So my country has been taken over by fascists. You may have heard about it. I hate them. I hate feeling powerless. So I’m going to do the only thing I feel I can do: write about it.
Now, I want to break down what drives them, and that’s projection. The things that these American Nazis claim to hate in marginalized groups is really a reflection of them and how they see and interact with the world around them. The groups they hate don’t do the things the fascists say they do, but those fascists do those things. They think that if LGBTQ+ folks, BIPOC people, and women of all races get their hands on power, those folks will think and act like fascists and ruling class capitalists do. The non-rich fascists also project their hopes and dreams onto billionaires, thinking, “One day, that will be me.”
(I don’t have any relevant fun images for this post, and I don’t want to give people like Elon Musk extra SEO for their images, so here’s Grogu/Baby Yoda.)
Here are some more concrete examples of what I’m talking about:
- “Trans women will harass cis women in bathrooms”: No, they won’t. That’s what creepy conservative cishet white dude say because that’s what those creepy cishet white dudes would do if they were given permission to go into women’s bathrooms. But other people believe those creepy men when they make this claim because they probably haven’t met a trans person, and they’re more likely to believe this myth because it’s about people who aren’t in their lives, so they have no one to compare this claim against. That’s probably why J.K. Rowling believes this, too, because she’s awful. (I think she hates trans people because she has claimed her dad wanted her to be a son named Simon John, and she sees trans people as being able to “choose” their gender in a way she couldn’t. But that’s another post.)
- “DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) gives jobs to undeserving people just to tick a box”: No, it doesn’t. DEI initiatives (and Affirmative Action laws before them) give people who aren’t cishet white men (particularly from wealthy backgrounds) a chance to be interviewed and get the kinds of opportunities those men get through nepotism, good ol’ boy networks, and other avenues that many people don’t have access to. Cishet white men (and quite a few white women who think they’ll get the full powers of white men if they think this way) believe that DEI allows BIPOC people, LGBTQ+ people, and all types of women (yes, including white women) to be handed jobs because of their status, as many cishet white men are. I think that deep down, those men (and women, in some cases) are at least somewhat aware of their mediocrity. At the very least, they know they’re not advancing up the corporate ladder the way the would have when there were fewer women, BIPOC folks, and openly LGBTQ+ folks in the workplace. Clearly, those white dudes can’t be mediocre because the whole world is built around them, so that means that everyone else is getting an unfair advantage. But we aren’t. DEI and Affirmative Action helped white women like me the most because there are still many biases in place in the U.S. The people who work their way up the corporate ladder without being cishet white men most likely worked much harder than those dudes because they didn’t have the connections to hand them a place at or near the top.
- Example I Have Witnessed: A few years ago, I worked at a company that had somewhere between 300 and 500 employees. We would have these monthly company meetings on Fridays. One Friday about three months after I started, I thought it was going to be a regular company meeting where we celebrated all the different departments and their employees, but it wasn’t. Instead, it was devoted to this one cishet white guy whom I’d never heard of before. He worked in a different area of the company from me, which is why I wasn’t familiar with him. He looked to be about my age (later, I found out he was 11 months younger than then-30-year-old me, so he was 29 when all this happened). The whole company meeting was about promoting him to president of the company. And as he and the executives talked about the promotion, we all learned that this young guy was the brother-in-law of one of the company’s executives. He’d applied for and gotten a lower-level operations job a few years earlier, and then they decided that he had leadership potential, so they moved him around and promoted him accordingly so they could prime him to become an executive. They told us all this in a very straightforward way. That’s the kind of nepotism and bias that DEI and Affirmative Action are supposed to help prevent.
- “Immigrants are crossing the border to steal our jobs!”: The only immigrant who’s trying to steal your job, your money, and your Social Security Number (WTF?!) is Elon Musk. He’s the only evil immigrant here. The immigrants trying to cross the border are escaping violence and poverty, and many migrant workers who are now being deported do the jobs that lots of non-immigrant Americans (both white and BIPOC) refuse to do. That includes jobs like picking produce in the fields and washing dishes in restaurants. If all those people get deported, who is going to do those jobs? Not the people complaining about immigrants–that’s for sure. Anyway, I think this line of thinking is proposed by manipulative conservative leaders who, if they were to go live in another country, would be angling for ways to get into high-paying jobs at the expense of the natural-born citizens of that country.
- “People are getting rich off of welfare/Food Stamps/WIC!”: Absolutely not. I worked as a grocery store cashier over the past few years, and my store got a lot of customers who used Food Stamps (now usually called SNAP) or WIC (Women, Infants, and Children–it’s a program that helps moms and their young kids afford healthy foods), and none of those people were millionaires or billionaires. They were just people trying to afford food, just like the rest of us. And many of them were white people, though there were quite a few BIPOC and immigrant families who used these programs, too. Now, in the the 1960s and 1970s, there was an ethnically and racially ambiguous con woman named Linda Taylor who did defraud government programs and she was nicknamed “The Welfare Queen”, but she was the only person/woman we really know of who did that. But Ronald Reagan claimed there were millions of women of color (WOC) out there being “Welfare Queens,” getting wealthy off taxpayer dollars. But that’s never happened. It’s not true. Fraud in government programs is pretty low (and is rather hard to calculate overall, as it varies from agency to agency), as that article points out. But I think this myth persists because 1) racism, and 2) corporate welfare. Corporate welfare is when billionaires and CEOs get government contracts, grants, subsidies, and bailouts to keep their companies afloat. So those wealthy conservatives think that the average U.S. citizen on welfare, SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, etc. is using these programs in the same manipulative ways that billionaires do. But really, that’s not how it works at all.
- “Medicare For All is communism!” Again, no. Many, many other countries in this world have universal healthcare. The U.S. is the only major country that doesn’t have a national health insurance program funded by our government. Conservatives and fascists would tell you that that’s because we would descend into godless communism if we did that. In reality, we’re not allowed to have one because 1) conservatives want as much privatization as possible, and 2) a national health program would have to cover all Americans regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality/romantic orientation, etc. Since we’re not allowed to have that, we end up paying exorbitant amounts of money determined by insurance companies run by people who get rich off of innocent people’s suffering. You can thank medical insurance companies for headlines like “Local Teacher Raises $20,000 for Cancer Treatments Through Crowdfunding,” which are supposed to be inspiring, but are actually horrifying because no one should have to raise that kind of money for medical treatments on their own, but insurance companies refuse to cover those kinds of medical care. If you want to know more about the details of what happens in the American medical system and how it affects people, you can read this article and this one. But yeah, the fascists and conservatives don’t want us to have affordable healthcare because they make money off of us by gatekeeping access to healthcare, and they don’t want to stop making money off of us.
- “We need to protect the rich because one day, you’ll be one of us!” Nope, nope, nope. We’re sold the lie that we, too, could become billionaires so that we don’t riot against the existing billionaires. This type of projection is less routed in overt hatred than the other ones, but it does get us to hate our current circumstances without blaming billionaires for those circumstances. If we think, “Hey, I could be as wealthy as Elon Musk one day,” then we sit around waiting for the system to change and work in our favor instead of fighting for progress now. But while you vote to give the rich more power, they steal things from you–your time, your energy, your money.
- “Billionaires got where they are because they’re smart and hardworking!” Absolutely not. Most billionaires are born to some level of existing wealth (that includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates; if you want female examples, look at Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Taylor Swift), and they find ways to some wealth into a ton of wealth. They often have connections that they can use to get high-paying jobs and start at a higher rung of the corporate ladder than the rest of us. They’re also manipulative and willing to exploit tons of people to build their billions. It’s not about intelligence. There are plenty of very smart people who work working- and middle-class jobs, but they don’t get the same opportunities that billionaires have had. It’s about connections, manipulation, and exploitation. And that’s that.
Remember, if you have any family members or friends/acquaintances who start spewing these talking points, they’re not true. They’re created by a bunch of crazy rich people who want you to work for them forever. They are never going to give you a slice of their pie. So find ways to push back against them. Talk about what’s going on. Blog about it. Call your representatives and senators (because those people are supposed to work for us, not Elon Musk). Speak out about the government cuts that bother you. Make noise. Break their rules. Become ungovernable.
And if you’re wondering “When did this blog get so political?”, I’ll point to the fact that I’ve been writing about representation in media since 2018. Representation is inherently political.
…That’s all I really have to say right now, but I’ll be back soon.