My book is about the tradition of American supremacy & the ways it shapes all of our lives, sabotages our natural shared society in order to steal all value from it for a few, makes others pay its unnaturally high costs ... and what we can do about it. armoxon.com/books/very-fin… I find it useful to begin with art—with the idea that humans are art. The idea that to be a human is to be a unique expression of unsurpassable worth, whose worth is natural and inherent.

Focusing on this truth makes it easier to spot supremacy's anti-human lies.

Well I'm given to understand that today & for a VERY limited time, our nation's political violence party is shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.

(link to essay in thread) I'm kidding, of course. They've already decided who is to blame. It's the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.

LOST is streaming on Netflix—an excellent time to revisit the show, using the viewing guide I'm publishing in my newsletter (link in thread).

Many think the story isn't coherent. I think it was. My lens is the one the show itself suggests: a dialectic of observation and belief. This dialectic isn’t too tough to detect. There’s even an episode called “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” In a dialectic, the opposing ideas operate in concert with one another. While these ideas are oppositional within the artistic work, they aren’t opposites.

I've been thinking of American conservatism—which has proved itself irreducible from American fascism—in terms of burdens.

I find burdens an apt metaphor, because christian fascists claim to worship a Jewish rabbi from antiquity named Yeshu ben Yosef (Mr. Jesus if you're nasty). Interesting thing about young Mr. Jesus: He was very sharp-tongued with the politically influential religious hypocrites of his day. There's a whole chapter of him reading them the riot act, calling them whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers and blind guides etc etc.

I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out tomorrow, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.

There's a slight of hand at the start that catapults us into the massive lie.

https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1804238081131974873

Let's do the slight of hand, first. The article presupposes to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?

This is savvy if what you want to exonerate the comments, because it answers the wrong question, and dismisses the right one.

THE HUMAN PROBLEM
Last week an image went viral online. It was generated by a computer from the classic movie 12 Angry Men. It added no value, and it was being used for no good reason.

It's a perfect encapsulation of where our dominant cultural narrative has brought us. It's my belief that things that provide positive value to humans are good, and that those who make good things should be compensated for it.

I also believe that people should have access to good things whether or not they can pay. It's the reason I love libraries, for example.

It seems certain people insist that we all as a society pay the cost of a serious problem they are creating, just so that they can imagine themselves to be the solution to it.

For example: the Prosper TX police and their brand new murder tank.

the-reframe.com/cruel-luxuries/ The tank is a MRAP, which stands for Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle. The MRAP has an MSRP of $689,000, which in case you didn't know is a lot of money—about a fifth of the school lunch debt for the whole state, to give a totally random example of another type of expense.

It seems to me that this is a nation mediated by fear—by who is permitted to feel it and who is permitted to spread it, and who gets to claim they are frightened or threatened, and who gets to define those parameters.

To explain, let me tell you about the trails I run. When I run trails, I sometimes encounter people in twos or threes but mostly ones, and sometimes, as you might expect, some of those people are women.

I’ve seen pictures of me when I’m jogging; I’m 6’2” 230 lbs. and even if I’m trying to smile, exertion turns it into a scowl.

They found him guilty. The pig president I mean. White evangelical Christianity's bronzed calf. They found him guilty. That's good.

The funny thing is, he didn't even have to do the crimes. The bullshitter believed his cult's bullshit.

Full essay: the-reframe.com/not-better-but… I'll admit I'm surprised they found him guilty. The pig president hasn't seen a lot of direct consequences, despite a lifetime of flagrant infractions against law and basic human decency.

In this immunity he is an extension of his cult.

It's worth detailing how how this works.

I understand that suggesting we lie to fascists is a controversial thing to say. It's extremist, in a way that Sam Alito's stop-the-steal flag and Harrison Butker's speech will never be. It's dangerous divisive talk, in a way in ways that a plan to deport 5% of the nation isn't.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1792188133104066623

I think this tells you what sort of things are and aren't instinctively treated as normal by mainstream institutions.

Christian fascism can never escalate; it can only be escalated upon. It can never be exclusionary; it can only be excluded, and that exclusion is always unjust.

LYING TO FASCISTS
It's been rough this week if you're the sort of person who pays attention.

Let's distract ourselves with the sporting life. Let's talk about sports hero Harrison Butker, a man whose name sounds like it is pretend.

(link to full essay further in the thread) Butker plays American football for the Kansas City Chiefs, in case you didn't know. He is a kicker, which is the only part of football that uses the feet, but ironically is the only part of football that isn't really football.

An excerpt from Very Fine People—reprinting an essay written October 2020.
___
Let me tell you two stories.

Story one: let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that there’s a virus.

the-reframe.com/very-fine-peop… Let’s pretend it’s deadly. Let’s say it’s a novel new strain of an old structure that we’ve known about for a long time.

Let’s imagine that one reason this virus spreads so effectively is because a large number of people who get it are asymptomatic.

This is not the proclamation of an expert. This is the confession of a fool.

I should explain.

I wrote the words you’ll find between these covers after August 2017, which was a key date in my rapidly dawning awareness of the true nature of my country.
the-reframe.com/very-fine-peop… August 2017 is when tiki-torch waving Nazis invaded Charlottesville, Virginia, in defense of treasonous slaveholders and their own perceived supremacy.

August 2017 was also when the White Christian president defended those who marched with the Nazis as “very fine people.”

Hey everyone, Very Fine People releases on June 25, and the paperback version is available for presale right now! (eBook preorders will be available later this month.)

More details right here: the-reframe.com/a-very-fine-an… You can preorder it any of the places where books are sold, and if you go and order it you'll be doing the thing that helps authors more than anything else you can do. Preorders make bookstores and other instruments of publishing take notice.

Seven lessons learned from a quarter century in a war-oriented society.

It's 2001—the year the movies promised we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings.

the-reframe.com/war-or-nothing/ I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't yet; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war.

In 2017 American Nazis invaded Charlottesville, VA, which is a major U.S. city in case you didn't know. Maybe you remember this. They called themselves "Unite the Right." They wanted what Nazis want, and did what Nazis do, which was to kill.

the-reframe.com/americans-who-… They also wore polo shirts and held tiki torches, and chanted Nazi chants; about blood and soil, and others predicated on the idea that the white race was being replaced by races that Nazis view as inferior.

Probably it is worth talking about what 'the white race" means.

Cargo ship Dali lost power and from there it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

We hadn't maintained the bridge for collisions of this type, we're learning. You'd think we would have—it's critical infrastructure.

the-reframe.com/blame-manageme… But we're often the sort of place that fails to maintain what it has built; mostly because maintenance costs eat into tax revenues, and revenues could be used for tax cuts, and tax cuts help profits, and profits are very important, so collapses are just a thing that is coming.

I'd like everybody to yell at me, so I wrote about the upcoming election.

Or, to put it more specifically, I wrote about what an anti-fascist coalition might look like and how it might fall apart, using the election as a context.

the-reframe.com/binaries-and-i… We’re dealing with rising fascism both globally and domestically, as I might have mentioned once or twice recently—“domestically” for me meaning the United States, though maybe you find it is true in your part of the old cosmic blueball, too.

OK, let me tell you a joke. It’s a joke about context.

(One of the most popular topics for jokes, I know. I give the people what they want.)

Here’s the joke:

Say somebody gave a rally, and a lot of people came.

the-reframe.com/the-way-it-is/ Say that the person who was the focus of the rally was a politician, a man who had once been president of the United States, had stopped being president of the United States, and now was running to be president of the United States again.

EVERY ACCUSATION A CONFESSION

At the U.S./Mexico border, Republicans are defending their right to make themselves feel safe by murdering refugee men, women, and children, using as rationale a once-fringe Nazi conspiracy theory they are promoting.

the-reframe.com/every-accusati… They’re talking about a civil war in order to protect this "right." And yes, they’re framing it all as self-defense, as if they—the ones eager to murder both foreigners and fellow citizens—are the ones in danger, and the rest of us—who they are eager to murder—are the danger.

Promoting ideas and actions in the name of some fine thing that you don’t believe in and might actually oppose is what is meant when someone says "bad faith."

For example say your name was Elise Stefanik, and you were for example a US Senator

Full essay: armoxon.substack.com/p/lose-the-deb…
Say also you belong to a political party whose leader is an open fascist who approvingly quotes Hitler in order to promote a conspiracy theory called ‘replacement’ that forms the undergirding bedrock of antisemitism, to better enact eliminationist brutality against refugees.