“O cruel needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
George Orwell, 1984
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.”
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
Man, they got me out just in time, I kid you not. The situation in which I now find myself makes me feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Except it’s one Rod Serling himself couldn’t concoct in his most febrile nightmares. At least I’m safe. But for how long?
I saw my house on the news—actually, the smoldering ashes that remained of it. The arsonists—or largely peaceful protesters as the media referred to them—didn’t know if I was home or not at the time they lit it on fire, nor did they care, I’m certain of that. Man, oh man, they couldn’t have given less of a fuck. In fact, they wanted me in there and were disappointed as hell when they found out I wasn’t.
How do I know this? The news reported that no bodies were found at the scene. I saw videos posted online by people who may have been part of the mob—they were at least supporters, even if not there. They said unimaginably vile things after they found out this news: “Uncle Tom got away this time, but we’ll get this runaway coon soon enough,” with soon enough full of menace. The menace of intended pursuit, intended harm. These fuckers aren’t playing around, I kid you not.
Pardon my language; it’s out-of-character for me, really it is. But I just can’t fathom any of this, I can’t get my emotions settled or my heartrate down. I’m not sure that I’m not having a slow-motion heart attack, which began when I’d first heard the shouts from a large crowd gathering in front of my house. I peeked through the living room curtains and almost fainted. These were not the shouts of revelry; for example, a large party next door gotten unduly boisterous; or an argument over a fender bender; or children carrying on in the way they do. Dozens of black-clad people, many of them masked, were congregating in the street—a quiet, tree-lined street which might as well have been on the most alien of planets, so discordant and terrifying was the sight.
As expected, the legacy media sanitized the incident, made it presentable for Mr. and Mrs. Somnolent America (“at a BLM protest today, a college professor’s house was set on fire”). It wasn’t said directly, but it was insinuated that I’d brought this upon myself. I was referred to as “controversial” and “right-wing.” It didn’t surprise me when one of these talking head-up-the-asses said I was a “white supremacist.”
Then there was my own congresswoman who didn’t merely insinuate. She posted a video statement about the incident: “He has a history of allowing his classroom to be an unsafe space for marginalized students, including those of color, so it’s not surprising that people acted out as a result of hundreds of years of oppression.” So arson—and worse—is okay? What an ignorant fucking bitch.
Christ, I remember when we could have debates about the issues of the day, no matter how controversial or contentious. Students on all sides of the issue engaging in an adult discussion in an academic setting was a beautiful thing, an important part of becoming an adult. A thinking adult in a free society. I kept up with it despite there being too many prickly pussies on campus nowadays. There’s not a lot of them, a small percentage of the student body really, but there’s enough of them, and they’re vocal enough, to cower our administrators into genuflecting to their silly demands. As soon as a campus hires a “diversity” officer, or worst of all, creates an entire “diversity, equity, and inclusion” office, it’s fucked as far as the free-flow of ideas goes. And, yes, I’d publicly written and spoke about this concern.
One of these DEI fascists told me to tone down my “classroom dynamics” (to use his Orwellian term), make my writing “more inclusive,” and stop doing appearances on what he called “right-wing” internet shows. I had tenure—so I figured, screw that.
Until recently, my classes remained popular, though complaints were regularly filed against me, almost entirely by students who weren’t enrolled in any of these. I lost count of how many times these complainers accused me of “violence” or “hate speech” because of the course content and debates. Then this year they started targeting the students enrolled in my classes. Harassing them coming from and going to class, calling the employers of the students who had part-time jobs and demanding they be fired (“How can you employ a Nazi sympathizer!”), contacting dating sites and demanding the removal of my students who’d signed up for these. How do these fuckers get the time and energy for such childish fascism applied down to the atomic level?
My appearance as a guest on a podcast is what apparently set off last night’s Brown Shirt wannabes, gave me my very own Kristallnacht. I defended voter I.D. laws, assuring the interviewer that black people aren’t children and are perfectly capable of getting driver’s licenses or some other form of identification. There is no doubt the cretins who burnt my house down would’ve put me in a cattle car headed to a deathcamp had that been an option. Don’t think that shit can’t happen here. Here’s your future camp guards, herders to the showers, stokers of the ovens.
Worse were videos on the Internet posted by members of the mob that gathered at my house, and if the viciousness and callousness of their actions didn’t slap you awake and into wanting to put a stop to this shit, then nothing sure as hell is going to do it. I mean, get real. If there was ever a group of people due for some good old-fashioned police brutality, it was these motherfuckers. Fire hoses, dogs, and truncheons. Bring it all to bear as soon as they gather and cross the line from peaceful protest to lawbreaking. Don’t give them an inch over that line. They’ll take a fucking parsec—and you’ll never catch up.
Don’t believe me? When they show up at your house—and they will someday—you’re going to know very real abject terror. If you don’t believe that day will come, then you’re a damn fool. If you have kids, you may want to invest in asbestos jammies because these monsters aren’t going to give a shit if there are children at home. They want them at home. I can’t emphasize this enough.
The sense of impunity is what I find most unbelievable. The look on their faces—unmasked ones and the eyes of the masked ones—made it clear they have no fear of being held accountable, let alone being stopped. These mobs are soldiers turned loose in cities declared fair game for pillage and harm against their helpless inhabitants. They know with certainty the police, or any other part of the justice system, aren’t going to intervene—except to put yellow caution tape around the ashes the next morning, which is indeed what happened. Christ, during the BLM protests the current vice president donated to a bail fund for these fiends. That’s defending my right to free speech and a society subject to law and order?
The height of the BLM madness was several years ago, but you wouldn’t guess that looking at the videos shot in front of my house. BLM, ACAB, and Antifa signs were evident in the largely white group, mostly young and mostly dressed in black. George Floyd posters, too—no self-respecting BLM protest can lack those. A dumb-ass career criminal is their patron saint.
For a while, the mob screamed and shouted at my house—the inanimate object served as an avatar for myself, who they assumed was inside. The word nigger was clearly audible and shouted not just once. That it was yelled from amongst BLM sign waivers made it beyond surreal. Jesus, is there such a thing as a supersurreal situation?
My house. They burnt my house to the goddamned ground. A house I might’ve been in had I not received a call, the voice telling me to “get out, and get out now.” I thought of the movie, The Terminator. “Come with me if you want to live!” the Reese character shouted to Sarah Connor, the terminator robot in hot pursuit. At that moment, there was no doubt in my mind that I needed to follow the instructions.
Thank God for the back alley, and a car parked there. There was a man in my backyard to help me get over the fence, another on the other side of it to help me down. A car waited. I didn’t ask questions, I knew this was serious shit: As I went over the fence, I heard the volume of the crowd in front of the house escalate, as if a volume knob had been buried to the right. They had me turn off my cell phone and put it in a thick metal box. Then we sped off, past two men they’d posted at one end of the ally, who looked warily up and down the street.
We changed cars twice. “They tie into surveillance camera feeds, both public and private,” the man in the passenger seat of the first car told me, as I was handed off to the next car. They took me to a safe house—they actually called it that—and that’s where I am now. I was told not to use my cell phone until they build a secure VPN for me. A super-VPN they call it. “They’re drilling down to that level,” I was informed. “We learned they’re tracing calls back to both the sender and the receiver, and hunting both down.”
“What the hell, are these guys the NSA, CIA, or KGB?” I asked.
The answer terrified me: “They have people that make any of those look like Inspector Clouseau.”
I can’t believe this is happening. A black man in America fleeing for his life from a mob of (largely) white folks. Largely? Yes, look at the videos. There were black faces in that mob, brown and Asian, also. It’s an inclusive fascism, not contingent on skin color, but on a shared demented mindset combined with a juvenile understanding of the world and a childish lack of impulse control.
I still haven’t seen any comment by the legacy media on these horrific videos that are posted for all the world to see. This is not surprising. The videos “go against the narrative” and, therefore, hold no interest for the mob’s enablers.
Wow, what a spectacularly fucked-up narrative that must be. That an uppity black man gets his just deserts from a mob that don’t cotton to his notions. Explain to me how this is any different from what Klansmen did to us a century ago. Apparently, the modern mob got itself a taste for strange fruit—I’ll get to why I say this in a moment. The Billie Holiday song, the Nina Simone version, too, I heard those tunes in my dream when I finally dozed off a few hours ago…and the lyrics woke me the hell up.
I can’t expunge the videos out of my brain. I never will, and I now know exactly how the blacks in the Jim Crow South felt. The terror of being abandoned by one’s government to systematic censorship, oppression, and physical harm.
Christ, that one image in particular. I’ll never get over it. An unmasked pudgy white woman, early twenties, her green and pink dreadlocks poking out from the edges of a black knitted cap, her nose sporting the obligatory bull ring, produced a megaphone and, I kid you not, screamed the following: “We ain’t got a rope to hang this nigger, so let’s burn his fuckin’ coon-ass house down.”
A cheer went up, actually erupted from the crowd that was mostly white, but, as I said, there were black faces there as well, every goddamned unmasked face twisted with the ruthlessness and hatred and ecstasy I’d seen in photos of white Southerners at black lynchings—from a century ago. This was true even of the masked faces. The eyes—those evil eyes—shined with malevolent glee so intense, that it might terrify the likes of Hannibal Lecter.
The sound of glass breaking could be heard, followed immediately by another cheer from the crowd. A delighted black female twerked toward my house, as if paying homage to a savage god, and the crowd roared again in the most evil-sounding cheer imaginable. A few seconds later, the first yellow flames could be seen dancing in my living room, at which point I had to turn the videos off.
Where the fuck were the police? I’m now in hiding, and where the fuck are they?
I’ll tell you what the police are doing: I was shown a report that hate crime charges were filed against me for the content of my courses, including one I last taught ten years ago—the last time I was allowed to teach it. It’s not just the mob looking for me now. The police are, too.
A white hand grips my shoulder, not in anger but in commiseration, and I look up. The owner of the safe housed places a cup of coffee on the table in front of me.
“Welcome, to the New America, my friend,” he says. “We’re all niggers now.”
Be First to Comment