It's Time To Oppress Conservatives
It's Time To Oppress Conservatives
With a generous, diverse, and open world that will care for everyone, even for them.
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Last Tuesday Donald Trump shat his pants on national TV in prime time, and ever since he's been scooting his butt around on the national carpet trying to dislodge the detritus of loserdom, stumbling around the post-debate media spin tent like a shaved tranquilized bear, and declaring that the whole thing was rigged against him, and also at the same time declaring that he had achieved so much victory that there will be no need for him to debate again. It was standard wounded narcissist self-care behavior, as pathetic as it is awkward, and it would be nice if all of this could be only funny.
Unfortunately, it can't be only funny, because Trump and his gang are also engaged in some shockingly evil behavior and rhetoric even for them, and real people are already being hurt, and the promise is that more and more people will also be hurt—that, for the crime of daring to exist while undesirable to conservatives, as many people as possible will be hurt, as soon and as badly as possible. Millions of registered voters seem really enthusiastic about this prospect, and millions more seem willing to go along to preserve some perceived advantage. There are many reasons the race will be close, and we might hopefully talk about some of the reasons on the Democratic side soon enough—but it has to be said that one of the big reasons the race is close is that a whole lot of people look at Donald Trump's promises to menace and harm and kill literally millions of already marginalized people and they really like it; it makes them feel really good, it makes them feel like they're great again—so great that they're willing to overlook the fact that Trump is a profoundly ignorant grotesque dilettantish bully possessing not a single redeeming quality. And this group calls itself "conservative," a word they use to mean "the good people."
And yes, this gang of conservatives been particularly shocking lately.
We should start with the Haitian immigrants. In case you haven't heard, there is a town, name of Springfield, in the country of the USA, state of Ohio, and it was a declining town—declining since the 60s. But Haitian immigrants were willing to come, and fill the jobs that were there to fill, and most reports agree that they have added nearly 20,000 human beings to the natural human system that is Springfield, Ohio. By most accounts these Haitian immigrants did all the things that conservatives claim to most value: work hard, care for their families, participate in community activities and religious organizations, and so on. And the influx of humans did what influxes of humans do to natural human systems—energized it, fostered growth and industry and economy and diversity and strength, and added the value that humans add to a place, simply by being human and being there instead of someplace else.
This is why "adding humans" is what makes a declining town stop declining, in case you didn't know that.
But that wasn't good enough for our nation's political party calling itself "conservative," the Republican Party, which is a white supremacist party of religious bigots in case you didn't know that. If you doubt this claim, I will refer you to the party's Vice Leader, the gimlet-eyed adult Cabbage Patch doll and fascist-of-opportunity J.D. Vance. Vance play-acted at being a sort of horse whisperer of rural Americana for a while, which he did in the sort of condescending way that endeared him to the sort of moderate that looks down their nose at rural Americana. These days, though, he's the Republican VP candidate, and we're learning a bunch of things about his real beliefs, which are a real creepshow nightmare of sweaty perseveration over women's fertility and the viability of their eggs and the need for women to fit into their proper role or else be treated as if they have no point, and stuff like that. But in recent days Vance has shown that sexism isn't his only bag; when it comes to racism, he is not a dabbler.
What happened is that Vance's boss, Republican presidential candidate/pants shitter Don Trump, has been energizing his base by promising to deport 15 million human beings, which is a thing that has never before been done without concentration camps and ethnic cleansing and mass murder entering the picture. The people Trump claims he wants to deport are people in the United States who are undocumented. This is a group that Trump and his fascist gang call "illegals"—which is a pretty rich term for a gang of thugs led by a convicted felon awaiting sentencing to append to others. And Trump's thugs truly are energized by this promise of mass murder, as gangs of millions of fascist thugs usually are. As was pointed out in the debate, these Republican shit-heels really have no plan for improvement or maintenance of our society; all they have is the gal what brung 'em—nationalist bigotry—and so that's who they dance with, song after song.
And Vance is nothing if not a good little gold star-seeking grade grubber who would sell out his own family for wealth and power (see: his book), so he went and found a lie that was bubbling up from the more hateful corners of the internet, the places where Vance's sort of people can be found, and he found a vile racist lie about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, and he told it all over the place, and he's still telling it now.
It's a lie. It's a vile lie. There is no evidence that any of it is true. None. There is a photo of a Black person holding a goose that is passed around as evidence. When was the photo taken? Does it depict Springfield? It's not clear. Is the person Haitian? There's no evidence of it. Was the goose eaten? There's no evidence of it.
But it's a lie that quickly found itself getting spread around by Nazi fascists like Elon Musk and other less-famous Nazi fascists, and eventually even found itself being repeated by the former and would-be-again President of the United States on the stage of a debate that he won so much he now will run away from debates forevermore: They are eating the dogs, and they're eating the cats, and they're eating the pets of the people who live there.
Which is interesting, because in case you don't click through to read all the linked stories, the Haitian immigrants are "the people who live there." They're here legally, which I mention only because those who call themselves conservative claim that's what matters to them.1 They are J.D. Vance's own constituents! They put the spring in Springfield! They are the people who live there! They can only be "eating the pets of the people who live there" (they aren't) if they don't live there, or if they aren't people, and that latter formulation is of course what Vance and all these other bigoted thugs are trying to do: dehumanize them, in order to further marginalize them, in order to justify violence against them, in order to bolster their case for mass deportations of millions and millions of people—which, again, is the sort of thing that has never failed to lead to mass murder, so the proposal should be taken as the intent.
And violence has come to Springfield, as violence was intended to. There are bomb threats, and threats upon threats and lies upon lies, and there are Nazi marches, schools are being evacuated, and Haitian immigrants are hiding in their houses, trying to keep themselves and their children safe—which is something that conservatives claim is important to them. It's worth noting that these fascists, who claim to be concerned about danger, have created the only real danger, and they've created it for the people they claim are the danger. These poor Haitian people—who have done nothing other than be the exact thing the community of Springfield needed, which is to say to be themselves—are now in hiding from people who support a party with a long history of running candidates who abuse animals. They're in hiding from people who insist that police—a group that actually does kill thousands of family pets each year—must enjoy total immunity for their crimes of summary execution of both humans and pets, and I mention that only to demonstrate that what the people terrorizing Haitian immigrants want is not to keep pets safe, but to terrorize Haitian immigrants. It has nothing to do with pets.
And in case you still doubt that, Vance still hasn't stopped! Even though the lie has been debunked as a vile hoax, even though Vance's words are leading directly to violence, he took to the musky platform to encourage his thugs to keep spreading the memes, and now he's spreading the vile and baseless lie that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are responsible for a rise in diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. And this is how we know that these lies are being spread not "even though," it foments violence, but "because."
This isn't the first time elected Republican thugs and their network of propagandists have used bigoted lies to target a community for violence and then sat back and watched the violence come. It's not the second. It's not the twelfth. It's their modus oparandi. It's all they have.
We've seen all this sort of thing before, and we know where it leads.
J.D. Vance, United States Senator for the state of Ohio, candidate for Vice President of the United States of America, a man with a very real path to becoming the most powerful person on the planet, is actively trying to get people in his own community murdered, for no reason other than the fact that they are immigrants and they are Black. And Vance has got the full buy-in of his boss on this; Trump repeats Vance's vile lies even though Trump rather hilariously (and credibly) claims he doesn't talk to his VP. We should be clear that this is openly Nazi behavior, from a guy who belongs to a party that keeps having these confluences and points of agreement with Nazi memes and Nazi methodologies and Nazi intentions and actual Nazis, and maybe it's just time to look at it plainly and say we've got ourselves a Nazi party in the United States. If you want to quibble over names, let's just call it deeply evil with murderous intent, in a way that is entirely indistinguishable from the historical examples of genocidal propogandists who have come before.
And all of it done to oppress people from Haiti—the nation about which Trump targeted while talking about countries from whom we should not want to accept immigrants; it was at the same time when he famously claimed not to want immigrants from "shithole" (meaning African) countries.
Now, Haiti is a country that we here in the United States have ruined for a couple centuries, which has resulted in it being the sort of place where Haitians might be compelled to leave, even though human beings really don't usually want to leave their homes and have to face extreme and compelling circumstances before they would even consider such a thing. And yes, "compelling circumstances" is what we here in the United States have provided to Haiti! This won't be a history lesson, but there's good reason to believe we ruined Haiti for centuries for the crime of being a nation of enslaved people who threw off the oppressors that enslaved them and started to govern themselves. Read up on Haiti; we had help from other countries, but we here in the United States aren't the good guys, in aggregate. We're the other thing. You might say we're oppressors, aligned with the oppressors they overthrew.
Oppressors are people who do oppression. Oppression is when humans modify their natural human systems, so that instead of delivering what a natural human system typically delivers (which is the shared value that all humans generate simply by being humans within their societies, simply by being who they are), it delivers harm and pain and exclusion to certain targeted people. Oppression takes the natural value those targeted people provide and keeps it for the oppressors, and then gives the victim of the theft harm and pain and exclusion and death, in order to keep them in their place and force them to go on producing stolen value for the thieves, which makes slavery the purest form of oppression there is. And, again, Haitians were enslaved people who threw off their oppressors, and we can, if we squint at history's page, observe the ways that people who rely upon oppression for fortune and identity have never really forgiven them for it.
But Haitians aren't the only oppressed people.
Conservatives are oppressed too. They'll tell you all about it. So many, many, many people oppress conservative. We should look at who those people are, and the form that oppression takes.
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Conservatives are oppressed by immigrants, of course, even though immigrants add value to their communities and always have, even though immigrants in aggregate uphold the values conservatives claim to hold dear more than conservatives do. Immigrants oppress conservatives by existing, and this oppression takes the form of conservatives having to be aware that they exist, and through other people accepting immigrants, and through laws that accept immigrants, all of which creates an expectation that conservatives will accept immigrants, too, instead of terrorizing and bullying and expelling and killing them, and this is a very oppressive thing for conservatives to endure, and if you don't believe me, go ask them.
Conservatives are oppressed by queer people, too—gay and lesbian and bi and trans and the whole rainbow on the spectrum of gender presentation and sexual orientation. This, even though queer people are people who want to live life on their own terms without being forced into unnatural constraints by government restrictions, which is something that conservatives claim to care about. Queer people oppress conservatives through the fact that they exist, and this oppression takes the form of conservatives having to be aware that they exist, and through other people accepting queer people, and through laws that accept queer people, all of which creates an expectation that conservatives will accept queer people, too, instead of terrorizing and bullying and expelling and killing them, and this is a very oppressive thing for conservatives to endure, and if you don't believe me, go ask them.
And in much the same way, conservatives are oppressed by the existence of anybody who does not adhere to a religion that conforms to the dogmas of their apocalyptic exclusionary-yet-domineering brand of proselytizing Christianity. This, even though their religion admonishes them to not be the sort of people they insist on being, and to divest themselves of the wealth and power they cling to, so that they might care for the human needs of the exact types of people whose existence they claim oppresses them so.
And also conservatives are oppressed by the existence of people languishing in poverty and abandoned by our shared society—by people who have lost homes, and by disabled people, and by sick people, and by people who don't have jobs, and people who have been imprisoned, and on and on. This, even though many conservatives are languishing in poverty, or disabled, or sick, or out of work; this, even though many more conservatives will find themselves in such a state, particularly if they get the sort of cruel and exclusionary society they demand.
And of course conservatives are oppressed by women—the existence of women, I mean, and the fact that women have bodies, and the fact that those bodies produce too many children, and also not enough children, and the fact that these women want to have some say in how many children their bodies produce, and when, and with whom. This, even though many conservatives are women.
The list of oppressive people gets added to daily. Teachers and journalists are being targeted now, and people who eat soy, and people who aren't sexy enough, and people who are too sexy, and performers and artists, and people who are too smart and people who aren't smart enough, and honestly it's just a squirming knot of slithering fearful hate at this point, the sort of thing that makes you a bit queasy whenever you have to consider it, which is often, unfortunately, because conservatives demand to have their worldviews heard and considered no matter how grotesque and debunked those worldviews are, and demand that their opinions be certified as valid no matter how detached those opinions become from observable fact, and they are accommodated in this demand more than any other group in the history of humankind.
There's no end to the lies conservatives tell about all these people who oppress conservatives by existing. Trump's on the stump saying that schools are doing gender-reassignment surgeries at school—where and when I don't know, I guess in the bathrooms during 4th period or something. And he's lying that Democrats are performing post-birth abortions, by which it seems he means palliative care for terminal neonatal patients. And he's saying he's furious that immigrants are raping young girls, which is pretty rich coming from an adjudicated and unrepentant rapist with plenty of log book entries on Jeffery Epstein's private jet, and who has speculated openly about the virtues of sexual assault and ogling underaged children, and whose political career's lasting legacy will be preteen victims of rape forced to carry their attacker's baby. I guess what I'm saying is one gets the idea that what he and his mob of cheering fascist thugs are concerned about isn't rape, but rather using rape as a justifying premise for doing violence to immigrants.
And of course conservatives are oppressed by even the suggestion that any of their guns might be taken away, or that any gun that they might want to get wouldn't be gettable at a moment's notice, because their notion of freedom is entirely tied up with being able to kill anybody that they think is a threat at the exact moment that they believe the threat is posed, even as their worldview is entirely tied up with identifying threats based on total nonsense—this, even though as a matter of statistical fact having a gun puts you and your loved ones in far greater danger than any threat that might be solved by a gun.
And on and on and on, if you listen. The existence of people oppresses conservatives, and the sight of others caring for such people oppresses them, and any laws curtailing of their ability to threaten such people oppresses them. It's never-ending oppression of conservatives out there.
You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it.
I think we ought to oppress conservatives.
It seems like a great idea.
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Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.
We should stop accommodating those fears.
Let's create a world that doesn't lock people up—not even conservatives, even though we despise their grotesque bigotry. Let's create a world that doesn't disinherit people of their universal birthright of justice simply because we find them distasteful—not even conservatives, who have through their desire for injustice made themselves so distasteful. Let's create a world where if a conservative gets cancer, they are oppressively offered care and treatment without having to worry about cost. A world where a conservative who struggles to make ends meet is nevertheless oppressively ensured that they will have a roof over their heads, enough food in their belly, clean water to drink, and regulations protecting them from abuse by corporate corruption. Let's make a world where even conservative's children receive their birthright of a good education and, if even conservative children come to school hungry, they are given food to eat without having to earn it, simply because they are hungry. Let's make a world where not even conservatives will need to worry about how they will live once their bodies become too old to earn money through work. And, if a conservative's evil beliefs leads them to harm others, let us create a world where their physical safety is a chief priority in their apprehension, their trial fair, and their sentence carried out without violence or cruelty or exploitation—and that they do not receive these considerations the way they do now, as the perks of belonging to an in-group, but as a function of living in a society where everyone receives such considerations as the natural function of a just society.
Yes, let's make a world that oppresses conservatives.
This may strike you as difficult. I think it's even more difficult than we suspect. It require us transforming our own hearts and minds, is my sense. I think we have to oppress the conservatives that we might find living in there, and to be honest with ourselves that they're there.
I think an aggregate of us, advantaged by American traditions of supremacy, have a lot of similar fears. Progress is what we want ... but not if it goes too far.
We don't have a political party that wants to achieve open borders, I notice—even though open borders should be what we want, because open borders represent such a state of peace and friendship between neighbors that restrictions have become unnecessary. Instead we have parties who both work to achieve something they call "border security," which involves shameful cruelty and harmful exclusion. And some will tell me this is because of corruption in our political system, and I think this is observably true, but I think the deeper reason is that many of us, who are not part of a gang of openly fascist thugs, nevertheless fear the foreign, the outsider, the different, and so many of us, in our fear, make openness at borders politically unviable on the national stage.
We don't have a party that wants to dramatically restructure our systems of punishment that we call "the justice system," I notice—even though a system that runs on punishment will only ever achieve punishment, even though we who call our country "the land of the free" imprison more people than any other, even though we use this justice system to achieve the most astonishing injustice. And some will tell me that this is because of the corruption of our political system, and while I think this is observably true, I think the deeper reason is that many of us, who are not part of a gang of openly fascist thugs, nevertheless fear what dangers would come if we stopped being over-policed and over-incarcerated, fear the cost we might have to pay to share our nation's plenty in such a way that social unrest subsides—and so many of us, in our fear of change, and in our secret belief that this oppression keeps us safe, make the necessary steps of carceral abolition and police defunding politically unviable on the national stage.
We don't have a party that wants to end the violent effects of American empire, such as the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza by our nation's political allies in the Israeli government—or at least we don't have a party that has committed to taking the available steps to do so, or even to acknowledging the obvious truth that our country has vast power to do so. And some will tell me that this is because of corruption of our political system, and while I think this is observably true, and that we should all work to end corruption of our political system, I think the deeper reason is that too many of us have learned to see foreign people as a threat rather than as humans, and to view the notion of treating foreigners as if they are humans just like us as a fearful notion—an act that might endanger us, one that might cost us some advantage—and that this aggregate fear in the American spirit makes treating foreign people as if their lives matter something that is politically unviable on the national stage.
I could go on for longer—about military spending, or means testing, or policy for persecuting unhoused people, or dozens of other things—but the fact remains, while only one of our two viable political parties is openly pursuing maximalist fascism, the other one has an instinct for accommodation of the fascist worldview that seems driven in no small part by the aggregate of fears within the citizenry of the United States, the people who still, in large part, do make decisions regarding which leaders will have power.
Let me take care not to minimize the corruption of our political system: it's there, it's real, and the politicians who benefit from it are responsible for that in ways that the rest of us aren't, and it is both valid and just to call them to account for that failing and to expect them to pay the consequences for that failing. And let me take care to acknowledge that this aggregate fear in the American spirit is not equally distributed. Many do not share equally in the advantages of American tradition of supremacy and empire and capital, and thus many do not share equally in the responsibility for this needed change to the American spirit.
Yet I also have seen the ways that We The People can change what is possible, by changing our national spirit—and, given the extent to which our national spirit seems driven by fear, this very often means changing what we all are afraid of. Democrats running for president used to do so in opposition to gay marriage as recently as 2008. This changed. Do you think Democrats underwent a transformation of their beliefs about gay people, or did enough people stop fearing gay marriage that being in favor of it stopped being politically unviable on the national stage? The method of change doesn't flatter the political courage of Democrats, but it does nevertheless point toward spirit effecting change.
Unviable things become viable all the time. Change is often so unlikely as to seem impossible right before it happens. And things can change back the other way, too. Sometimes it seems they will. Sometimes I fear they will, so much that I fear to even admit that we still fear the thing we clearly fear.
It seems to me that many of us have that scared little conservative inside of us, who warns us that changing the untenable way things are is scary, because getting rid of those things might introduce terrible dangers—this, even though all of these unsustainable things themselves are terrible dangers. And that same little scared conservative within instructs us to be complacent about these actual dangers, because those dangers don't seem to threaten us—not right now, anyway—and for now there might even be some advantages for that little conservative inside us.
Us? Me. I. Me. I have that little conservative in my mind, a terrified little fella who wants to avoid costs of reparation and maintenance and wants to keep as much stolen advantage as I can get, who understands that progressive change will diminish those advantages. I inherited him, I think, from the aggregate of fears and complacencies I was raised around. I try to starve him of attention, but he's in there, yapping away, so sometimes I have to tell him to shut up. Do I accommodate him? I know I have in the past. I hope not to give him the helm in the future, but we're not always the best judges of our own character, so who knows how I might fail the moment?
But I think we need to stop making a world that accommodates that little fearful conservative that lives within ourselves, and start to make a world that oppresses it instead—a world for which, when it comes to progress and desperately needed change, there is no too far. And then we might make things politically viable that haven't been viable yet. And then we might be able to start oppressing the conservatives that live outside our minds, by bringing about all the things that oppress conservatives: openness, and freedom, and art, and health, and stability, and sustainability, and the diversity of human expression that all of these things would protect, and the knowledge and growth that come with friendship, and the true safety and plenty that attend all those things.
That's the world I'd love to see.
Who knows? It might be one that even the terrified little conservative that lives within might someday learn to love.
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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 upcoming essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. Laid down last night, Lord, he could not take his rest; his mind was wanderin' like the wild geese in the West.
Also to expose the fact that this claim of theirs is and always has been a lie—which is important, because we must realize that when they say they want to deport "only" 15 million undocumented people they are also lying about that, and they will be grabbing as many as they can.