Author: blackunicornpress

The circumstances of the death of Charlie Kirk are still a bit opaque to me, as I have seen a lot of contradicting things on the internet about the motives behind the shooter, so I am going to wait to post any thoughts I have specifically about Kirk’s death or “how things like this come to happen” in the US. What I have noticed, and I think is a very concerning sign, is how confusing people’s belief in the Freedom of Speech is in the United States. Right now, many on the right are calling for people to face consequences for publicly posting anything that appears to either celebrate or make light of Charlie Kirk’s death. Primarily, the consequences I see being called for are “doxxing” social media posters and getting them fired from various kinds of jobs, although for many months immigrants have been facing direct legal repercussions for their public speech, including deportation and incarcerations. Thus, I don’t think it is unreasonable for some on the left to be particularly concerned about how the Trump administration has been going hard after major media outlets, celebrities and public figures generally for criticism, especially for criticisms comparing Trumps actions to fascism. 

At the same time as I think it is essential for the press to remain free from government oversight, and for the government not to arrest people for what they say, I have always been very vocal that I believe the freedom of speech means freedom from government repression for what you say, not that the government has any responsibility to protect you from the consequences of your own speech. From a radical anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspective, for example, when now humiliated, disgraced alt-right leader Richard Spencer tried to hold a rally and meeting at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI, it wasn’t the police or the State of Michigan or even MSU denying him access to their spaces as a state school that led to his public breakdown, and pretty much the implosion of his organizations and leadership. What pretty much ended Richard Spencer as a white nationalist leader (he has since become a self-described political moderate and voted for Kamala Harris for president…no shit.) was how effectively essentially one protest shut down his event. To me, this was one of the clearest examples of the entirety of the first amendment working to its maximum effectiveness. Some members of the white supremacist group the “Traditionalist Workers Party” (which was also invited to the event, but their leader got arrested trying to fight his way into the hall) have tried to blame local law enforcement for not doing enough to essentially provide free security for the event, but that accusation went nowhere in law suits and only a handful of his supporters made it past the protesters into the event.  At the time, on the ground, I remember there were a lot of “moderate voices” afraid that protesters showing up to the event would lead to Charlottesville like violence and were trying to discourage protestors from showing up, but having been there, and seen how completely humiliated and frustrated the white supremacists were that they couldn’t get into their event, and how betrayed they felt by a lackluster police presence that did very little to protect them. They expected the State to step up and protect their right to free speech and silence the voice of protestors, and when that failed to happen, it pretty well broke that section of their movement. Honestly, it was one of the most effective anti-racist/antifa protests for which I have ever been present. I think one of the things that really made it effective was exactly the fact that the state took so little responsibility for trying to protect Spencer and his white nationalist allies from the direct consequences of his hateful speech, but also didn’t try to directly silence him by trying to prevent his event from happening. Other Universities did take this approach, and tried to claim that it was for the good of public safety, and those institutions ended up getting sued and not being the place where Spencer’s movement ended. 

So, what does that have to do with the Death of Charlie Kirk and the current political climate surrounding the topic of Free Speech? 

I think it is important that people have spaces to voice their ideas, even when their ideas are hateful, ignorant and dangerous. When people do not have places to voice those ideas and see how other people react to those ideas and what consequences they will face for espousing those ideas, then they continue to hold on to those ideas, and tend to just grow bitter around them, or find specific communities where those ideas can be shared over and over again into an echo chamber. I think it is absolutely vital that college campuses and institutions of education foster places for people to have conversations around difficult, even dangerous ideas in ways where people are spared some of the direct vitriol and hostility that they might experience expressing these ideas in more public spaces, and I will come back to this idea at the end of this post.

I also think that many younger young folks are already realizing that public facing social media is a bit of a trap, that tends to lead to more trouble than it is worth, as it is not actually a truly free and public space, but rather a highly controlled commercial space where most of the content generated by normal people and not professional media personalities is essentially being stolen by these social media companies for as much profit as can be sucked out of them, while the social media companies let the people take almost all of the risk for what they publish. I think younger folks have turned away from more public facing social media like eX-Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram for anything more than observing media, and towards platforms like Discord and Signal for creating communities of people they want to selectively share ideas and information with, because it feels like there is less risk associated with doing so. 

Personally, I think the flip side of having the protected right of free speech is that people have to learn how take responsibility for what they say and for the consequences for having said it. I think we collectively need to make sure we are including that as part of the education of the people we want to build community and society with, but I also think that the most public facing side of that is that the government has absolutely no responsibility, nor right, to protect people from the consequences of what they say publicly, not from their employers, or their communities. The belief that it should be ok to say something publicly on social media that a person wouldn’t feel comfortable shouting out into a public square is a big part of why the rhetoric of social media feels so toxic to so many. 

The biggest problem with this though, is that most people are not very well informed about how social media works, or how much anonymity they have online, or how easily someone savvy with the technology can trace even anonymous feeling posts and messages back to them, because the vast majority of time, no one cares, and so people don’t see it happen. But when events occur that do really upset a wide group of people, these kinds of situations are going to happen more and more, and I think people on both sides of the political spectrum are now waking up to the fact that there is little to do about it except learn how to harness that power for themselves.  

All of this put together is why college campuses have fully become active, real battle grounds in the Culture War. Just back in 2023, most Americans viewed college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech. The story I just told above about shutting down Richard Spencer from speaking to a full crowd of people at MSU certainly seems to support this claim, and it probably is fairly true, even if the “liberal ideas” of most college campuses feel incredibly mainstream and middle of the road compared to the ideas like “white nationalism” that people like Richard Spencer was expressing. I said earlier that I think it is essential that college campuses remain places where people share and discuss difficult and dangerous ideas, but I think it is also important that we don’t limit the discussion of these ideas to locations that are locked behind class barriers which is a huge part of why I think Trump has found so much success targeting a “liberal elite.” Colleges and Universities might have center-left leaning political and social biases, but the power and authority that they really exert on society is quite small, and most of the “progressive” or “liberal” ideas that were maybe starting to transition from college campuses to mainstream US culture have been incredibly mild, capitalist friendly, and often much more centered around the appearance of values like “diversity” or “inclusivity” than the meaningful cultivation of those values. This has led higher education to look like it is a bastion of liberal values without actually accomplishing much, and made it a very easy target for groups and institutions that actually hold a ton of political, economic and social power.

I have a lot more to say about Charlie Kirk specifically, and how effectively he utilized the illusion of “Liberal Elite” authority on college campuses to make it look like he was a political and social underdog while not even really engaging with the academic community as his target audience, but I think I will save that for a future post where we can maybe also address the circumstances and consequences of his murder with more concrete knowledge about what happened. I guess I will just sign off this blog post expressing my own anxiety that the right is coming hard after universities, colleges and other institutions of higher education and that many of these institutions are going to be suckered into thinking that they will be safest by lowering their heads and kowtowing to the blatantly racist, sexist and false belief that there can be any knowledge that can be taught at the college level that is not politically situated. Having stepped away from teaching to be a stay at home parent, it is difficult to see myself being welcome back into a college or university setting that is trying to hide its head in the sand, and also it leaves me a bit sad that I have basically taken myself out of a position to fight against that from the inside.

As I write this post, the president of the United States deployed 2000 National Guard troops to the city of LA  to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers performing detainment and deportation raids that have resulted in over 100 arrests in the last 2 days. This was against the wishes of the state of California government and the LA city government. There will be no sanctuary cities in the second Trump administration and the only thing slowing ICE down is direct protest in the streets. 

I have kinda, sorta, started to touch on how the Trump administration’s crack down on immigration connects with the values of patriarchal misogyny (PM) and Transphobia in post 47 0f 100, but after some conversations with awesome radical folks here in Seattle, I want to come back to talking about the connection between Transphobia and Anti-immigration sentiment within the framework of patriarchal misogyny being used by the Trump administration, because these have been 2 of the most successful rhetorical tools he has used to galvanize his base and win elections in particular counties and states that have swung federal congressional elections. 

Maybe some of my readers might question whether it really makes sense to try to draw a connection between transphobia and the xenophobia of anti-immigrant rhetoric, as the immigrant community and the trans community are often depicted as being antagonistic to each other in media that paints immigrants as ardently religious and  anti-LGBTQIA2S+, and the trans community as both predominantly white and fairly well off economically. In the few months of organizing and anti-authoritarian/anti-capitalist community building I have done here in Seattle, I have seen some tension in who will show up to events, actions and demonstrations centered around immigrant rights and safety and trans folks rights and safety, and I think it is natural for people to have specific issues and concerns that motivate them to action. However, within a PM framework, especially the one at the heart of 2nd term Trumpism, I think it is absolutely vital to understand where the attack on trans people and the attack on immigrant communities is intersecting and how they can be countered simultaneously. 

In post 48 of 100, I talked about how hierarchies require essentializing value traits into the people these hierarchies are meant to control. This is why the very possibility of trans identity is an attack on patriarchy. Because patriarchy cannot exist if gender identity is any kind of flexible or fluid in nature. The authority of men over women has to be seen as fundamental or else it is exposed as arbitrary. In other words, when the border between masculinity and femininity becomes porous, the privileges and authority that comes with being identified as a man become vulnerable to critique and attack in ways that don’t happen when everyone believes that gender is fixed and based upon innate traits. 

National identity occupies a much more similar place to gender than gets talked about in mainstream media, or even radical/academic criticism. Especially for white US Americans, our national identity is a deeply rooted building block of personal identity that feeds into everything from what language we think and speak in, what defines our “inalienable rights,” and thus what power and privilege we are entitled just by being born here. Perhaps most US citizens acknowledge that citizenship and national identity are a little more flexible than they think of gender, but making sure that national identity remains a very restrictive container for power and authority is absolutely why people like Stephan Miller, have risen so prominently in the Trump administration. 

To be an immigrant is, inherently, to transgress the borders of national identity. For some, like the wealthy, identity categories that are used to control and enforce hierarchies have always been more fluid than they are for others, and you see this flaunted in ideas like Trump’s Gold Card Visa. But for pretty much everyone else, especially those trying to cross borders for reasons of survival and obtaining the most basic opportunities of living in a different nation, nation states lean heavily towards being restrictive about opening up the category of “citizen” to anyone who might jeopardize the power and privilege that having that national identity currently bestows. National identity tends not to be as binary as gender identity, as in people don’t usually immediate dismiss the possibility of being a dual citizen, or people changing citizenship multiple times over the course of their lives, but people do tend to lose their minds as soon as they start to think that just about anyone could come and start claiming the same national identity as them, infringing upon their access to the limited powers and privileges being a citizen in that country entails.

All of this tends to be a bit nebulous for most people in their daily lives, and thus easily ignored unless either their national identity or gender identity become something of concern to the people with authority in the immediate world around them, but authoritarian governments, like Trumpism, immediate draw this into much more real and practically situated terms when they do things like declare English to be the official language of the United States and try to create an essentialist definition of gender in an executive order. They absolutely know that creating legal barriers that force people into accepting essentialist identity categories is the first and most important step in establishing authoritarian control over society. The way they want to accomplish that is to label the people who step outside these essentialist categories of identity as criminal, not just in their actions, but in their very act of existing. 

There is much more to say about these essentialist categories of identity and authoritarianism in future posts, like about why Trump relied on race baiting much more in his first term than he has thus far in the second term, and how much of that has to do with political expediency and how much his base already was looking at black people as inherently existing as criminals, but I think that will derail this specific conversation about the intersection of national identity (which also includes much more complicated racial components of identity than I talked about in this post) and gender identity. 

So as the Trump administration promises to crack down more on sanctuary cities that are protecting immigrants and refusing to look at undocumented people as inherent criminals and threats to the national identity of US citizen, I hope people realize that the work of standing up to that repression and violence is the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny and transphobia at the same time. Because who we are is defined and constructed by the society around us and if we let authoritarians have that power—of defining what are safe and protected identities under the law and which are criminalized and not worthy of protection under the law, then the other world that could still yet be is already lost. 

and must be confronted, even in the face of state repression.

I am not sure anyone reads most of these blogs, much less if the people doing so are friends from places beyond Seattle, or new friends in the Seattle area, so I am going to try to establish some context first. 

A terrible group, named Mayday USA (they have a website but I have no interest in directing traffic to them), planed a public attack on the existence of Trans people, in the most LGBQIA2S+ park and gathering space in Seattle. In their internal documents promoting the event (stuff available for looking at on their website), they use language like “taking to the streets to take back family in America,” and calling for “every man and women in America to stand with us” to defend family and attack “sex traffickers” who are trying to groom children. This kind of horrific bullshit is all over their website, their PR materials for their events and is very transparently aggressive and confrontational. 

This group looks very similar/modeled around the Westboro Baptist Church, with the goal of going to places they know they are not welcome and trying to incite a response that they can then use to try to paint themselves as victims, lying directly to media saying things like “They say we don’t like people…We’re here to love Jesus” and performing stunts like giving away free haircuts (you know, to enforce essentialist ideas about gender), while really just picking cities and locations in those cities where they can get a bunch of attention, influence and money for themselves. Seriously, they wave their fundraising ability like a flag on the front page of their website, if you had any doubts about why they are doing what they are doing. 

***This was my first read on the organizers and leadership that planned the event and I still think it is true, but I did receive word from folks that were at the protest that the majority of people that the Mayday people brought, a couple of hundred (more likely than the 500 reported in the Seattle Times), seemed like they were “true believers” who were there to “pray the gay away.” If they were being used by their organizations’ leadership, they were doing so pretty willingly. ***

So if this is essentially a charlatan con job looking for attention and the ability to cast themselves (and of course the innocent children being exposed to the idea that gender is not an essential trait bestowed upon humans by god) as victims, wouldn’t it be better to just ignore them? 

This is the exact same question I have been hearing about confronting Klansmen, homophobes, Nazis, and other public spectacle hate-inciters for going on 30 years that I have been actively organizing to confront such groups, and while my answer has always been, “NO! We don’t ignore hate-mongering, we confront it.” I will try to talk through the complexity of why that is still the right answer without being dismissive to people who might disagree.

1. Being ignored doesn’t make hate-mongers go away, especially not professional/organized ones. Like the colonial invaders that came before them, the goal of these kinds of hate groups is to take up all the space that they can get their hands on. When streets/parks/etc are given up freely, they claim them proudly and make a show of trying to appear like their hate-speech and ideology is the “normal,” accepted rhetoric of that space/community, and that is what all the kids and bystanders see too. Sometimes they are also looking for confrontation, but only ever confrontation that they believe they can win, and in conditions where the smallest possible harms they might possible experience can be overblown for political exploitation. The “True believers” of these groups can absolutely be terrifying fanatics with no fear of death, but I have personally never seen that be the unified majority of any of these groups and the leadership is almost always scared pathetic losers that are trusting fully that the local police are going to be able to protect them successfully from the consequences of their own hatred. I think it can be a lot easier to believe that the overwhelming violence of the state will make the answer to that question be, “yes, the cops will be able to protect the leaders of these hate groups from the consequences of their rhetoric and actions,” than it is to imagine the circumstances in which we can make the answer “No, they will not.”  

2. Some of us are not physically, emotionally, mentally, materially or socially in a subject position to step into the role of what we imagine to be “the confronters of hate-speech and hate-speakers.” That is a funny, maybe academically weird way to say something similar to “some people might not personally be ready, comfortable or able to take confronting hate groups in the streets”…but that is because it is supposed to mean more than that too.  There are some tried and true tactics that have worked and continue to work to shut down hate groups, but those tactics have also failed in many situations to accomplish that goal, and those tactics can come with a lot of risk that will affect different people differently. It is getting really late for me and my mind is pretty scrambled, so I will come back to this point in the future, but I very intentionally want to talk about ways we can imagine resistance to violent and oppressive authoritarianism in the future.

3. I think pretty much every other argument people have tried to make about trying to “spread love instead of hate” or “we have to try to connect with the human on the other side instead of their hatred” really just boils down to people misunderstanding what groups like this are trying to accomplish, as well as making the mistake of using their imagination to pretend like the kinds of supportive mutual aid and community building that actually could have shut down a group like this can just be organized on the spot in response to events like “Transphobia and hate as religion instead of political philosophy,” and is not something that requires months (if not years) of horizontal power sharing, community building and dialog. Hence why trying to organize counter events to pull people away from these hate rallies always just ends up looking performative activism in service of the state or at least the status quo.

 4. Even if, on a personal level, for some reason, I feel like a group is just trying to entrap me into doing something stupid that they plan on using as a catalyst for future rhetorical purposes or to sue the shit out of me (like what the Westboro Baptists turned into their whole economic strategy), the thing is, that personal perspective  and understanding don’t change the reality on the ground of the other people in the path of the hate group. When young angry kids see nazis, klan, misogynists and transphobes coming into their protected spaces and spewing hate, the political posturing and con artistry behind it don’t matter any more. What matters is that you can either try to be the police, and force your probably convoluted and personal political reading on the situation on to everyone else around you, as a condition of your support…or you can not do that, and make your support for Trans youth, or any other group in the line of fire unconditional on how they respond to being targeted, and instead something they can count on and actually use. 

I really want to write a whole lot more about the event, the police’s out of control violence in response to balloons and water bottles, what it is like to be on the front lines of events like this and what it is like to not be able to be on the front lines of this specific event, and how to build stronger movements that will protect our communities from the hate these groups bring in their hearts to hurl at us, our friends, our family, and our neighbors. But I am old and tired, and I want to post this before I let too much time go by and my words and actions of solitary, support and aid are just performative after thoughts. 

People showed up in Seattle to protect Trans kids (young and old). They took a beating from a Seattle police force that just got permission again to use all their old protest smashing weapons they treat like toys, and 23 comrades and friends got arrested and will suffer continued harassment and intimidation from the state unless we make it clear to the city that we know who was really acting to protect our communities and who was acting as the hired goons of outside agitators who had come to town to spread their hate.

hint, this is not what a community protector looks like: