They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.

This is how abuse works.

3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.

This is how abuse works.
We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.

This is how abuse works.
We've endured the sight of police brutalizing our fellow citizens for years, a horror magnified by the knowledge that for Black people this brutality has been a constant way of life, but we're told change must wait, because we aren't asking right.

This is how abuse works.
We have been menaced and lied to and confronted with a daily litany of atrocity that has only made the Republican rank and file happier, and the only message we ever get is that we need to be better at relating to the feelings of people who find comfort in suffering.

It's abuse.
The undergirding load-bearing superstructure upon which our entire society is built is abuse and enablement, and it's sick, and it has to stop.

We need to stop this deadly unreasonable practice of expecting people to accept unacceptable things in order to be thought reasonable.
In order to have healing, we first need to cleanse the wound.

This healing needs rage.
Rage, and consequence, and a real reckoning.

Anything less is just pretending it didn't happen. It's how abuse works.
They're going to ask you to pretend that none of it happened. It's appropriate to be angry about that, because it was real, it was abuse, asking you to pretend otherwise is enablement, and it's always appropriate to be angry about enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.
They're going to tell you that your anger makes you just as bad as them, as if it's anger that is the problem, rather than the reason for the anger.

It's appropriate to be angry when you're told that, because that is enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.
They're going to tell you to look ahead, not behind—as if their unconcern with the trauma is maturity, which you can only share in by matching it.

It's appropriate to be angry, because making people pay the cost of their own trauma is enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.
This shit happened, it was absolutely unacceptable, and anybody supporting it, or anybody wanting to ignore it to avoid a reckoning of real consequence, should not be allowed in polite company.

Refuse to pay their tax of abuse.
Your rage is yours, and it's appropriate, and it's necessary right now. The reason abusive enablers want it gone is simple: It's evidence.

Abusive people and their enablers dislike evidence.

Evidence leads to conviction.

Conviction, to consequence.
Reject the abusive notion that your anger is the problem, not the abuse that made your anger appropriate.

Reject the enabling notion that abuse is an unfortunate necessity, changing it is unrealistic, and demanding better is immature or divisive.

Refuse to pay the tax of abuse.
They're going to tell you that your anger is causing the abuse:

*Your anger demonizes abusers.
*Your anger leaves no room for them to be redeemed.
*Your anger makes abusers angry.
*It's forcing them to be abusive.

All this is how enablement of abuse works.

Enablement is abuse.
The redemption of abusive people is their project, not yours.

Your anger is appropriate. It's evidence. It mustn't be hidden, and those who suggest it should should be rejected.

Those who suggest a reckoning is unrealistic, or badly timed, or divisive, should be rejected.
This is how we break this cycle.

Refuse to pay the tax of abuse, as proxy for those who were harmed, to the benefit of abusers, all in the name of healing.

That is how abuse stops working.

More from A.R. Moxon

People have wondered why I have spent 3 days mostly pushing back on this idea that "defund the police" is bad marketing.

The reason is, it's an example of this magic trick, the oldest trick in the book.

It's a competition between what I call compass statements. And it matters.


There are a lot of people who think "defund the police" is a bad slogan.

But it's a directional intention. A compass statement.

The real effect of calling it a bad slogan, whether or not intentional (but usually intentional), is to reduce a compass statement down to a slogan.

Whenever there is a real problem and a clear solution, there will be people who benefit from the problem and therefore oppose the solution in a variety of ways.

And this is true of any real problem, not just the problem of lawless militarized white supremacist police.

There are people who oppose it directly using a wide variety of tactics, one of which is misconstruing anything—quite literally anything—said by those who propose solutions—any solutions.

They'd appreciate it if you mistake their deliberate misrepresentation for confusion.

The reason they'd appreciate if if you mistake their deliberate misrepresentation for confusion is, it wastes time that could have been spend on the solution trying to persuade them, with different arguments and metaphors or solutions.

Which they intend to misconstrue.
The reality is very simple: The Republican Party is no longer participating in democracy. They're running a series of ops against every election cycle, predicated on the notion that only their power is legitimate.


This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years. It includes Gingrich's scorched earth methods, Bush v Gore, the politicizing of the Bush DoJ, the judicial obstructionism and nullification of the McConnell Senate, and the entire Trump presidency.

It includes decades of tortured racist gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, Citizens United, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, PACs, and deliberately colluding with foreign powers.

This isn't a failed coup. This is a *continuous* coup that stretches back years.

The Republican Party is not participating in democracy. They are quite obviously an organization dedicated to the destruction and overthrow of the government of the U.S. as we know it, and should be treated as such.

There are no legitimate Republican office-holders.

I think there's a distinction to be made. Democrats are often weak/ineffective, and many are complicit because they're those things by choice—but institutionally they aren't authoritarian, and they aren't fascist. They're a corporatist conservative party.

More from Government

If you're curious what Trump's defense will look like, all you have to do is turn on Fox News. My latest at @mmfa

The tl;dr is that for years right-wing media have been excusing Trump's violent rhetoric by going, "Yes, but THE DEMOCRATS..." and then bending themselves into knots to pretend that Dems were calling for violence when they very, very clearly weren't.

And in fact, this predates Trump.

In 2008, Obama was talking about not backing down in the face of an ugly campaign. He said "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

https://t.co/i5YaQJsKop


That quote was from the movie The Untouchables. And there's no way anybody reading that quote in good faith could conclude that he was talking about actual guns and knives. But it became a big talking point on the

In 2018, Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder was speaking to a group of Georgia Democrats about GOP voter suppression. He riffed on Michelle Obama's "When they go low, we go high" line from the 2016 DNC.

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.