US American Terrorism is Considered too Sophisticated to be Violence

When I grew up as a Muslim, especially a devoted one, I would feel a lot of distress whenever I would hear about terrorist attacks made in the name of Islam by extremist Muslims. As someone who has always valued human life and been committed to having a strong moral and ethical compass, especially one that I believed to be derived from God, this made me ridden with multiple worries. I wondered, what if my religion was actually as violent as it was being painted to be, different from the versions of it I had been exposed to growing up. And how it would make myself and fellow Muslims look to others, painting us in a negative and extremist light despite us being peaceful, everyday people. I wondered if my faith at the time (I am agnostic now and don’t ascribe to a particular organized religion) really did condone acts of violence or was really so bad compared to other religions. And as the news and the culture of my high school teachers and peers would have me believe, Muslims tended to be terrorists more often than Christians or people of any other religion. Islam, according to all of the external sources around me, was more extreme and violent and incompatible with being a real enough, good enough US American compared to Christianity and Judaism. And, as you often hear from especially Western conservative media outlets, they refer to the United States as a “Judeo-Christian nation” where Islam, despite being a monotheistic Abrahamic religion sharing many of the same core beliefs and prophets, is excluded. It is obvious that the exclusion of Islam has to do with the foreignization of it, especially because of the image of most people practicing it people people of color which threatens the whitewashed US American Christianity. The Christianity that is interpreted and weaponized to justify Western violence and imperialism both inside and outside of the United States. 

This doesn’t mean that Muslim communities and Muslim countries are void of systemic issues, or that all extremism weaponizing Islam are tied to colonization. But it does mean that extremism where Islam is weaponized is given more scrutiny from the Western world than is extremism from religious and political ideologies that where the majority of its practicers are perceived to be white. 

And that brings me to the point of this essay, something I’ve pondered a long time: people who are proponents of United States imperialism, most of the time being, but not excluded to, white people, don’t like to label this country’s violence as “terrorism” because they view their terrorism as “sophisticated.” Justifiable, and entitled to being labeled as moral despite the lack of ethics. In other words, superior moral righteousness is a common grift that the United States uses as an excuse to be guilt and shame free over dominating people on the basis of racism, sexism– particularly patriarchy, classism and capitalism. White conservatives are unsurprisingly the majority demographic of this entitled notion, but apparently so are many people of color. Liberal US Americans are not free from this bias either; many of them still preach freedom and justice for all and will stand up for the rights of women, people of color, queer people and other marginalized groups while still justifying the country’s military conquering innocent civilians and stealing their resources in the name of US American national defense. 

When we see what is happening now with the ICE raids, US America conservative Christians who preach love, kindness and nonviolence are still proponents of violence towards innocent people they deem to be less worthy of human rights. One of the most glaring and astonishing examples of this hypocrisy also comes from the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death. Many conservative Kirk-lovers were honoring Charlie as this morally righteous man who promoted peace through open, civil dialogue. He went to college campuses to “peacefully” debate people on why bigotry was okay– but of course, like many conservative spaces, there is a culture of skirting around the actual blunt labeling of various terms of bigotry (racism, misogyny, anti-semitism, anti-Palestinian rhetoric, discrimination-based violence). Of course, while they deny the systemic reality of discrimination-based violence against actual marginalized groups, they have several instances where they try to antagonize marginalized groups as a whole by directing emphasis on situations where there is a victim who happens to be a white person who is harmed at the hands of a person belonging to a marginalized group. And just to be clear, those latter crimes are worthy of attention– the problem becomes when they are not spoken about in good faith. It is not okay when they are given more importance than the violent crimes committed due to systems of oppression that are actively ignored (or justified) in the roles that they play in harming people, particularly marginalized groups. 

My point with Charlie Kirk is that it doesn’t matter if Charlie Kirk had supposed “civil dialogue” in terms of having actual conversations with people without physical violence and name-calling. The effects of his discussions and strategy matter. He cared less about the dignity of humanity as a whole and cared more about keeping white men like himself in power. You don’t have to, as an individual, be calling people names to their faces or throwing hands at them to be enacting violence with your words. Words, and the ideologies you promote through them do have an effect. The intentional ignorance you promote through them do have an effect. 

The mannerisms of your soft-spoken tone and sophistication of gentle hand gestures don’t matter when seeds of violence are being sprouted from them, gaslighting your audience from the heaviness of violent effects on the people you are dehumanizing with morally righteous jargon.

Because of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, let alone Donald Dick– er, sorry Trump– and JD Vance, people are feeling emboldened in their dehumanization of marginalized groups. There is a clip of Charlie Kirk joking about the devastating destruction of Gaza caused by bombing and airstrikes, saying that Gazans don’t have any more buildings to throw gay people off of. Not only does he make ridicule of Israel’s terrorism against Palestinians that is causing irrevocable pain to countless adults and children, but in the same breadth of making light of something that resulted in the dehumanization of an entire group of people, he fuels pride and a sense of justification in doing so under the guise of moral righteousness. He continues on then to say that maybe these “stupid Muslims” shouldn’t have killed Jews. 

This dehumanization, selective empathy and performance of concern over Jewish people is astonishing and rooted in sinister strategy. He of course neglected the fact that there are many non-Muslim Palestinians, including several Palestinian Christians whose churches and loved ones have also been targets of airstrikes and bombs. It is obvious that he intentionally clusters all Gazans into representing and being a part of Hamas, and that he does not give a single fuck about Israel and the United Kingdom’s terrorism against Palestinians that made the state of Israel possible, and the ongoing violence that has continued since Israel’s formation in 1948 that has consisted of continuous kidnappings, legalized (and immoral and unethical) property theft and destructions from innocent Palestinian civilians, organ trafficking, rapes and other irrevocably disgusting human atrocities. Based on his rhetoric, it’s obvious that he pounced on an opportunity to demonize Muslims as a whole as violent extremists, and furthermore by insinuating that Israel’s colonization, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians is borne out of religious conflict where Muslim Palestinians are perpetual instigators against Jewish people simply for being Jewish.

In other words, apartheid, taking hostages, mass bombings, airstrikes and overall genocide is only okay in Charlie’s world as long as it’s Palestinians being harmed. As a disclaimer, I acknowledge antisemitism is very real and condemn Hamas. The reason I condemn this is because it goes against my values of valuing all human life. It is through these values that I condemn Israel and acknowledge its (intentional) role in creating Hamas and scapegoating those horrific attacks as a reason to commit genocide. And as something worth considering, Charlie’s slate isn’t clean of making antisemitic statements. I doubt he truly cared about Jewish safety.

Charlie Kirk didn’t care about the truth, and his white-supremacist, opportunistic wife Erika Kirk does not, either. Like her late husband, Erika claims status of the truth through a performance of moral righteousness, claiming that “the Lord” grants them the gifts of domination and power to serve a godly cause (hello, colonizers and their manifest destiny bullshit).

But the only people being served here are themselves– and the oppressive systems that serve them and people they consider to be worthy enough of humanization in the systemic hierarchies that require the dehumanization of others— a dangerous creation of “us” versus “them.” Many conservative Christians and non-Christian conservatives as well in the United States don’t care about true morality, ethics, freedom and justice— they claim to do, but contradict themselves by only calling for these for some, which ultimately requires dehumanizing hierarchies and erasure of people who do not fit their white supremacist standards. They just want to make sure that these labels of moral righteousness are always afforded to them, because on an existential level, they need to feel superior in order to feel secure in themselves; their supposed confidence comes from the erasure of other people. It is through the erasure of the people they dominate and steal from that they try to attain a sense of peace– because the acknowledgment of the oppressed’s full humanity is a threat to the facade of morality that they crave to have. Just look at how they whitewash brown, Middle Eastern (not to mention Palestinian) Jesus.

The irony is in how that security is rooted in an insecurity, where they end up painting themselves as the victims of the discrimination that they vehemently deny exist from their end. I just finished reading Doppelganger by Noami Klein, and she articulates this through her description of “Shadow Lands” where people in privileged groups such as white US Americans and white Canadians try to shove away and suppress acknowledgment of the violent roots of their ancestors that allowed them to be in the land they are on with the opportunities they have where they do not have to worry about something like racial discrimination. However, the denial of these violent pasts and very real parts of racist, white supremacist history and how they still systemically affect indigenous people and other people of color are still in the “shadows.” And these shadows start manifesting in the appropriation by white people such as very far right white conservatives, where they adopt concepts of oppression that marginalized groups have been vocalizing in their experiences. For example, George Floyd’s distress of saying “I can’t breathe” while facing police brutality that ultimately resulted in his death (in more accurate terms, these were George Floyd’s words as he was being murdered by a police officer, Derek Chauvin) were appropriated by white women who were enraged by mask mandates during the earlier times of the Covid pandemic. They had the audacity to downplay the importance of discussing and doing something about the systemic police brutality that exists against Black people, while stealing the last words of distress from a Black man who was being killed. This shows that George Floyd and the oppression of Black people existed in their consciousness, but it wasn’t a worthy enough cause to invest in but when it came to their personal benefit as white women, they would steal the symbolisms of freedom and human dignity that the advocacy for George Floyd and other Black people inspired and were intricately tied to, only to center themselves. This is no doubt made possible by and field by the hierarchy of white people over other people of color, and especially over Black people, in societies built with racist roots that are not properly confronted, and whose effects in the modern day are especially willfully ignored.

In this case of the Kirks, Turning Point USA and conservative US Americans including the many that identify as Christian, these Shadow Lands are undoubtedly showing. There is a long history of these doppelganger effects showing in US American conservatism, as well as blatant white supremacy, Eurocentric conservatism and their imperialisms. 

There is this huge fear-mongering of the destruction of the heterosexual, nuclear family unit. This triggers existential fears of people not continuing their bloodlines— specifically, around continuing their white bloodlines. And there is propaganda being spread around the persecution of Christians for simply being Christians and having their own beliefs. In reality, white supremacist Christian nationalists are trying to claim the status of oppression for not being allowed to oppress. They’re the ones who impose Christian theology on non-Christians and want to vote against gay marriages despite no one forcing them to leave their Christianty or to have a gay marriage themselves; ultimately, they are disturbed that they don’t have to ability to control how other people believe in religion (or don’t) or express their sexualitities. The basis of their oppression is from the lack of having control over other people. There is the claim that systemically, Christians are being barred from their religious freedom for being “forced” to coexist with what is unfamiliar to them. The existence of ethnic diversity as well as queer people and queer relationships are seen as wrong for simply making them uncomfortable. It’s laughable when this is considered in the context of the right declaring themselves the side of facts, where “facts don’t care about your feelings.” They shun people’s identities and experiences, often gaslighting them, while demanding attention and dominance of their own bigotry and expecting people to cater to them. 

Also important to mention is the laughable idea where Charlie Kirk claims that Islam is incompatible with the West, while always lauding Christianity as a blueprint for the United States as superior, and the ultimate way of morality where ethics are taken for granted. Now I myself am not religious– I have written about my reasons for leaving Islam in my essay, God Over Religion: I Left Islam, but I Also Didn’t and have criticized the Qur’an for having a patriarchal bias here in my essay, Marginalization of Women in the Qur’an. While I have many criticisms of Islam, I also acknowledge the ways in which it has positively contributed to people and societies. Growing up among various Muslim communities myself and having several Muslim friends and family members, while I have my disagreements with certain ideologies such as ones around purity culture and there being mainly man prophets, I know that religiosity is a spectrum and that there are many ways of interpreting it. Just because something is traditionally popular also doesn’t make it legitimate, and many religious people can agree with me. Similarly, I see many beautiful things derived from Christianity and Judaism. But it is laughable to assume that Christianity is more compatible with the west than Islam because it advocates violence and oppression against others. In fact, it is utterly ironic. Have a lot of these people even read the Bible and actually sat with the violence depicted and justified within it— at least from widely accepted translations? Many of the criticisms I have of Christianity and Judaism— namely violent verses that can easily be weaponized out of context, gatekeeping of women’s rights, slavery including sexual slavery of women, male centrism where women are not given equal recognition for their labor and are often scapegoated for the downfall of men, and more. Charlie criticizes Islam for restricting free speech and for being radical and violent. It is obvious that Kirk only has a problem with religious extremism when he is not part of the group conducting it. In Charlie and his white supremacist posse’s world, spectrums of religious practice and varieties of religious interpretation and practice are only valid of consideration when it’s their religion that need defending. Apologetics are okay for Christianityy and Judaism, but not Islam. Similarly, United States’ and Europe’s violence against people of color is morally righteous, and violence including rape by white men are excusable, but defense from people affected by these violence are considered immoral and make the resisting people “uncivilized.” The burden of immorality is deflected from the oppressor onto the oppressed.

Another narrative I’m sick of— the idea of the United States and Europe as civilized while pillaging the deemed “uncivilized” people they harm and take from, too often appropriating and “discovering” what rightfully belongs to the ones they oppress and shun. A classic case of valuing people’s culture but not them. I can’t help but think of Israel’s stealings of Palestinian culture— their food and fashion— and claiming it as their own with the simultaneous rendering of Palestinians as inherently evil, disgusting, less than human.

Charlie was a proponent of ICE’s inhumanity towards immigrants, willfully ignorant of social inequalities and an enthusiastic spreader of the denial of various systems of oppression that called out white supremacy. He even goes as far to call the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a mistake, unapologetically defending his stance (unsurprisingly reflected by several other statements he’s made throughout his career). He and Erika hold this air of moral righteousness, shared with their supporters, calling for freedom and well-being of people especially rooted in Christian faith, while actively harboring dehumanization of marginalized people. This sense of moral righteousness from conservatives, including many times religious conservatives, as I have written about in my essay, Morality Without Ethics, claims the status of humanity and ethics through explicitly worded values of humanity while not living up in integrity through other words and actions. For example, many conservatives say that they “don’t see color” or that they don’t want to differentiate and discriminate based on race because it’s important to them that people don’t get what they claim to be “special treatment,” especially when they believe that those are people of color; simultaneously, they deny racist structures and attitudes that demonize people of color that put them [POC] at disadvantages for safety and well-being. It’s incredibly dishonest, ignorant and sinister to say that you’re worried about people getting special treatment while also saying that you are against the Civil Rights Act— it just makes it obvious you never cared about equality in the first place, with racism not being a concern in the first place.

In reality, it’s not that many of them deny these things exist for people of color and other discrimination against other marginalized groups exists– they don’t see it as a real enough problem. They don’t care to acknowledge these being more than an anomaly. Or, they know that these discriminations exist but believe that they are justified; they don’t want the label of racists, misogynists and classists and the weight that they hold, so they try to explain their association to these labels instead to dilute the reality of their bigotry thinking it will lessen the blow of the seriousness of the single word. As if nuance of their bigotry will absolve them from the moral wrongs of their ideologies. They try to evade the moral stains that these labels reveal while still perpetuating the ideologies that are in alignment to them. Charlie Kirk and his legacy, which again is promoted by conservative supporters of him as peaceful dialogue, is an ultimate example of this; he said dangerous things in a conversational (at many times smug and disrespectful tone, even if not always) way to promote the illusion of peace and mutual respect. Sure, he didn’t shout explicitly fascist things (at least not all the time)– but he did explain them in a calm, sometimes nonchalant, other times passionately conversational manner. Not pointing at a person of color and calling them names doesn’t mean you aren’t racist— being ignorant of their full human presence and erasing their personhood as you take from them; ignoring their existence and how your privilege and actions affect them also make you racist.

Explaining your bigotry in a “normal” tone of voice, being inviting towards people who oppose your fascist beliefs, does not make you “civil.” Civil dialogue in this context of calm, “normal” conversation does not grant you moral and especially not ethical status– or at least, it doesn’t do so when what you are actually saying and the effects it has are inciting and reinforcing dehumanization and human rights violations. 

Your racism isn’t any less problematic or demonizing towards people of color just because you explain it in a hushed way and make space for a person of color in your audience to ask their questions and share their perspectives; especially not when your behavior contradicts with the ideologies you are expressing where it is clear you do not believe them to be as worthy of their freedom based on your racialized classification of them. Your misogyny, though shy of bluntness, isn’t any less malicious as you express admiration for young adult girls and women who want to be homemakers and mothers in a way that demonizes girls and women who don’t have those same desires and want to prioritize their career or other life passions instead; you are still showing that you put women in patriarchal hierarchies that laud women who fit an image of submission to men. To be clear, I’m not saying that all women who are mothers and homemakers are oppressed, but that the imposition of these as superior roles for women and indicative of “true” womanhood by people like Charlie is oppressive and is done with the purpose of demonizing women who choose a different path because it threatens patriarchal structures where women are not given a choice. I’m also not implying that a woman being in these traditional roles are automatically submissive to men and void of an equal, mutually respecting and mutually benefitting partnership. The sinister intentions of this right wing agenda is made clear to control women through the antagonization and humiliation of women who don’t choose the traditional paths, while pushing for women who do choose that path to fit into a very specific box where autonomy is not made accessible to them. That is where the danger and dehumanization, coupled with infantilization, lie. That is where it is made obvious that the well-being and genuine satisfaction of women are not being considered– it is about making women fit the ideal that serves men who want to benefit from these patriarchal controls, whether that is something that they desire or not. The happiness and satisfaction of women who are genuinely happy with the traditional roles are weaponized to promote the lie that all women would be the most fulfilled in these roles, and have the same privilege and safety. With the idealization of this selective narrative, confirmation bias is promoted to suggest that this is the expected norm that will result if you are just the right kind of Western patriarchally submissive, feminine woman, rather than considering the dangers and limitations of women who are exploited in these situations. 

What I see very often also is the cherry picking of a value from one context to be inserted into a different context to prove the justification of the latter context in accordance with the reasoning from the initial one. And of course, when there is a lack of regard for science as is common within the conservative and especially religious dynamics where science is weaponized (often inaccurately) to encourage an oppressive ideal, there is very often conflation of correlation with causation. As a disclaimer, I’m not saying that this is exclusive to the right wing, conservative sides and that the left is never guilty of this. I am saying that the right side’s disregard for scientific truth in prioritization of their agenda or validating their biases often results in inaccurate depictions of science and reality. 

In the case of conservative, ultra right wing sides, one example is how feminism is undermined as being a movement rooted in misandry. There is the very general, explicit definition of feminism declaring a belief of equality among sexes and genders where patriarchal oppression causing inequality is acknowledged, and then there are the feminist movements themselves that supposedly draw from these definitions. Right wingers will often claim that feminism is extreme or not needed any longer, saying that the pendulum has far too far where feminism was birthed for women’s rights and now it is about women dominating men. They try to support this by victimizing men, saying that feminism is a threat to men’s reputations, putting them at risk for being publicly accused of sexual harassment and assaults against women. I do want to acknowledge that this does happen, unfortunately, by some women where they wrongly accuse men for personal, egotistical reasons; however, this is not a systemic issue and neither is it something that happens super often. Yes, those innocent men do not deserve to be wrongly accused. And at the same time, the men who are guilty do deserve to be held accountable, and their victims, women, other men or children, do deserve to receive justice. The weaponization of a very real, needed cause by not in good faith instigators is disgusting, and they are ultimately on the same team as the real perpetrators, acting in alignment with them to undermine the seriousness of the real issues of patriarchal violence that need to be fought. With that being said, feminism is still very much needed. Victims still largely do not receive justice; women are most often the victims of sexual abuse from men. Women can also be abusers against boys and men, even if this is not on a systemic level like patriarchy; however, patriarchy enables the dismissal of victims who are men whether the abuse they receive comes from men or women. The root of men being accused of sexual violence, most of the time against women, isn’t a result of women being out to get men— the root of it is the patriarchal justification and ensuing allowing of sexual violence itself, something that is too often downplayed thanks to patriarchal systems.

So how does this serve as an example for the cherry picking of some valid thing from one context to another?

Like I stated earlier, it is a valid issue that some women weaponize feminism to villainize innocent men. But in the cases of conservative dismissals of feminism and the reality of systemic oppression of women under patriarchy, the context of wrongness in this situation is used to justify the wrongness of feminism overall, carrying over the context of lying in outlier situations to contexts of systemic, and unfortunately commonplace situations of men’s sexual violence against women. There is the intended distraction of the lie that feminism exists to oppress and demonize men so that women victims and supporters of these women are antagonized in relation to actual women who have weaponized feminism, away from the men perpetrators whose horrific actions have given women reason to stand up for themselves and others in the first place. There is an intended erasure of the root perpetrator, and ultimately history, so that a patriarchally sympathetic, manufactured reality can be favored to claim moral grounds against women’s autonomy and liberation. Ultimately, to no surprise, the purpose is to undermine women’s struggles at the hands of men, painting women victims as noncredible sources and men as victims of undeserved vitriol. 

Another example is how the existence of systemic racism and its harmful effects on people of color on individual and collective levels is downplayed and outright denied. People in denial and ignorance will use examples of people of color with wealth and career success to justify the idea that racism no longer exists. Or, they may use examples of criminals who happen to be immigrants of color to assert that allowing immigrants to come or stay within the country will increase crime, not just generalizing immigrants of color with the purpose of dehumanization with racist biases, but also to deflect from normalized violence from white men in professional and political spaces (such as that of our rapist president Trump). 

These examples again demonstrate how violence from the oppressors is deemed okay and “normal”-- the natural, moral order of things (while of course separating ethics from said “morality”) and how resistance to that oppression, being on the side of humanity and ethics, is deemed “evil” and “immoral”— even “demonic.” The terms of “sexism” and “racism” carry the weight of their inherent evils, and the United States nationalists and ultra conservative sides want to exercise such evils of bigotry while rejecting the ethical and therefore moral violations of these. In other words, they want the “freedom” of bigotry and oppression, calling it that term of “freedom” and claiming the status of it on the grounds of equality and humanity while acting entitled in going against freedom and human equality through dynamics of domination rooted in systemic oppression.

In another example, again tying it back to the case of Erika Kirk and Charlie Kirk’s promoted conservative ideologies, I want to mention the dichotomy of how the ideal woman is painted. Ideal women in conservative, or at least in ultra conservative ideologies, are painted as wives, mothers and homemakers married to men, who they are submissive to. They do not have a career outside of the home, and they certainly do not prioritize it. Their sphere is to take care of the home while the man takes care outside of the home and by providing for his family. Now in and of itself, a traditional heterosexual nuclear family is not necessarily oppressive. But deeming it as the ideal for everyone and imposing that ideal, shaming women who do not conform to it, reveals a harmful and sinister agenda. It shows that, contrary to the consideration and overall well-being of women, it is order and structure that are given the utmost importance to. It’s about molding women to fit these norms, rather than figuring out which ways to best help women self-activate and find fulfillment. I made a YouTube video delving into this titled “Why even LIBERAL women fall for trad wife propaganda”, where I talk about how the trad wife movement is often appealing to women from various parts of the political spectrum because of the validation they receive for needs and desires that are otherwise minimized or not addressed. For example, women who genuinely want to be a homemaker and perhaps a mother may receive vitriol from men who accuse them of being golddiggers (with no respect or consideration for her labor inside of the home, and even moreso with raising kids on top of that) and from women who accuse her of not having a sense of self or autonomy for having these specific domestic dreams. Many of these women with these specific desires then get lured into ultra right wing, conservative validation that tells them that they are valid for not wanting to work outside of their home and that what they do inside of the home is valuable and important to society. The root problem here isn’t that all women are naturally inclined to stay at home or be mothers and are being brainwashed to have financial independence and a career separate from her relationship to a husband or father– the problem here is that patriarchal devaluation in the context of capitalistic devaluation of people and relationships and relational labor is taking place both within liberal and conservative spaces; they are often showing up differently, but share a lot more in common than are very often realized. Also in Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger, which I incorporate into my video, is the concept of “Diagonal Politics.” This is the term she coins to describe this phenomena of one side of the political spectrum noticing where there are gaps of validation and answers to questions and concerns missing on the opposing side, where the former appeals to people on the latter side, leading them to cross over and switch sides. To illustrate this further, I’ll give the opening example Klein gave in her book of the pandemic and divisions regarding the Covid vaccines. The United States and Canada saw a lot of conversions of people from considering themselves left leaning and others apolitical only to be converted over to the ultra right wing sides. Initially, these people had become anxious about the public mandates requiring social distancing, masks and vaccines. When they asked valid questions– such as potential side effects of the vaccine for example– they were often shunned or those concerns were not properly addressed by others whom they identified with on the same side of their initial left leaning political spectrum. The ultra conservative actors like Steve Bannon noticed this, and pounced on the opportunity to extend connection to them through displayed empathy and validation. This led to left leaning principles of preserving humanity and advocating for universal human rights to be molded to fit ultra-conservative ideologies that acted against humanity and human rights; for example, mandated mask requirements for public spaces were painted as sources of control often being disgustingly likened to the Holocaust, despite those mandates being there to protect human safety, including that of especially immunocompromised individuals.

The privileged became victimized in this sense, antagonizing the actual people at risk for danger. This is a common tale persisting throughout the fascist conservatism that plagues the United States and other white-supremacist Western countries today. 

As Naomi Klein discusses extensively in Doppelganger, the pandemic caused shock and a sense of chaos for many in the United States and Canada because there was no escaping the interconnectedness of the individual, the rest of the world and the systems embedded into our lives. The comforting hyper-individaulistic myth that you as an individual are only responsible for yourself and are in full control of yourself despite external factors was a rug harshly pulled under from people who had been able to stay blissfully ignorant in their privileged bubbles about how 1) they are responsible whether indirectly or directly on the well beings of others and 2) how they are also affected by external factors outside of their control. The switch from not having to worry about the convenience of consumerism and freedom that is wrought from the oppression of others was more easily ignorable, but the pandemic shattered that peace by having more laws and regulations in place to enforce collective accountability. In a further reflection, this is a reason why I believe that the online Western New Age space was so popular, particularly on social media. There was this emphasis on individual control and internal states affecting people’s physical realities, with a willful ignorance of the role of external factors. In 2021 and 2022, being at a low point in my life, I had fallen dangerously into these spaces that taught me harmful beliefs about money and realtionships. Not all of the things I learned were harmful— with money, it is important to have an abundance mindset, sure, but without going to extremes where you assume that you will make back thousands of dollars you “invest” in a manifestation course in time to pay off your bills. With relationships, it is necessary to cut certain people off, especially if they are toxic and even more so if they are abusive— but you also have to consider your safety in how you go about doing it and how essential it is to have social support systems during challenging times. Unfortunately, these spaces largely emphasized a sense of control that individuals did not have— and alongside it, they promoted dangerous psuedoscientific ideologies that downplayed the identities and experiences of queer people and neurodivergent people. Doppelganger talks about how the online health and fitness space garnered a lot of attention during the pandemic, tying it to this sense of control needed when times especially made individuals feel out of control. It’s unsurprising when I look back during my own struggles during those couple of years and remember seeing a lot of people in these Western New Age circles that I was mutuals with or followed make posts or have in their circles people who were proponents of psudeoscience that were aligned with ignorance of systems of oppression and rooted in bigoted ideologies. Realizing these led me to distnacing myself from these groups.

Back to the case of the ideal woman and regarding the topic of Erika and Charlie Kirk, the career woman is painted as the villain. She does not put her family first, and her career becomes a replacement for her family; however, when a man works outside of the home and is making money to provide for his family, that is viewed as honorable. A man’s quest for financial independence and autonomy is a given, but a woman’s quest for that stability for herself is immoral and harmful towards others– especially for children (nevermind the harms of absent, neglectful, abusive or workaholic fathers on children). It is expected and require that a true family woman, and a “real” woman in general, must secure financial resources and stability indirectly from the provisions of a man. A man is entitled to his own identity, while a woman is pathalogized for having her own identity outside of her association to others.

It’s interesting that US Western conservatism lauds capitalism where dehumanization is inherent and profit over people is an inherent motto, yet women expressing and going after their own dreams in alignment with capitalistic ideals are shamed. When men have their own capitalist dreams, it is assumed that they are contributing to their family in a selfless way through a selfish dream (though still they will not be labeled as selfish). In other words, men’s selfishness is deemed beneficial to society, whereas a woman’s selfishness is deemed detrimental. This shows how again, morality is assumed in the hierarchical structures that keep men in power through the idealization of patriarchy. There is the grace for a man putting profit over people— including his own nuclear family— while there is the shunning of a woman who makes prioritizes her career, period. Even deeper, a woman who prioritizes herself is deemed as evil. In the eyes of US conservatism, profit over people is only okay when a powerful man is doing it.

The antagonization of a financially independent woman is strategic as it is sinister. It paints the ideal image of a healthy nuclear family as a morally and ethically fulfilling guarantee, placing women and children in vulnerable positions in the hands of men. This is in tandem with discouraging women from careers and financial autonomy which would give them security if something happens to them or their children where they are being endangered by the male “head of the household” or if something happens to the “head of the household.” It is also infantilization of grown women at its finest. This further goes to show how women and children are used as sources of existential fulfillment for men borne out of selfishness. It is true that there are many conservative men who genuinely do care about their spouses and children even if they are ignorant to (or even justifying of) other dehumanizing policies that do not personally affect them or their families. However, for the men and other conservatives who wish for a family for these selfish reasons for their identity and continued importance beyond their own life through offspring, they are not providing simply out of selflessness or moral values, especially when ethics comprises that morality. These kinds of men want to have the status of a man who has a wife and kids, but do not want to have the role of being a good husband and good father. After all, they delegate the spousal and child-rearing duties, in addition to the domestic duties, to their wives claiming exemption on the basis of having already worked outside of the home (nevermind that relationships require mutual presence and that a woman is toiling away day and night while her husband gets to separate work from home).

We see also how Charlie Kirk went around to college campus, places of education, and actively told young, impressionable women to prioritize being wives and mothers rather than students and people with careers. We see Erika Kirk continuing this endangering legacy, imploring women to save their career for later while saving their younger years to bear and raise children with husbands. 

This is especially more sinister given her own hypocrisy– being five years older than her deceased husband and having had various careers and continuing to parade herself in the same boss babe manner she and her supporters criticize other women for and discourage them from, Erika Kirk does not practice what she preaches. She bathes in the security and autonomy of safety nets, as well as indulging in the motivations of financial gain, that she claims repeatedly are so destructive to women and families and society as a whole. 

Maybe being a career woman is not what the right is shunning after all– 

It’s not being a pick me where men get to gatekeep your rights. Especially when those men are white men. 

Maybe it’s less about whether women are in or outside of the home, and more about how well they will adjust themselves to be instruments to be used by men who want to uphold patriarchy.

Because that’s what career women like Erika and other MAGA women have in common– they are happy with the privileges and status given to them by white men and revel in the benefits of those privileges, and don’t care about the control and vitriol these men target towards women who aren’t submissive to their control and gatekeeping. They praise these men for “giving” them rights, but fail to criticize them for assuming entitlement over the giving and taking of rights over human beings, in this case being women, in the first place. 

A similar concept goes for the entitlement to gatekeeping human rights in other intersections. For the United States, there is an assumed ownership and entitlement to the lives and well beings of others– especially when they do not fit the white supremacist standards. Or it is because they assume ownership over others in the first place that they think they have any right to impose Eurocentric, white-supremacist standards of sophistication onto those who do not fit this mold, deeming the “others” broken and in need of fixing. The United States claims entitlement to violating and pillaging other countries, especially where the citizens are people of color, in the name of morality, on ethical grounds of humanity where security, family and freedom are concerned for their own right to exist is is considered– but when there is resistance or if the same was to be done to them, then they would call it terrorisms. They claim impunity to the label of being a criminal and terrorist, especially where white people and especially white men are the main characters. When white Europeans and white Americans colonize, they are fulfilling a divine calling; when people of color immigrate to the countries of their oppressors seeking escape from danger or just better lives in general without wishing harm on others, they are regarded as rule breakers and criminals, people who are not worthy of having accessibility to the lands of people who claimed entitlement to ownership over their own (no matter the fact that in the context of the United States and Canada and a number of other Western countries, these bigots are only there due to the domination over the actual native peoples of that land). According to these white-centric ideologies, when Islam is weaponized to justify Osama bin Laden’s terrorism against Americans, Islam is the cause of the terrorism; when Christianity is weaponized to justify the genocides and destructions of Native Americans and Black people and other people of color both within and outside of the United States, it is either 1) an anomaly and not reflective of the “true” Christianity or 2) morally and ethically sound since the “others” are criminals and evil people anyway and therefore white Christians do not deserve the heavy label of “terrorism.”

In conclusion, existential anxieties from oppressors manifest as a desire to erase what does not seem familiar or confirming of their realities and worldviews, leading them to lose a sense of stability that they wish to distance themselves from. This is regarding a concept called “cosmic self worth,” a term coined by Dr. Edward Weisband, one of my favorite college professors during my undergraduate years at Virginia Tech. This term refers to the existential need and desire for human beings to have meaning and significance beyond their lifetime. In other words, humans want to feel that they will be important even after their deaths, through pieces of their identity that will transcend their individual selves. When the roots of those identities feel threatened, then they want to get rid of the source of these threats. For instance, in the case of honor killings, people kill women whom they believe to contaminate their cultural communities with the “moral stain” of having romantic or sexual outside of the bond of a marriage. There is this idea that getting rid of that specific woman will “purify” the community again and keep the culture “clean,” ensuring its preservation. In the case of genocides, majority groups, usually consisting of the oppressors and privileged in society, will set out to dehumanize and destroy minority groups, believing that the destruction of them will ensure the significance or “cosmic worth” of the groups that they established themselves to be part of. These existential anxieties are often framed as moral causes rooted in preserving humanity, when really it's about preserving identity in a way where there is superiority in a hierarchy where some people are deemed unworthy of being considered human. There is this idea that worthiness of humanness is a competition— a scarcity. Having significance is a scarcity. It’s important that we continue to challenge the fascist notions that downplay Western violence and do not fall for the propaganda in promotion of the double standards where certain lives are valued over those of others. Violence is violence regardless– and resistance to oppression is a defensive approach, not an offensive one which is what oppressors want to promote. As obvious things need to be stated often, fascism does not get to have the moral and ethical integrity of defense that its enactors and supporters claim. Morality cannot exist without ethics, and moral righteousness is a farce when it calls for social hierarchies.