation with an enormous cult of millions of white supremacist bullies, and I think we're going to need to fight them—not because we seek fights, but because the one thing they seem to not be lying about is their determination to fight all the rest of us who want democracy and inclusion and equality and progress and healing, in order to force the rest of us to occupy the unacceptable world of indecency and abuse that soothes their narcissistic wounds of trauma.
A lot of horrific things were said at the Nazi rally, any of which could have been anticipated from what Trump and his christian MAGA gang had already done and said. It was a litany of malicious intentions and a celebration of corruption and supremacy and every kind of bigotry and hatred and dehumanization of everyone who wasn't them. You can look it up if you want the full list.
This was only one rally among many. There have been so many other instances of racism and general hatred and calls for political violence and sly little winks to fascist imagery and symbolism hidden just on the other side of what I suppose passes for the benefit of the doubt, for those who still want to extend the benefit of the doubt to people who have exhibited no reason to deserve it.
There are a lot of people who do want to extend that benefit of the doubt, unfortunately. Benefit of the doubt for whiteness and maleness is core to our dominant cultural narrative.
It cuts against the dominant social narrative to say we need to fight the white supremacist cult, and this is for the very good reason that our society is traditionally white supremacist. If you suggest that a white supremacist cult's behavior and intentions are indecent and absolutely unacceptable, there is a general realization that this means not accepting it, which would inevitably mean the social exclusion and isolation of people committed to pursuing unacceptable behavior, and who have made indecent and unacceptable behavior a core part of their identity. And it's very unhealthy to be socially excluded and isolated. And who could be against health?
In the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, it is a far less divisive act to hold a Nazi rally, crammed with racism and hatred and bigotry and Nazi speakers delivering Nazi slogans and Nazi intentions to enact Nazi policies, than it is to refer to such a thing as "a Nazi rally." In the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, saying you intend to fight a white supremacist cult is considered far more divisive and radical than being part of a white supremacist cult and forcing a fight with everyone else. In fact "we're still going to be sharing a nation with them and there are millions of them" is usually what's said to anybody who suggests we even oppose them. It's said as a reason to not oppose them, as a reason to not even name them for what they have chosen to be. "You can't just get rid of them," it's said. The suggestion seems to be that in so doing we are excluding them from society, isolating them, dehumanizing them, by naming what it is they have chosen to become (which, again, is a white supremacist cult), and by refusing to accept their unacceptable propositions as acceptable.
It's not so popular to suggest that the answer is for white supremacists to change their behavior.
It's far more popular to say we need to heal the white supremacist cult.
It's far more popular to issue reminders that we need to leave paths open for the white supremacist cult to find redemption.
And who could be against redemption? Who could be against healing?
I mean, do we not need to heal the white supremacist cult? Do we want these people to stay broken?
I sure don't.
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No matter how the election goes, I think one prominent aspect of the Nazi rally gives us some clues as to how to fight them—if fighting them is what we intend to do.
I mentioned that the rally was a litany of horrific words and intentions. Most of these things were framed as "just jokes." Fair enough, I suppose. I'll point out that this serves as a confession about the sorts of things they find funny. Somehow joking is meant to be a defense. Apparently laughter can't be hateful. One thing seems to have truly broke through into the larger narrative: A speaker who I suppose we must refer to as a "comedian" referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage."
This was, in the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, beyond the pale in a way that none of the other things I listed apparently had been. I find it interesting to ponder why. You might think that it was seen as beyond the pale because it was racist, but the entire Trump movement has been drenched in the most blatant racism from its inception. You might think that it was seen as offensive because Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but everyone who was attacked from that stage represents some part of the United States. I think it was seen as offensive because there are a lot of voting Puerto Rican citizens living in swing states, so this particular instance of racist hate disrupted the one thing the press actually seems to think matters: that is, the horse race aspect of the election. It's not that it was racist or hateful or prefigured violence and death for real people—these sort of things are just business as usual—no, it's that it might actually swing the race, which means it was a gaffe.
All over the place, Republicans and journalists scrambled to walk it back and restore balance to the Force. When a Democrat makes a gaffe, the thing to do is report on it for several weeks in massive fonts. When a Republican makes a gaffe, the thing to do is to find a Democratic gaffe to counter it, and if one can't be procured, to make one up.
And sure enough, one came along, or at least was made up. What happened was that our lame duck President Joe "Biscuits" Biden had a human reaction to the spectacle of a Nazi rally where most Americans had been subjected to some form of hateful threat or another, and in which all Puerto Ricans had been called "garbage." He said that this sort of behavior was garbage—or maybe he said the people who exhibited this sort of behavior were garbage. The phrasing is unclear, and Ol' Biscuits has never been renowned for his clarity in speaking. He's never even been nowned for it.
I think we all understand what he was saying, though. He was saying "this is unacceptable." Which it should be—aspirationally, anyway. He was saying "this cannot exist in a decent society, because a society that allows it to exist cannot be considered decent." Which is true, and I'd like to live in a decent society.
But whether Biden meant that the attendees of the Nazi rally were people of garbage beliefs or meant that the attendees of the Nazi rally were garbage people immediately became the most important distinction in the world, and parsing it ceaselessly and speculating how Kamala Harris (who has taken pains to not say anything that true about people who would attend a Nazi rally) would respond, replaced the Nazi rally itself as a top news item, which is exactly what parsing it and talking ceaselessly about it was designed to do (as opposed to, you know, making a world where dehumanizing language is unacceptable).
Suddenly, for a limited time and within a limited scope, the same people who had laughed at a racist joke about all Puerto Ricans being garbage—the same people who had said that everyone had to stop taking mere words so seriously—discovered, all at once, that words can do harm. Suddenly, for a limited time and within a limited scope, the same people who spend all day calling for political violence against people they are dehumanizing discovered that dehumanizing language leads to political violence and is absolutely unacceptable. And suddenly they were no longer so confused by the concept of reappropriation of harmful language, which is something that this crowd claims confuses them when they muse why they aren't allowed to use slurs; they started referring to themselves as 'garbage' and dressing up in garbage bags, and Donald Trump put on a garbageman outfit, and drove around a tarmac in a garbage truck, and generally conservatives across the country made a spectacle of being hyper-offended that they would become the victim of the exact sort of thing—even the exact same words—they had themselves applied to others just days before, specifically to dehumanize those others.
So MAGA fascists now dress up in garbage and insist that they are garbage people in defiance of Joe Biden, even if Ol' Biscuits merely meant they were people of garbage beliefs who want to do disgusting things. It's a nearly perfect demonstration of the fact that while bullies and abusers are indeed dehumanized, the person dehumanizing them is themselves, not because their humanity is lost, but because they scorn the idea of humanity itself, a flotilla of dehumanizing scorn that eventually washes up on their own shore just like ... well, you know.
I know this isn't surprising. It's standard bully behavior for a bully to always cast themselves as the victim of their own behavior. It's standard behavior of an abuser to reverse the victim and offender, to claim the people they dehumanize are dehumanizing them by resisting them, to claim that what they are doing to others is being done to them. Doing so demonstrates the supremacist belief that only supremacists matter. Hypocrisy is a virtue to a supremacist.
We should know this very well by now, but all the same we seem persistently immune, culturally speaking, to this knowledge.
And the prodigal son refused to enter the party to celebrate his unworthy brother.
And women are unwilling to date men who want to control their bodies and lives.
And TRUMP signs dot the lawns of our nation.
Now let me switch gears and say something that might seem counterintuitive. MAGA fascists and Republicans and white christians and other types of supremacists and fascists do need healing. They need it badly, and if we can help, we should. I think there is no doubt that there is something deeply broken within somebody's spirit or soul, even something imbalanced in their mind, to want the things that a white supremacist cult wants, to tie your identity to a Hitler-admiring pretend-billionaire rapist, thief, and would-be autocrat, who isn't even sly and charming, but is one of the most blatantly phony, ignorant, and repugnant people to ever live. It's absolutely true to say that bullies are terribly damaged people—it's a very clearly observable thing—so we might well ask how they might be healed of that damage, if we want to live in a world without bullies, which sure is something that I want.
A question: How do we heal fascist bullies? How do we leave paths open for their redemption?
To answer, let me give you a phrase and a word, both of which might also seem counterintuitive.
Let me give you this phrase: Apology not accepted.
Let me give you this word: Unacceptable
Let me ask some other questions.
Do Republicans and other fascists want healing? Is that what they're asking for?
Do Republicans and other fascists want to walk these redemptive paths? If so, why aren't they walking them? If not, why are we so certain those paths are closed and that we are the ones who have closed them?
Let me tell you one more story.
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The other day a white supremacist and former writer for famed Nazi Richard Spencer named Ryan Girdusky was on CNN's Newsnight with Abby Phillips arguing in favor of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and he said to Muslim reporter Medhi Hassan "hope your beeper doesn't go off," which is both a death threat and a suggestion that Hassan is a terrorist simply for opposing mass slaughter of Palestinians, or being a Muslim, or both. Girdusky was rightly called out for it immediately, on-air, and quickly apologized. He was told that his apology was not accepted, because his words were vile and his intent had been clear. CNN later announced that Girdusky would no longer be welcome on their network.
Girdusky responded angrily on Twitter that this meant CNN can't take a joke, which serves as a confession that blowing up Muslim reporters with beepers is funny to him, and that his apology was designed not to make amends but to avoid consequence; it was not issued in good faith, in other words, which suggests that it was probably a good idea to not accept it.
One thing I notice about this story is that the only reason that there was a white supremacist on the network in the first place is because the network has decided that the white supremacist fascist perspective is a necessary one to hear from. Girdusky is only one of many, and CNN is only one of many networks who have made similar decisions. I don't think this is a decision that respects anybody's humanity; not the humanity of the white supremacist fascist making a spectacle of their rejection of humanity as a concept; certainly not the humanity of the people whose humanity they reject.
Another thing I notice is that when white supremacist fascists are barred from a platform, they lose access to the influence and reach of the platform, not access to society. What white supremacists want to exclude people from is their very lives. This distinction seems to me more important than whether or not Biscuits Biden called the attendees of a Nazi rally "people of garbage" or "garbage people" (which is different from saying it is an irrelevant distinction).
Another thing I notice is that when fascists are told that what they have done is unacceptable, they tend to back down, not because they are repentant, but because they are cowards. This is standard bully stuff. Girdusky's old buddy Richard Spencer largely disappeared from public life after a punch. And some will fret that my noting this means I love punches, which I do not; but I do note that they often make fascists go away without killing them, which is what fascists intend to do to others.
One thing I've noticed is that white supremacist fascists get very angry when people who are not white supremacist fascists will not give them social acceptance, but people who are not white supremacist fascists do not similarly seek social acceptance from white supremacist fascists. When fascists gather together, they create channels of permission for one another to express their hatred and scorn for the rest of us and their desire to make the rest of us suffer and die, but it seems that when they disperse, they still need the rest of us for validation. This suggests to me that the flames of fascism and supremacy burn not oxygen, but social acceptance from people in decent society, yet decent society has no need for supremacy and fascism.
A final thing I've noticed is that even though white supremacist fascists have nothing but scorn for every fine principle and outcome—justice, peace, inclusion, comity, civility, safety, bravery, sacrifice, tolerance, empathy, decency, forgiveness, redemption—they will not hesitate to appeal to our desire for them in order to gain their unnatural advantages and achieve their hateful intentions.
They will appeal to values they despise, because they know we value these things, and they need social acceptance from us. They will demand to receive the benefits of these values even while they refuse to extend them to others. So they don't apologize to us because they're sorry, because they aren't sorry. They apologize because they want forgiveness without having to be sorry.
The question remains.
How do we heal Republicans and other kinds of fascist bully?
It's an important question, because we want to be people of healing, and because we don't want to live in a world of bullies.
But there's a problem with the question. The problem is in the word we.
My problem with the word we is not only that it puts the responsibility for healing white supremacist fascists most heavily on the shoulders of those who are under a persistent and ongoing threat of violence from white supremacy and fascism—though I do object on those grounds. My problem with the word we is that it also suggests that we have some kind of ownership over these white supremacist fascists, that it is not only our responsibility but our right to make them change their minds. I think that framing dehumanizes white supremacist fascists far more than naming them as the white supremacist fascists they are, or even calling them "garbage," ever could (which is different from saying that there is nothing potentially dehumanizing about calling them "garbage").
It's standard behavior of our bully-enabling culture to always put the bullies at the center. It's standard behavior to only worry about healing a bully's wounds, to only worry that the bully might be in danger, to answer calls to protect a bully's victims by admonishing that we first make sure that in doing so we don't forget to defend the bully. And this is to be expected in a supremacist land. Supremacism is hateful, but it's the reflexive instinct to accommodate supremacist hatred that makes a culture supremacist.
We can make a world where healing is more likely. We can't force broken people to do the work of repair on their own spirits and minds. It's not just that doing so isn't possible; it's not our place to do so.
How do we heal the fascist bully? is the wrong question. The right one is how can we make it more likely they would heal themselves? We'll never get there by trying to accommodate the bully in them, the inhuman thing to which they have tied their identity. If we're trying to heal bullies, then we're aligning with them on that matter. Even to the extent that bullies are also often victims of bullying, we're not trying to heal or protect the bully in them, but the person in them.
The way to heal bullies is to stop trying to heal bullies. Protect people from bullies instead.
The answer to the question how to heal bullies? is to work for a world that doesn't coddle bullies—in fact to make a world that refuses to accept bullying and minimizes bullies. Make a world that says unacceptable to unacceptable behavior, and celebrates those who stop. Make a world that says apology not accepted to people who are not sorry, and celebrates those who are willing to do the real work of repentance.
Who is isolating Republicans and other kinds of fascist bullies? They’re isolating themselves. They are indeed victims, but also their own oppressors. They are dehumanized, but they're the ones rejecting humanity. Are they garbage people? I can insist on their humanity even as they reject it in themselves, but I can't stop them from wearing the bags and driving the truck, and noting that they are doing so is not something I am doing to them. A woman not wanting to be around someone who wants to control their body and their life is not something the woman is doing to the man. A bully's target not wanting to be around their bully is not something the target is doing to the bully. A kid not wanting to play with a friend who cheats is not something the kid is doing to the cheater.
There's a party forming where everyone is invited with no question of whether they've earned it. Decent people everywhere celebrate this party wherever it appears, but white supremacist fascists refuse to enter it, not because they are not invited but because they hold themselves as more worthy than the attendees. We have to set these people, prodigal with their own humanity, free to be what they are. We don’t control them, and we’re not responsible for what they’ve chosen to be.
We can create a world that values healing, but we can’t force those who would rather have brokenness to take the treatment.
We can create a world that fosters healthy minds, but we can't change a person's mind for them.
We can leave the path open to redemption, but we can’t walk it for them.
We can open the cage they built for themselves but we can’t make them walk out of it.
We must make a world in which they will indeed be isolated if they persist in denying their own humanity and making inhumanity their identity, all so they can abrogate the humanity of others.
And it begins with the world “unacceptable.”
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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. More than this he will not ask, faced with mysteries dark and vast; statements just seem vain at last.