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If we can no longer rely on our political system to protect our rights, all we can do is double down on culture change.
The North Korea tweet struck me as an unsettling portent of how Trump’s presidency was likely to unfold: rash, petty, ostentatiously uninformed, with no regard for public safety or the mechanics of governance.
Trump’s endgame, communications-wise, is to silo his supporters to the point that he is literally their only trusted source of news, opinion, and truth—and Twitter is the platform on which he talks to them. It matters.
We, who literally inured ourselves to rape threats and death threats so that we could participate in public life, were called weak by people who felt persecuted by the existence of female Ghostbusters.
Internet trolls have bad lives. Happy people don’t do this.
The tech companies allowing white supremacy and violent misogyny to flourish on their platforms could do something about it. Never forget that they choose not to.
that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren’t success and safety at all; they are domestication and implied violence.
The men’s rights movement (which fed directly into the alt-right) was in itself an elaborate troll, preying on disaffected young men’s resentments and insecurities to entice them to join what was framed as a social justice movement, then deploying them to make women’s lives hell both online and off. They did not fight for paid paternal leave, raise money to build domestic violence shelters for men, or encourage men to go to therapy and learn to be vulnerable and share their feelings instead of seeking cruel catharsis in degrading and abusing women. Instead, they spent their time doing things
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But it didn’t matter what she was saying. None of it was ever about communication, a good-faith exchange of ideas. It was about making women mad so you can call them crazy and justify hurting them to make yourself feel better about your broken little life
If we lose either way, why the fuck shouldn’t we just let our anger out?
visibility isn’t justice.
We need to remember what a society is for.
Stop doubting what you see right in front of your face. Climate change is real. Criminalizing homelessness does not stop homelessness. Universal health care is an objective public good. Corporations are stealing your money and your future.
If you’re waiting for a grown-up to come fix it, stop. Be your own grown-up. Be your own president.
The myth of the “liberal elite” strategically frames liberal values—environmentalism, racial and gender equality, gay and trans liberation, immigrants’ rights, the social safety net—as inherently frivolous, dishonest, a joke. By extension, the people who would benefit from the actualization of those values are “fake” Americans—the nation’s most vulnerable groups being called decadent effetes by the most feckless, corrupt, undeserving legacy hires history has ever seen, people who have all the advantages in the world and still need to buy their kids’ way into college.
Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.
Maybe that’s the news today. Does it have to be the news tomorrow?
You fail again, you start again. No matter how many times you fail, you can still start. Don’t let today swallow tomorrow.
Americans love to overwrite their own memory—to remake cruelty as clumsiness, victims as perpetrators—but this wasn’t an accident. We knew we were failing them even then, and we let it happen. We chose it.
