We’ve seen this movie before, America. We’ve seen it a lot recently.
There was an alarming rise in hate crimes here over the past year, and the year before that too. No one who is paying attention (and not brainwashed by FoxNews and Breitbart or Lindsey Graham) is surprised by this. We all saw it coming from a mile—and an election away.
This week’s reported attack on Empire actor Jussie Smollett*, if true, would be simply another day in an America that has become safe refuge for phobic bullies seeking (and finding) consent to be horrible; the latest reminder of the trickle-down hatred flowing from the top and into our national bloodstream. It is the familiar enmity generated by terrified little boys whose minds never developed in time with their bodies—and we know full well, who is serving up the toxic cocktail of misogyny, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism these man-children are currently drunk on.
Smollett’s attackers purportedly yelled “MAGA Country,” as they assaulted him and placed a noose around his neck. If these reports are accurate, they needn’t go to the trouble of defining their political alignments that explicitly, as we could have guessed as much. When you see men fragile enough to harm another human being based on their identity or orientation or skin color, it’s pretty sound money what their voting block is. When people of color are accosted in coffee shops and spit at on street corners by strangers while being showered with racial slurs—you can bet they favor red caps, to pink knit hats or rainbow pins. When a white guy sprays a school, shopping mall, or music festival with bullets, chances are high he didn’t vote for Hillary—and that’s just how this insidious sexism works.
The stunted, distorted version of manhood perpetuated in MAGA culture needs to be named and reckoned with, because those afflicted with it, can neither see it nor care to pushback against it. They cannot hear the cries of marginalized people over the sounds of their knuckles dragging on the ground, and so the rest of us are going to have to make them listen.
This is about Jussie Smollett’s alleged assault, but it’s about so much more.
It’s about a President who is physically incapable of calling white male hate crimes what they are; who refuses to defend transgender teens and black men and Muslim families from violence; who will never confront discrimination against vulnerable communities, because that angers his base.
It’s about several-timed accused predators in both the White House and on the Supreme Court.
It’s about an Evangelical Church that incubates toxic masculinity under the guise of Biblical Literacy, that recklessly preaches LGBTQ people as an abomination, that harbors nationalism and passes the buck to a Caucasian Republican God.
It’s about a political movement of Stephen Millers and Mitch McConnells and Steve Bannons and Mike Pences—that sees everything as an urgent threat to straight whiteness.
It’s about teenage kids wearing MAGA hats while smirking at an indigenous elder, because they are intoxicated with privilege.
It’s about the countless stories that you and I are surrounded by, if we care to listen to them.
There are millions of Jussie Smolletts whose stories will never trend nationally, never become a hashtag, never make the news. Today they will face physical violence, emotional terrorism, workplace harassment, social exclusion—and they will do so largely in the silence and the shadows. They will encounter this emboldened, vicious MAGA manhood in their schools and at their churches and walking down the street and on their rides home and in Presidential tweet rants.
And we who find this unacceptable, need to say speak loudly to the insecure, violent men who need desperately to grow up: for themselves, for the people they wound, and for the boys and young men who are watching.
*This investigation is ongoing.
Originally Published on JohnPavlovitz.com
Photo: iStock