A strange thing happened to me in the aftermath of the 2024 election. In the build up to election day, I experienced a lot of anger. To manage my stress, I went to the gym. Usually I wore one of my Kamala shirts, and I glared at people, daring them to say something to me.
In my conscious thoughts, I couldn’t conceive that the people of this country would elect such a clearly terrible man. We had the opportunity to select a brilliant, accomplished, and compassionate Black woman. The other option was an odious bully who had never worked a day in his life, spent all his time insulting people, was guilty of too many crimes to count, and who had no plan for the future other than grievance.
I honestly believed that America would make the right choice, but still my subconscious mind knew better. I kept looking at the situation and wondering why the pathway had been cleared for him. Again and again we had an opportunity to hold him accountable, again and again our institutions failed to do anything.
It’s only since the election that I’ve come to realize that lack of action isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Oddly, my rage continued to rise right up until the results started coming in. I thought of all the former friends and relatives that I’d cut out of my life. I cut them out because they made it clear they saw my foreign born wife as less than human.
They revealed this in the disparaging assumptions they made about her. They assumed she came from an undeveloped area with no technology. They assumed she had no formal education. That their minds instinctively landed on these thoughts was an indication of their unacknowledged racism.
Naturally, they’d never admit this consciously, but I could see that they’d been programmed with a delusion of superiority. It simmered below the surface and came out from time to time in their unconscious actions. It’s odd to think that people could look my children in the face and call me their friend, and then vote to give power to a man who swore to obliterate them.
“Oh, I don’t have a problem with you, you guys are here legally,” they tried to explain.
“Do you think the racists stop and verify whether we’re here legally before they start harassing us?”
“Well, it’s just that I think the diversity movement has gone too far.”
“What about the white supremacy movement?”
They never had an answer for that. For some reason, Americans are reluctant to even name the white supremacy movement. The current government is willing to name the philosophy of anti-fascism as a terrorist organization, but they don’t even recognize the white supremacy groups that are active in our society.
That’s not an accident.
After the election, my anger went away to be replaced with sadness. I didn’t understand it at first. In fact, it took me a full year to explore my emotions and understand just what I was feeling. Now I know.
Throughout this last year, people have been trying to claim that this regime does not “represent” who we are as a nation. Prior to the election, I still believed that. Now, I know it’s not the case.
The horrible truth is that this regime represents exactly who we are. This is an unapologetically white supremacist movement, and it has activated the social conditioning that’s been simmering beneath the surface since the founding of this country.
The mistake we’re making is to call this regime “fascist.” They often get compared to the nazis. By doing that, Americans are able to tell themselves that their ideology represents some toxic foreign influence.
“It’s not us, it’s the nazis. They’ve infected us.”
But it’s long been the case that Americans don’t study true history. They study a sanitized version because they feel the truth will make them “feel bad about themselves.” So the textbooks in our schools omit all the atrocities committed by this nation. That’s why Americans don’t know that the nazis were influenced by the Jim Crow laws. In fact, even the nazis thought the Jim Crow laws were too cruel.
This horrible, anti-human regime that’s taken control of the levers of power isn’t a foreign takeover. This is a home grown danger. We’re under the rule of the KKK. We’re under the rule of the Confederacy. We’re under the rule of white supremacists.
Americans have an awful habit of always looking for a quick fix. They want to slap a band-aid on a problem and then move on. That’s why people are inclined to say, “The election was stolen,” or “The economy didn’t improve quickly enough,” or “He got unexpected support from a surprising demographic.”
None of those arguments help us see the truth.
Anyone who grew up in an abusive household knows that some topics are “off limits.” If the father is an alcoholic, that’s the cause of all the family’s problems. But when it comes up in meetings, the father is all-powerful so there’s never time for an intervention. Instead of tackling the source of the problem, the rest of the family is doomed to constantly battle irrelevant symptoms.
The bulk of the American population is willing to blame all sorts of issues beyond the true problem. They’ll claim the nation isn’t ready for “a woman president.” They’ll claim the result was misogyny or racism. Meanwhile they’ll overlook the fact that this president was elected because white people deliberately voted for white supremacy.
This president’s base is white. White people have disproportionate electoral power. The people were acting in obedience to a cultural identity that’s been installed in them against their will. White Americans are conditioned at every stage of their lives from preschool to retirement to revere the concept of white supremacy whether they’re consciously aware this is happening or not.
White supremacy is a toxic hate ideology that requires camouflage in order to survive. It dies if you name it, that’s why it has learned to wriggle out of the light.
Instead of saying we’re a nation of white supremacy, we talk about “American exceptionalism” or “manifest destiny.” Those phrases are dog whistles for our subconsciously programmed sense of superiority.
This is why even Democrats will turn around and claim that DEI and Woke have gone too far. They haven’t examined their cultural conditioning that makes them susceptible to the influence of white supremacy.
From an early age we train our kids to be obedient to the commands of a phony strongman. When one of them takes the stage and represents everything we claim to hate, millions of Americans will dutifully cast their vote for him. This isn’t the land of the free and the home of the brave that we think.
We’re controlled and we’re cowardly, and white people elected a white supremacist.
The silver lining is that after the election, I felt an odd sense of peace descend upon me. The anger I’d been feeling went away. First I felt sadness, then I felt resolve. Today I realize that much of my building anger prior to the 2024 election was derived from the internal frustration of having to deny what I subconsciously knew to be true.
White supremacy has been fused to the cultural identity of this nation. We need an intervention. We need to remove it. We need to restructure all the institutions that allow gatekeepers to halt the progress of accomplished, compassionate people even as they wave the oppressors and abusers through.
That’s our task.
We can no longer waste energy denying it. The simple fact is that the occupant of the Oval Office is not the problem. He’s a symptom of the problem. The true problem is the toxic strain of white supremacy that infects our entire cultural identity.
It’s time that we stopped speaking our engrained language of denial. When white supremacists come forth and claim we can’t teach the true history of slavery, we can’t capitulate and assume the conflict isn’t worth the fight.
White supremacists know that they must battle over ever little detail. They do this in order to keep their hate ideology alive. There are still places in the United States that celebrate the assassination of Lincoln. Much of our political policy is determined by the grievance ideology of mediocre white men who have conditioned themselves to believe they’ve been denied their “rightful” inheritance.
This is why we can’t have universal healthcare.
This is why we can’t have free education.
This is why we can’t have a livable minimum wage.
This is why we have school shootings.
The white supremacists have managed to wriggle themselves into positions of influence and sabotage any possibility of progress. They’re so much in control that we aren’t even allowed to denounce them. They’ve conditioned everyone to make excuses. We constantly deflect and deny the truth, and we’ve been indoctrinated to believe these are our impulses and not the deceitful manipulations of an evil ideology.
But there’s something else I’ve learned in the last year that brings me hope. Despite all appearances to the contrary, white supremacy is a weak ideology. It only appears strong because we’ve allowed it to flourish. White supremacy exists outside the realm of our awareness. It offers false promises so people begin to believe that the hardships of our country are simply inherent to humanity and not indicators of an ideology of deceit.
The thing that gives us hope is that, the moment white supremacy is named, it dies. It shrivels up in the light. When people see it, they reject it.
This is why we have to use the correct terms to denounce this regime. It’s not fascist. It’s white supremacist. It’s not a foreign influence. It’s home grown.
We’ve got to put them on the defensive, we need them to start denying white supremacy the same way they deny climate change. We need people talking about it, we need to put them in check. Once people see how awful white supremacy is, they reject it. That’s why the white supremacists have learned how to keep it hidden because they know it dies if people see the truth.
This regime represents the original sin of a country that was founded on genocide, cruelty, human slavery, and stolen labor. Every fortune is derived from these transgressions against humanity. We have to stop looking at the past through red, white, and blue tinted glasses and resolve to offer restitution for our crimes.
This is a country that has committed acts of evil. This is a country that indoctrinates its population to believe that it should never be held accountable for its crimes. This is a nation that trains its citizens to believe some lives have no value.
These are the false beliefs that we have to recognize, renounce, and obliterate. This is a country in need of an intervention. The population has to be reprogrammed. The current regime isn’t an aberration, it’s a feature. We can’t fix the issue by the removal of one man, instead we have to deliberately restructure every institution in our society.
It’s not enough to passively denounce white supremacy. Everyone has to be actively anti-racist. We have to be unapologetic warriors of integrity. Our citizens should be ashamed to utter phrases like “they went too far with diversity and woke ideology.”
Instead, we must be unified in denouncing white supremacy.
It’s a toxic ideology. Ether we defeat white supremacy, or it kills us. The time has come to enter a new era of accountability and fulfill the promise of freedom and prosperity that this nation has offered but never delivered.
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