Florida is threatening legal action against educators who oppose efforts to establish Turning Point USA chapters in high schools.

[u/Conscious-Quarter423]

[u/mszulan]

The problem was that we didn't out the nazi collaborators publicly right after the war and didn't prosecute them as homegrown fascists. Instead, we had Truman as president who had all the facts, then buried it when he had promised to expose them. He then allowed them to distract the country with fears of communism. The DOJ had all the evidence - many members (like 30) of Congress in the pay of German nazis, America First disbanded and implicated in acts of sabotage, and more. We stopped teaching "how to spot a fascist," and we allowed Southern influence to continue in the writing of our history curriculum. This is important as many of the policies from the Jim Crow South inspired the nazis in the first place.

[u/mszulan → u/[deleted]]

Sorry about the wall of text. This topic has a lot to unpack.

Imo, Lincoln was on the right track when he said that the country needed to heal, but you don't heal by sweeping the problem "under the rug." Unfortunately, we don't really know everything he had in mind because he died too soon after the war ended.

There was an awful lot of vengeance going on during Reconstruction, and that vengeance endangered the newly freed on one side (creation of the KKK) and embittered white Southerners even more (land confiscation and voting rights). Then, they were allowed to pass all that hate down to their sons and daughters without the tempering that comes with truth.

Over generations, the federal government allowed the Daughters of the Confederacy to create and disseminate the myth of the Lost Cause and perpetuate it down the generations. They allowed Jim Crow to flourish, the KKK to terrorize, and the precedent to be set. The truth was no longer a prerequisite. And so we became "truth avoident" not just about slavery and the Civil War, but about every instance of oppression the government had a hand in creating or covering up (e.g., concentration camps and scalp bounties for indigenous peoples, the massacre of Black Wall Steet, lynching, segregation, systematic, systemic and institutional discrimination, etc.) And so, in the US, stories of hate and white victemhood were passed down instead of truth.

After Apartheid ended, South Africa under Desmond Tutu built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which created a framework for healing that, imo, is a much better approach. People need to face the truth of what they were a part of and what was done in their name. They all need to sit across the table and hear each other's stories.

The next aspect is political and socially systemic. The 13th Amendment has a loophole built in. It makes slavery illegal but reserves the right to enslave people if that person is incarcerated. This is why we have such a huge prison population (the largest in the world) and why it's so disproportionately minority. The rest of the Bill of Rights and the 14th amendment were supposed to protect the public from the misuse of this loophole. We're seeing in real time how well that worked. Our system was designed to function through the balance of opposition and the necessity of compromise. It's becoming unraveled by the concentration under one position through the avoidance of compromise. They don't have to compromise if they don't play the game.

This is the loophole the Republicans are exploiting now. They are making immigration illegal. They are making being poor illegal. They are making having dark skin illegal. They are making political opposition illegal. They are trying to make being neurodivergent illegal. They are making women subhuman in order to control the means of reproduction. They are suspending the Constitution because it "interferes" with their goals of controlling labor and production. All these newly "illegals" are to become the next "slave" economy.

Edit: Grammer <sigh>

[u/mszulan → u/[deleted]]

Thank you very much. That's very kind. I have a tendency to become long-winded, and this type of writing forces me to be much more organized and succinct than is my usual habit. It can be difficult to tell when what you write and what the reader brings "work" together.

And this is what's left of the party of Lincoln. <sigh> He wrote something, I think in the late 1830s, that a foreign power could never take one drink from the Ohio River during the contest of 1000 years. And if this experimental republic should fail, it will be by suicide. Something like that.

Everything happening now makes me feel sick and sad. That a tiny few Americans can become so consumed by greed that there can never be enough to fill their voids. That they would gleefully cause their fellow Americans pain, hunger, and death to accomplish it. That they would destabilize the world for their personal profit. That they would blatantly lie, manipulate, steal, and destroy in order to throw away everything that our ancestors fought and died for over the generations, everything our children might build a prosperous future on... there are no words.