Brownish smoke tumbled over Persimmon Ridge. Standing on her farm in the South Carolina Upstate, a concerned citizen took pictures of the smoke, along with something else that had caught her eye in the bright blue sky: Crisscrossing white lines of condensation.

The plume of brownish smoke was from a wildfire burning in nearby Table Rock State Park, caused by careless hikers who had lit a fire during a drought in March 2025. The fire had burned more than 4,000 acres at the time she took the photo, and it would go on to burn another 12,000 before it was contained by firefighters, rainfall, and a shift in the wind.

The white lines had a simple explanation too. They were condensation trails left by the engines of passing aircraft, composed mainly of water that froze into crystals in low temperatures at high altitude. But that explanation didn’t satisfy the concerned citizen.1

“Check out 2 planes dripping chemtrails over the same area! Pure evil,” she wrote on Facebook, via an account she had recently used in a successful run for Greenville County Council. She shared several photos of the skyline, along with screenshots from the Flightradar24 app showing a flight path.

“I tracked the plane back to where they took off near Folly Beach and came the way here to dump the chemicals … Wished someone would meet them at the airport when they return!” She later claimed she could smell the chemicals from her porch, could feel them causing her skin to tingle when she stepped outside, could see them causing her horses’ eyes to water.

The chemtrails conspiracy theory is just old enough to predate widespread consumer adoption of the internet. If you are old enough and were immersed in certain paranormal subcultures, you might have encountered this theory on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio talk show in the ‘90s. For reasons I’m going to explore today, it’s reaching fervent new audiences and a national political stage in 2026.

Adherents believe that the contrails left by a wide variety of airplanes are secretly full of chemical agents used for mind control, population control, climate manipulation, or some other wicked plot. For this to be true, government officials or other malign actors would have to be in cahoots with commercial airline pilots, flight crews, and the numerous international scientific organizations that have patiently debunked the theory again and again since the ‘90s without a single leak or whistleblower.

I first heard people talking about chemtrails at one local government meeting or another in the 2010s. Sit through the public comments at enough county council or school board meetings, and you’re liable to learn a lot about what your neighbors believe.

There was a gentleman at a Charleston City Council meeting who believed local zoning laws were part of a scheme to establish One World Government under the United Nations’ Agenda 21. The John Birch Society sent emissaries to school board meetings to explain how the Common Core curriculum was a communist brainwashing plot. A well-dressed bespectacled man has shown up for years at city council meetings to deliver inscrutable word salad about various properties, for which the mayor politely thanks him at the end of the time limit.

It was easy to dismiss the chemtrails conspiracy theory, like so many of the other ones, as a bit of harmless nonsense. These delusions weren’t hurting anything but the social lives of people who held them.

Maybe those were simpler times. Today we are living under the second presidency of a man who entered the national political scene by spreading lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Medical misinformation is directly informing national public health policy. And lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced bills to ban chemtrails.

Mainstream political candidates are running on an anti-chemtrail platform. On March 25, Paul Dans, a Republican seeking to unseat U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, shared a video from the “Wall Street Apes” Twitter account of the aforementioned concerned citizen in the Upstate testifying about chemtrails killing monarch butterflies on her property. In a quote tweet he intoned, “Stop polluting our skies. Now.”

He didn’t use the word “chemtrails,” but Nancy Mace did. The sitting Congresswoman, currently polling well as she runs for governor of South Carolina, posted a graphic on March 31 with the slogan “BAN CHEMTRAILS” superimposed on a skyline with contrails.

“As Governor, I would sign legislation into law, like Florida and Tennessee, to ban chemtrails,” she said.

It’s hard to predict what will happen when the government seeks to ban something that does not exist, but we know what conspiratorial rhetoric does to our political institutions.

Part of the allure of conspiracy theories is that they help us assign blame for real suffering. Monarch butterflies really are in danger, but not because of chemtrails — their biggest problems are habitat loss, the proliferation of certain insecticides, and climate change affecting their migration patterns.

In early 2025 there really were wildfires burning all over South Carolina, including in the vicinity of Persimmon Ridge. As climate change worsens within our lifetimes, extreme droughts and wildfires will become more common. So will hurricanes, crop failures, dust storms, and other catastrophes. There is comfort in believing that we can reverse this all by unmasking and punishing the authors of a vast conspiracy.

There are people who bear disproportionate blame for the deteriorating state of our air and ecosystems. They live in the wealthiest countries on earth, including ours. But even if we imprison fossil fuel executives, reverse the official U.S. policy of inaction on climate change, and drastically curb carbon emissions worldwide this decade, we will have already crossed several tipping points. The Atlantic Ocean will reshape or swallow cities on the east coast of the United States. The summer heat will become hostile to human life in densely populated parts of India within the next 100 years.

The existential challenge of our generation will be to prevent as many degrees of warming as possible. We are all going to suffer because of climate change, and the world’s poorest people living in tropical climates will suffer first and most. Our children will suffer more than we did. The decision of how much more they will suffer is squarely in our hands.

Looking over the mountains at a systemic crisis that is too massive for metaphors, facing difficult prospects for human life no matter what, we will face the temptation to shrink and mystify our problems with increasingly baroque conspiracy theories.

David Wallace-Wells mentioned the allure of conspiracy theories near the end of The Uninhabitable Earth, a properly ominous 2019 book summarizing scientific research on the human toll of climate change:

Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid — the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytic shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate.

How tempting it is to think that we could save species from extinction, stop the bleaching of coral reefs off the coast of Australia, and reverse the melting of the polar ice caps just by stopping some small cabal of people responsible for spraying doomsday chemicals from airplanes. How nauseating it is to realize that the doomsday chemicals are the ones we ourselves burn every day, whether to fuel our cars or to cool our homes in the rising summer heat.

***

In other news, I’ve podcasted again. As part of my day job I co-host the While I Breathe podcast, focused on the people struggling for liberation in South Carolina. The latest episode, “Reconstruction Radicals,” is an interview with the historian Robert Greene II about the historical period that occupies my thoughts on a weekly basis. Check it out here or just search for “While I Breathe” wherever you listen to podcasts.

In case you missed it, I also recorded a podcast with my pal the sportswriter Mike Baumann, reviving our tradition of exchanging unusual and evocative Wikipedia articles. The latest episode of the Brutal South podcast is here, and it is very silly.

Discursive, self-indulgent, and inconsiderate of the audience’s time or interests, it’s everyone’s favorite Brutal South tradition: The exchange of rare and unusual Wikipedia articles with my pal the sportswriter Michael Baumann. Find him on Fangraphs where he writes about baseball, on Medium @wheelysports, and on Bluesky @baumann.bsky.social

I needed this. Maybe you did too.

The episode art is a photo by Nathanmcginty via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Yesterday was September 11th and I had a long drive across the state for my job. Like I do every year, I listened to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and thought about my country.

The Loops are a five-hour piece of music with a backstory that sounds like an overwrought metaphor. The story goes like this: In the summer of 2001, Basinski, the composer, was out of work and facing eviction in New York City. He decided to go into his studio and try digitizing some old recordings he’d made in the ‘80s.

One by one, he loaded short tape loops he’d recorded from an “easy listening” radio station onto the deck and hit play. But the tapes were falling apart. He could see bits of iron oxide flecking off into little piles, and he could hear the sound warping beyond recognition. He decided to let the loops play continuously and record what happened.

He did this for hours with various tapes, listening to things fall apart, and realized he had struck on something interesting. He arrived at a finished product on September 11th, 2001.

Most years on the anniversary, I only listen to the first hour or so — enough to get me through my morning correspondence, then on to something a little more lively. This year I drove for hours and let the Loops keep playing.

The most recognizable melody on the first track consisted of five notes, repeated over and over on what sounded like horns. At first the notes bled into each other under the dunk-tank of reverb that Basinski applied to the recording. Around the 18-minute mark, a gap started to open up, like someone had drawn a rest into the sheet music.

Then the melody pulled apart even more. I noticed what sounded like a new grace note that wasn’t there earlier, filling in the gaps. Assuming Basinski was honest about his methods, he didn’t add this himself. It must have been there on the tape all along, a little wrinkle I couldn’t detect at first.

I swerved around a pothole on a shot-to-shit stretch of Interstate 26, drew a breath, and tried listening closely again. Now there were new percussive sounds, irregular and distant booms, overtaking the breathy horn melody. I thought about a veteran I met once who fought in Iraq. He told me about nights in Tikrit when random volleys of mortar and rocket fire kept him awake all night, smoking cigarettes and wondering if he was about to die.

Of course Basinski didn’t mean to evoke that sound. He didn’t mean anything, really, or couldn’t have known what the piece would mean to people. He’d been futzing around with tapes for a while and this was what came out. Because of the release date, people have read all sorts of meaning into his work.

Basinski himself was the first person to associate The Disintegration Loops with the September 11th attacks. Later, in the documentary Other Music, he talked about debuting the piece to his friends:

“We saw the top of the South Tower crack off and fall from my building, and then we ran upstairs. So we turned on The Disintegration Loops really loud, just went up on the roof and just sat there looking at this new landscape.”

Or, as the story was mythologized by the music critic Michael Heumann in Stylus magazine:

He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another.

There aren’t a lot of commercial prospects for avant-garde and ambient music, but Basinski apparently did a brisk business selling CD-R copies of The Disintegration Loops in the early 2000s. The four-album set has sold out in multiple formats since then, including luxe vinyl reissues.

“It just took off and it saved my life,” Basinski told NPR.

People have their own ways of processing grief. Maybe you see me rambling about experimental music on the anniversary of a world-historical tragedy and you think of me the same way I think of people who can sing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” without irony. To each their own.

People talk about the mournful quality of The Disintegration Loops, and it’s certainly there. Some years I find the music meditative. I practice box breathing and deep breathing while I listen, and the sound is a soothing one.

This year the music felt menacing. On the first track, “DLP 1.1,” I noticed when a new percussive noise broke in, then stretched out to a reptilian hiss that reminded me of a Penderecki piece from The Shining. A human, vocal sound was being overtaken by an inhuman sound. On “DLP 4,” a warm bath of easy-listening nostalgia was interrupted by spats of crackling static, cutting in and out until the music finally gave up and died.

Twenty-four years out, this was a particularly bleak anniversary. The disintegration that started after 9/11 has picked up speed. Mainstream politicians and pundits are cheering for secret police, forced disappearances, ethnic cleansing, genocide, wars of aggression, and military occupations of American cities. Rampant Islamophobia is as much a driving force in our politics today as it was when FBI informants got caught spying in mosques. This is who we as a country chose to be in the near quarter-century since terror returned to our shores. It is not who we have to be.

On September 12th, 2001, we began to hear stories about the rescuers. Americans performed great acts of courage, caring, and solidarity. But it was also the day when we began to dissolve our democratic institutions. Congresswoman Barbara Lee pleaded with her colleagues while casting the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force on September 14th, 2001: “Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

We surrendered the power to declare wars to a president who launched invasions based on lies and killed millions. We embraced torture. We created whole new departments to surveil us and violate human rights in what we ominously christened the “Homeland.” We built a secret police force readymade for an even less scrupulous administration to use and abuse.

I was thinking yesterday about how Basinski’s tapes from the ‘80s are ruined beyond recognition. They’re more dust than tape now. He couldn’t restore them if he wanted to.

A lot of people and institutions and beliefs I held dear are gone now, too. They are ruined. That’s it. We can make something new, but there is no going back to whatever goodness we had in the world, or believed we had in the world.

***

The Disintegration Loops are available on Bandcamp (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

One way you can help protect your neighbors is by volunteering with an ICE hotline in your area. If you happen to live in the Charleston area, ours is seeking verifiers and hotline operators. Find more information at facebook.com/CHSHotline or @chs_hotline on Instagram.

On August 12, 2017, the American neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. rammed a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters at a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When police caught up with Fields, his car still had blood and flesh on it, according to local newspaper The Daily Progress. Fields sat on the ground in handcuffs, said he was sorry, and asked if everyone was OK. When the officer told Fields that he had killed a woman, Fields began to cry.

By the time of Fields’ terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others, reactionary lawmakers in several states had already introduced bills to reduce or eliminate liability for people who ran over protesters with their cars — but they blanched at the news from Charlottesville. As the president walked back his public support for “very fine people” among the assorted white supremacists and neo-Confederates that day, legislators sheepishly abandoned their bills. Of the eight initial driver liability bills introduced in the states, none passed.

But lawmakers did not abandon their dream of using vehicular manslaughter to stifle political speech. They just waited a few years.

In response to the new wave of protests following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, legislative bodies in at least 11 states introduced 18 new bills to reduce liability for people who run over protesters with their cars. Car rammings became a regular occurrence at racial justice protests. Now four states have laws on the books granting criminal or civil immunity to motorists who hit protesters with their cars, according to the US Protest Law Tracker: Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, the historian Robert O. Paxton describes a series of “dress rehearsals” (161) that prepared footsoldiers and everyday people to accept a program of mass murder. I think about the killing of Heather Heyer as one such rehearsal in our country. In the six-and-a-half years since the attack, not only did state governments begin to rationalize and legalize vehicular assaults on protesters, but a large portion of the general public seemed to get a libidinal thrill out of fantasizing about it. Look around on the highway today and you may still see vehicles with an “All Lives Splatter” sticker on the rear window.

“Local eruptions of vigilantism by party militants were encouraged by the language of Nazi leaders and the climate of toleration for violence they established,” Paxton writes. “The Nazi state, in turn, kept channeling the undisciplined initiatives of party militants into official policies applied in an orderly fashion.” (158)

Fascism has taken many forms in many countries. Paxton explains that most of these forms, from the cryptofascism of Austria’s Jörg Haider to the Catholic integralism of Brazil’s Ação Integralista Brasileira, did not reach the heights of power or the depths of depravity of their Italian and German counterparts. I want to be careful to say that there is no equivalence in scale between what our country is doing now and the Nazis’ genocide of European Jews.

The threat of fascism has been here for a long time, though. Each generation has to meet that threat and defeat it.

I am not going to try classifying the United States by Paxton’s rubric of fascism1 today. Neither am I interested in convincing current participants in the nationalist-authoritarian project that they are fascists. I am only trying to identify what some of our fellow Americans have been rehearsing, in some cases since the country’s founding, so that the rest of us can prepare for what they do next.

“The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy,” Paxton writes elsewhere, “brings us close to the heart of fascism.” (84)2

Terror

“The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism,” Paxton writes. He cites the Ku Klux Klan as possibly “the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism,” before such phenomena swept across every European country in the 20th century. One proto-fascist leader, the French street gang thug Marquis de Morès, adopted a simmering antisemitic resentment and the affectation of a ten-gallon cowboy hat from his time as a failed cattle rancher on the North Dakota prairie in the late 1800s.

Paxton rattles off a list of antidemocratic and xenophobic movements that have taken root here in the United States:

“[T]he Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s … the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials “SS” were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts … George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967 … The Klan revived in the 1920s … Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million … North Dakota congressman William Lemke … The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L.K. Smith.” (201)

Publishing in 2004, Paxton also noted a rising “politics of resentment” as well as the curtailing of civil liberties in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

We still have wildcard organizations falling in and out of alignment with the regime in tense negotiations reminiscent of the Italian squadristi: militias of varying preparedness like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters; propaganda organs like One American News Network, Libs of Tiktok, Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, and the various aspiring race scientists who have found their niche here on Substack.

Lately these private groups have joined the state in attacking one small minority community that 20th-century fascists also persecuted: transgender people. On Nov. 22, 2022, two days after a mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, the anti-trans hate group leader Jaimee Michell went on Tucker Carlson’s then-massive cable TV talk show to predict further violence without explicitly calling on anyone to carry it out:

“We all, within Gays Against Groomers, saw this coming from a mile away, and sadly I don’t think it’s gonna stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children.”

Exception

One theme of the next four years will be that, whatever weapons we handed the U.S. government during the previous administration — whether Biden-era gang and terrorism charges levied against Stop Cop City activists, mayors’ bulldozing of homeless encampments, clampdowns on asylum hearings at the border, recriminations against pro-Palestinian campus protesters, or the routine dehumanizing abuse heaped on people in our prisons — the current administration will wield those tools against a growing list of its chosen enemies.

This year plainclothes federal agents have been abducting immigrants and political dissidents and shipping them to locations in global prison capitals like Louisiana, or even to foreign prisons where the administration washes its hands of responsibility. On April 13, Trump mused on TV about sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), just a few short weeks after he started defying court orders and shipping immigrants there.

“We have documented systematic physical beatings, torture, intentional denial of access to food, water, clothing, health care,” Noah Bullock of the human rights watchdog group Christosal told PBS of conditions in El Salvador’s prison system. “Skin disease is rampant. It's more likely that prisoners in the other prisons have scabies on their skin or even signs of physical abuse than the tattoos that you see in the images that are often projected from CECOT.”

The rationale for sending people to these facilities is paper-thin in each case: a speeding ticket, disfavored political speech, a tattoo that some cops construed as a gang symbol. If you fall for these excuses now, you will fall for every excuse until the state imprisons or kills someone you love.

These cages operate under a legal and rhetorical framework familiar to anyone who remembers the Global War on Terror: a “state of exception.” The state shreds civil liberties in the name of security, and it can practice unlimited cruelty as long as it maintains the specter of “terrorism” or “invasion” in the popular imagination. If fascism is, as the Italian antifascist Gaetano Salvemini saw it, a phenomenon of failed democracies that “felt the need to get rid of their free institutions,”3 it’s worth noting that we threw out some of our own free institutions a quarter-century ago.

Crucially, no new law enforcement agencies had to be created to carry out this year’s mass deportation campaign. The departments spawned during the George W. Bush administration — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — are now in the hands of an even less accountable unitary executive. Officers of these same branches, or their deputies, are now bashing in car windows and abducting people in the streets. They are disappearing people.

So, in addition to what Ernst Fraenkel called the “normative state” consisting of agencies that still abide by rule of law, we have handed the new administration a ready-made “prerogative state” governed largely by whims. Few checks remain on the violence practiced by this second, parallel state.

Torture

There were rehearsals for torture within our own borders, and templates for the facilities to carry it out. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County ran an immigrant tent city in the blazing Arizona desert for 24 years starting in 1993 and described it, in his own words, as a concentration camp.

Arpaio came under federal investigation for racial profiling and was eventually convicted of criminal contempt of court in July 2017, only to be pardoned the next month by President Trump.4

Other rehearsals took place outside U.S. borders. The United States’ global archipelago of black sites is still little understood and zealously hidden from public oversight, but one name has become emblematic of the entire system: Guantánamo.

The military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, recently re-entered the American public consciousness when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posed for pictures with a military cargo plane depositing migrant detainees near a hastily constructed tent city there.

The function of Guantánamo Bay is to hold people indefinitely without charges. United States personnel have routinely tortured people at the facility with the full blessing of high-ranking bureaucrats like Marshall Billingslea and Donald Rumsfeld, who still walk free of the International Criminal Court.5

Guantánamo Bay was never a mega-prison. It held about 680 people at its peak in 2003, and one former Navy lawyer later described it as “America’s tiniest boutique prison.” Former President Barack Obama promised to close the facility but failed to do so from 2009 to 2017. Joe Biden made the same promise but instead spent millions of dollars on upgrades including a new secret courtroom.

The current administration has announced a plan to detain 30,000 people at Guantánamo.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who survived 14 years of physical, mental, and spiritual abuse at Guantánamo, did his best to establish bonds of human empathy with his captors. He wrote a book called Guantánamo Diary, heavily redacted at first by the U.S. government, in which he wondered what people on the outside thought of the hellhole they had built.

“What do the American people think? I am eager to know,” Slahi wrote. “I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people.” The reality is that most Americans don’t think about it at all.

There is a tendency to think of the United States’ moral failings as an aberration. But this is a country whose most progressive president invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to unjustly imprison 120,000 Japanese Americans. This is a country that abducted Native children and indoctrinated them in boarding schools as a matter of federal policy for 150 years.

Observing the final years of the Cold War, the German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote in her seminal 1990 essay “Christofascism” that the United States by then tended to export its violence far abroad through proxy dictatorships.

“[O]ne of the essential differences between [U.S.] and European fascism is, in my judgment, the geopolitical fact that nowadays the concentration camps are not close to Weimar or Munich, but are far away: in El Salvador, in the Philippines, in South Africa, and wherever the great world power permits or encourages torture and murder, or has done so in the past.”

The School of the Americas, where the United States trained death squad captains to do its dirty work in El Salvador during the Cold War, is still operating in Georgia under the rebranded name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The United States still forges strategic alliances with ethnonationalist authoritarians when it’s geopolitically convenient. And El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has opened a dungeon where the U.S. president intends to send his enemies.

Death

Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism, is careful to say what fascism is not. It is not the project of a single charismatic leader, but the project of many people in a particular milieu of mass politics, government stagnation, and wounded nationalist resentment. It is not an ideology; or to the extent that it expresses certain ideas, those ideas are loosely defined and less important than the actions of their adherents.

One thing the 21st-century U.S. shares in common with 20th-century fascist governments is a legal and logistical apparatus for state murder of captive civilians.

The German government compiled a list of those it deemed “criminally insane,” with a heavy preference for those it also deemed racially inferior. The state began killing these people with carbon monoxide gas at Brandenburg Euthanasia Center in January 1940. The first time the state tested the insecticide Zyklon-B on humans, it was to kill 600 Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz in September 1941. These were horrific crimes in themselves, but we know in retrospect that they were also rehearsals.

Whereas most industrialized democracies have ended the practice of capital punishment, several U.S. states are currently positioning themselves at the cutting edge of execution technology. Leading international pharmaceutical companies are no longer willing to sell to death-penalty states, so some state governments have resorted to experimental poison cocktails and chemicals sold by illicit black-market dealers.

The state of Arizona purchased a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December 2020 to begin manufacturing hydrogen cyanide, better known by its trade name Zyklon-B. Louisiana has resumed nitrogen gas suffocations, over protests from members of the state’s Jewish community. Executions by lethal injection have been botched and delayed, and some of the states’ victims have drowned as their lungs filled with fluid.

The shock of the news headline fades with each subsequent execution. The killings become routine. Those without a seat in the execution chamber can comfort themselves with the thought that maybe certain people were disposable after all.

What is there to say about politicians, states, and countries that work so doggedly, and with such “scientific” rigor, on the projects of terror, imprisonment, torture, and killing? In the death chambers, in the prisons, in the streets, in the statehouses, in the courtrooms, in the camps — what are they rehearsing?

***

Page number citations are from the 2005 Vintage Books edition of The Anatomy of Fascism. You can order a copy from Bookshop via my affiliate link if you like.

“Fatherhood unlocks your true potential,” an apparently famous man tells his 2.7 million internet followers. “Fatherhood is alpha-motivation.”

The famous man holds a baby and sports a T-shirt with the slogan “JUST A REGULAR DAD TRYING NOT TO RAISE A COMMUNIST.”

Setting aside the fact that treating your child as a political prop is a good way to inadvertently raise a communist (and setting aside the unsealing of a Justice Department indictment days later indicating that this man, one Benny Johnson of Tampa, might have been receiving 6 figures a month from the Russian government for his work as an internet celebrity), he reflects the zeitgeist of this election season in certain parts of the American right.

In the natalist-to-eugenicist circles of U.S. politics, voters are expected to valorize parents and scorn the “cat lady” and “man child,” embodiments of liberal decadence who supposedly haven’t gained full entry to adulthood because they aren’t parents. The men hold their babies up like trophy fish; they talk about child-rearing as a means of social discipline for adults. 1

The timing is notable. In the 26 months since the Supreme Court ended the right to a safe and legal abortion in this country, as state governments have stripped away choices about reproduction primarily from women, the most off-putting men in media and public life have been extolling their own decision to become dads. The Court created a new reality, and now the intellectual rear guard is here to sanctify and rationalize that reality.

Some, like vice presidential candidate JD Vance, have even proposed that adults without children ought to have their votes diluted by giving extra votes to parents on a per-child basis. This is a revival of Demeny voting, an idea that recurs in societies where people are panicking about birth rates and demographic change. Parents, they argue, know best.

I’ll play the dad card here: Nine years into fatherhood, I can report that my children have not made me a more virtuous person. I am not a more fully realized man than my child-free friends. I have gained no special insights into The Future of The Republic.

Of course I have different obligations and priorities than before. I have new struggles and new joys. I sleep lighter and wake up earlier; I do a lot more laundry; there’s a hard stop on my working day when I have a youth soccer team to assistant-coach. 

I can certainly change for my children, and I hope that I have. But I reject the notion that this is a path to self-actualization. Children are not born to help parents find themselves.

I owe my children unconditional love and all the happiness we can make. Still, morally speaking, what makes or breaks me is not the particular arrangement of people in my life, but the way I treat them. I can succeed or fail as a partner, coworker, neighbor, comrade, son, friend, and parent. 

Men like Vance and Johnson valorize parenthood precisely as their political backers seek to force childbirth using the power of the state. We can see the outer edges of their ambition when, for example, right-wing pundits decry the existence of vasectomy clinics outside the Democratic National Convention: They were never content with banning safe abortions in the states under their control; they seek a less free world for everyone.

I’m in a little book club that has been reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, and a recurring theme is how lofty doctrinal claims have overlaid and enforced control of reproduction by the state. In European countries during the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, as bosses in expanding markets demanded a steady supply of expendable low-wage workers, Federici notes “an almost fanatical desire to increase population,” coupled with severe penalties for long-practiced methods of contraception and abortion. New forms of surveillance arose; in France a royal edict of 1556 required women to register every pregnancy. Show trials and executions for witchcraft were not far behind.

“[F]rom now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation,” Federici writes.

When capitalism ends us or we end capitalism, familiar panicked voices will prescribe childbirth and parenting as a cure for what ails us at the personal and societal level. But it didn’t save the women of the medieval or early modern eras, and it won’t save any of us this time either.

“And after lunch you asked me if I still believed

In a spirit that would never come to me

You asked me what it was like on the far side of the creek

I told the truth, sometimes it gets lonely”

- “Prodigal” by Andrew Bryant, 2023

On weekday mornings the coffee shop is clustered with pods of the men. The men are holding forth — loudly — about the virtues of intermittent fasting, the meaning of the Egyptian plagues, and the Bible’s clear teaching on matters of human sexuality.

I used to be part of the pods, but now I sit alone. I eavesdrop. Some days when I listen to them reading from their Bible commentaries I hear an encouraging word, and I miss the feeling of spiritual fellowship. Most days I hear nonsense and remember why I’m in no hurry to return to church.

Last year the great Mississippi songwriter Andrew Bryant released one of my favorite albums, Prodigal, building on the theme that he’s “like the prodigal who never left at all.” He still lives in Mississippi; I still live in South Carolina. When he sings about living on the far side of the creek from the faith community that raised him, I understand him to mean it’s a walkable distance, a permeable barrier. I find myself similarly situated.

I’ve left two churches in my adult life, a theologically conservative one by choice and a theologically progressive one because its leaders left and the congregation ceased meeting. I still see people from both churches often. My family and I never intend to leave our town, so this will likely be the case for the rest of our lives.

***

I crossed a less substantial creek when I took a job in public relations last summer. I was a newspaper reporter in my 20s, and we in the newsroom used to smirk at colleagues who took PR jobs for better pay and saner hours. I’ve lost my credibility as an ink-stained wretch forever.

I console myself with the fact that I believe profoundly in the mission of my employer. At my day job we fight for things like free speech, juvenile justice reform, voting rights, fair landlord-tenant laws, and freedom from book bans propagated by the dull McCarthyites who dominate our politics. I am told I’m the first communications director in the history of the ACLU’s South Carolina affiliate. I consider it an honor and privilege to do this for a living.

This week I found myself looking back across the narrow divide to my past. On Monday I gave three TV news interviews about a proposed ban on 160 books in the school district where I grew up. That evening I walked into the district office with my friends and my parents and my parents’ friends and my middle school science teacher and I gave the school board a stern talking-to about the First Amendment. Adding to the surreality of the evening, the district office is housed in the same century-old brick building where I attended middle school.1

I spoke about the humanist sci-fi anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the 10th grade English teacher who assigned it to me, and why it would be a loss for young Christian conservatives like High School Paul if they banned it. (I also wrote an essay on the topic for work; it’s the most Brutal South piece of writing I’ve done in months.) Then a series of retirees with no children in the district stood up to denounce certain books as the work of Satan, and people like me as great deceivers and corrupters of innocence. One pastor said we ought to have millstones tied around our necks and be thrown in the sea, quoting the Good Book of course (Matthew 18:6). I tried making eye contact with one of the men as he returned to sit four chairs away from me, but he stared straight ahead the rest of the night. So I find myself in league with the devil.

I felt the same distance from my neighbors on Tuesday when I sat in a packed South Carolina Board of Education meeting where the state superintendent, a graduate of a Christian fundamentalist university, sought a policy banning books with descriptions of sexual conduct from all public grade schools. The superintendent claimed that my colleagues and I had somehow “misled” the students who had come to rally against censorship, and various preachers and biblical scholars rose to the microphone and said much the same. I had never met most of the students, but I thought they did a more eloquent job rebuking the superintendent than I could have.

Wednesday was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, a jumble of signifiers I won’t try to untangle. The focus of the day was a bill, already passed in the House, that would ban medically necessary care for transgender youth. Like most Southern legislatures controlled by Christians, South Carolina’s General Assembly is obsessed with making life difficult for my trans and gender-nonconforming friends.

During a subcommittee hearing on the proposed trans healthcare ban, I saw proponents of the bill citing recent proclamations issued by the South Carolina Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America. These are both denominations where I spent a good portion of my life; I am certain I know people who voted to affirm both of these statements.

I used to live in Christian communities that sought for trans people’s existence to be made illegal, for same-sex couples to be denied the right to marry, and for women to serve in either a subordinate or a “complementarian” role to men. These are the doctrines I upheld, despite my feeble protestations in those coffee-shop Bible studies. I feel ashamed that it took me so long to leave. I still love and miss those siblings in Christ.

Earlier on Ash Wednesday I found myself hauling a cart of audio equipment half a mile up a hill in Columbia so we could accommodate overflow testimony, assuming (correctly, it turns out) that the lawmakers would cut off opponents of the bill before we all had a chance to speak for 2 minutes apiece. I had happy flashbacks to quiet mornings in church, whole years of Sundays, when I would arrive early and set up sound systems in makeshift sanctuaries to amplify preaching and songs of praise. (I didn’t have to do it alone this time — if you’re reading this, Ivy and Kenya, thank you for making the magic happen.)

After a brutal hearing, we gathered on the Statehouse steps and took turns at the microphone, speaking for the better part of an hour about the dangers of this cruel and unconstitutional bill. Doctors, therapists, parents, and pastors kept speaking even after the news media moved on. I spoke near the end, sharing the story of a trans teenager and his family who hosted me as a guest in their living room last month. They were worried about the future under our state’s laws, but proud and affirming of their son. On the long drive home from Columbia Wednesday I wept for joy thinking about the love of the boy’s tough-minded father, raised conservative and Catholic, who learned to fully embrace his son’s identity.

As a holdover practice from my journalism days I tread carefully when telling stories of other people’s suffering. I try to convey their moments of joy and triumph too. Joy was hard to find this week.

***

I don’t have Christian fellowship anymore, but I do have solidarity. They’re not the same thing.

It would be fair for you to ask if I still believe in God at all. I do, though I would no longer try to convince you one way or the other. I find myself in the position the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan described once: “My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell … It isn't that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ.”

I do love Jesus, and I love the people I know who follow him. Lately I’ve seen Christians with the ash of mortification on their foreheads giving benedictions to the frightened families of trans kids; pledging to fight our Christian governor’s labor union-bashing tactics to the gates of hell; and speaking out against the death penalty — our modern crucifixion — even for people who murdered their family members.

Nietzsche called the way of Jesus “slave morality” and he wasn’t completely wrong, but I think he misread the faith of enslaved people. If the gospel narrative is true then I want to be on the side of Jesus and not the Roman empire, of Moses and not Pharaoh, of Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee. I want to walk justly and love my enemies and fight for liberation always. I’m with the crucified people, as Ignacio Ellacuría put it. There are nonreligious people following this path just as well as the faithful, but for better or worse I will always have a religious impulse in me. A part of me will always seek the Spirit even if it never comes.

This coming Friday I’ll speak at an event hosted by faith leaders in Greenville, focused on how we can carry out the sacred work of hospitality by fighting for housing justice. We pursue this work in the heart of so-called Trump Country, in the shadow of the Moral Majority, amid the ferment of white Christian nationalism and even Christian fascism. We walk as believers, against other believers, ostensibly praying to the same god.

***

“Prodigal” is available to stream or purchase via Andrew Bryant’s Bandcamp page.

I’ve decided to pause regular updates for Brutal South. After 4 years of regular self-publication, I’m going to make this more of an irregular thing with occasional updates and essays when I get around to it.

Because I can’t make any promises about my output, I’m turning off paid subscriptions for now. For those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions, look for email updates from Substack and/or the payment processor Stripe in the next week or so.

Today’s newsletter is about newslettering. It’s also about a rad new job I’m about to start. Goodbye for now (it’s not really goodbye). Thank you for reading (no really, thank you).

The new job

Four years ago today, I was unemployed and trying to imagine my family’s future without panicking.

Journalism, the only industry I’d ever cared about, had chewed me up and spit me out after just 8 years. All I knew was I needed to find work fast, and I couldn’t go back. I applied to be a craftsman apprentice, a museum communications worker, a hospital clerical worker, and a library special collections researcher, unclear on whether I was qualified for any of those jobs.

As I fired off resumés and wondered who I was about to become, I decided to keep writing on my own, if only to stave off the dread. “Newsletters” (blogs, basically) were the hot new thing for unemployed journalists in 2019, so I set one up and began writing my first post, a meticulous and oddly emotional history of the Strom Thurmond Federal Complex. I published it on June 26, 2019, with the headline “In praise of South Carolina’s brutalist beast.”

I called the newsletter Brutal South, taking the name from a sludge metal concept album I’d never gotten around to writing or recording. The only rule I set for myself was that I’d publish something new every week, usually on Wednesdays. To my surprise and gratitude, thousands of people signed up to read what I had to say — friends and family at first, then strangers from around the world.

In the meantime I found full-time work as a technical writer. By day I wrote instruction manuals for education software; by night I wrote sharp-tongued essays on public schools, public records, class struggle, mental health struggles, art, censorship, parenting, Christian existentialism, and the depravity of Southern politics. I launched an occasional podcast and interviewed old friends, musicians, and activists I admired. Brutal South became my lifeline to the world, my bizarre side hustle, and, yes, my “brand” (ugh).

Four years to the day since I published my first newsletter issue, I find myself between jobs again. I’ve handed off my technical writing duties. Starting July 10, I’m taking on a new role as communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina.

I’ve been writing and re-writing this announcement for a couple of weeks now, unsure how to sum up the feelings of pride and wonder that keep rising in my chest. I’ve admired the work of the ACLU-SC my whole adult life. I interviewed its past directors for some of my earliest articles on predictive policing, anti-panhandling ordinances, and the laws that helped create South Carolina’s school-to-prison pipeline.

In my last 4 years doing more direct activism, I’ve had the honor to work alongside ACLU-SC staff on the Freedom to Read SC coalition, on the South Carolina Housing Justice Network, on a working group fighting the expansion of police surveillance in North Charleston, and on brake light clinics and know-your-rights efforts with my local DSA chapter. I joined them on panel discussions, picked their brains on countless Zoom calls, and came away inspired each time by their deep expertise and clarity of purpose. As I told my new boss, Executive Director Jace Woodrum, in my cover letter applying for this job, I got the impression that these were my kind of people. I consider it an honor that I’ll get to fight alongside them for the future of my home state.

I’ll have a better handle on the job next month, but I hope to revamp the ACLU-SC blog, launch a podcast, and generally do what it takes to win in the court of public opinion while my colleagues win in the actual courts and legislature. If you want to receive updates and join the effort, you can sign up for email updates at aclusc.org.

What about Brutal South?

As I mentioned up top, I’m pausing regular updates here. I’ll still post occasionally when I feel like rambling about brutalist architecture or Mountain Goats lyrics or the South Carolina tax code.

I always told myself I’d quit this if it stopped bringing me joy, and I can honestly say it never stopped bringing me joy. I’ve found a generous audience for my work, even on topics that I assumed were too niche. Some of my writing about education was more widely read here, on my rinky-dink personal blog, than it ever was at South Carolina’s largest newspaper.

My decision came down to allocation of time and energy. For the past four years, in order to keep writing, I’ve had to squeeze Brutal South into the cracks between my day job and my responsibilities to my 3 kids. I sometimes chipped away at it on lunch breaks or in the morning hour after school dropoff. For the most part I wrote late at night, after my children were in bed.

Tuesday nights were crunch time for my self-imposed Wednesday deadlines, and my wife has become used to me staying up writing until 2, 3, or 4 a.m. She handles kid responsibilities on Wednesday mornings and generally deals with my grouchy disposition for the rest of the day.

I kept writing because it helped me stay engaged in fights I care about: academic freedom, racial justice, LGBTQ liberation, building working-class power. I anticipate that my new job will allow me to carry on many of those fights during daylight hours. I also anticipate that it will require more of my time and energy than my previous job, and I don’t know that I’ll have enough gas in the tank to keep writing late into the night.

I enjoy writing most of all when it reminds us we’re not alone. When I write about anxiety and depression in the news business and old friends come out of the woodwork to say they felt the same way, I know my words are not in vain. When I get to share the frustration of teachers, the weary determination of friends fighting against the death penalty and the carceral state, or the words of a trans teenager who was censored by the governor of South Carolina, I feel a thrill of solidarity in a world that seeks to snuff it out.

I’m going to keep doing that type of work, but I won’t be doing it alone. I’ll have colleagues and comrades, and maybe even an editor again. I’ll be on a team with some of the most brilliant legal minds in my state. We’re going to win some battles. We’re going to stay right here and fight like hell.

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A most predictable outcome has arisen in South Carolina. After passing a gag order to stop the imaginary threat of “critical race theory” in schools, the state has purged a memoir about American racism from the syllabus in a high school classroom.

An outcome such as this was the obvious purpose of the teacher censorship provisos that Republican lawmakers slipped into the last two years’ state budgets, which forbid public school teachers from teaching that  “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex,” along with a long list of other vague speech prohibitions.1

Bristow Marchant, a reporter at The State newspaper, reported on Monday that in the spring of 2022, students in an Advanced Placement Language and Composition class at Chapin High School complained to the Lexington-Richland 5 School Board after being assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 bestseller Between the World and Me.

“I am pretty sure a teacher talking about systemic racism is illegal in South Carolina,” one student wrote.

To be clear, it is not illegal for teachers to talk about systemic racism in South Carolina. But in a season of unhinged school board rants by the Moms for Liberty network, vague condemnations of “critical race theory” by the state education superintendent, micromanagement of classroom materials by the governor himself, and frivolous lawsuits filed by the all-white South Carolina Freedom Caucus alleging anti-white bias in schools, the unofficial state policy is to intimidate teachers into silence regardless of what the law says.

In this case, a school principal caved to pressure and censored the book. The school board caved too. If recent history is any indicator, we can expect The College Board to cave, as they did in Florida when Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies demanded a whitewashing of the AP African American Studies curriculum. (Coates’ writing was removed there, too.)

Here in South Carolina, the teacher was left standing up for herself, writing to her district superintendent with a spirited defense of the book’s inclusion in a unit on persuasive essays. Her courage is an inspiration. We can’t abandon her to the mob.

Book bans remain massively unpopular in the United States. In a poll conducted last year by the EveryLibrary Institute, just 18% of respondents said they supported banning books on issues of race and “critical race theory.” A small, entitled minority doesn’t get veto power over what the rest of our children learn. This is a message we can take to every school board, library board, and county council where the censors choose to wield their influence.

It can be daunting to stand up to the intimidation tactics of groups like Moms for Liberty, who got their start harassing and threatening their neighbors in Florida school districts. The piles of dark money behind these groups and others like the State Freedom Caucus Network can make them seem larger and more powerful than they really are. But never forget that we outnumber them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a literary giant who doesn’t need someone like me to defend his bona fides, but I’ll say this anyway: The politicians who seek to ban his work are revealing a lot about themselves. Coates wrote this to his then-14-year-old son in Between the World and Me:

[M]y experience has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration … Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, “Strom is no racist.” There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.

In some ways, Between the World and Me was a product of its time: Coates referred early in his book to the police murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and to the nascent uprisings of 2014. In South Carolina in 2015, when we witnessed the white supremacist massacre at Emanuel AME Church and the North Charleston Police murder of Walter Scott, I turned to Coates’ writing to understand the moment. He wasn’t a voice of hope, but of commitment and struggle.

Coates’ work fits into a long tradition. The title Between the World and Me comes from a 1957 Richard Wright poem, and the format of the book echoes James Baldwin’s 1962 classic letter to his own young nephew, The Fire Next Time — which took its title from an old spiritual song, which in turn was inspired by Jesus’ teachings and Noah’s story in the book of Genesis.

A decision to censor Coates, like Wright or Baldwin in previous generations, is an attempt to excise a modern classic from the canon. It is also a decision to privilege the comfort of white Americans (or “people who need to be white,” to borrow Coates’ phrase) above all others. To quote Coates from an interview earlier this year:

We’re uncomfortable every day. Being Black is to be existentially uncomfortable. Being a woman is to be existentially uncomfortable. Being LGBTQ is to be — being trans is to be uncomfortable. That is the nature of human beings. It’s the nature of the human experience, and particularly, as I said, for those who live outside of the mainstream. People who simply seek comfort, and people who come to education of all things to seek comfort, don’t make for good citizens, and they don’t really make for mature adults, honestly.

Jeremy C. Young, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program, wrote yesterday that the removal of Coates’ book at Chapin High School is an example of “outrageous government censorship.” It is. South Carolina educators and historians have been sounding the alarm about this wave of censorship for more than two years now.

Here, for example, is what the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission wrote to then-State Superintendent Molly Spearman on June 24, 2021, after she came out in favor of a vague ban on “critical race theory”:

Undeniably, slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic racism are all a part of our history, and they continue to impact our society today. We must present our history as it occurred, not how certain groups wish it had been. Addressing difficult lessons from the past, allows us to better understand and educate students in the present while avoiding making similar mistakes in the future.

To date, curriculum censors in the South Carolina General Assembly have only managed to enact their will via year-by-year provisos that they slip into the budget without much discussion. They attempted to make this provisional gag order permanent this year with House Bill 3728, a teacher censorship bill that they called the “Transparency and Integrity in Education Act.” I traveled to Columbia in March to testify against this bill, as did dozens of others. Nobody in the subcommittee meeting that day spoke in favor of this senseless, odious bill.

Thanks in part to intra-party beef between mainstream Republican lawmakers and the marginally more extremist South Carolina Freedom Caucus, the bill’s sponsors didn’t manage to pass a version of the bill that reconciled the House and Senate amendments this year. They’ll have another chance to ram the bill through when the legislative session continues in 2024.

We can kill this bill in the Statehouse, or we can kill it in the courts later on straightforward First Amendment grounds. However we win, we need to do it loudly and publicly, in overwhelming displays of solidarity with teachers like the one who stuck her neck out at Chapin High School. We’ve got the numbers. We’ve got the truth.

***

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Whenever I am thinking about changing jobs, I like to read the work of the Chicago oral historian Studs Terkel. I think I do this to remind myself that nobody was ever really satisfied with working.

When I was preparing to leave my first post-college job as staff writer at the alternative weekly newspaper in Charleston, I decided to do some interviews in the style of Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

My final issue at the Charleston City Paper in September 2015 included six first-person narratives taken straight from my interviews with Dr. Robert Bennett, forensic scientist; Freddie Brown, computer resale manager; Isaac Vanderhorst, prep cook; Margo Venomous, tattoo artist; James Jamison, taxi driver; and Bertha Edmond, longshoreman. (In previous issues I’d interviewed Dana Ford, cleanup technician; Renee King, salvage car buyer; and a private investigator whose article I can’t find online at the moment.)

The format was simple: I would sit down to interview a person with a voice recorder and a few open-ended questions, ask some follow-ups, then transcribe their answers back at the office and put them together in a sort of coherent narrative. I don’t remember how I picked these people or how I convinced them to open up like they did. Sometimes people surprise you when you ask about their lives.

There were some timely observations, like when Jamison talked about Uber moving in on the taxicab companies’ market and jacking up fares. There were tender moments, like when Ford shared what it was like to console family members in their homes at crime scene cleanups.

The story that haunted me most was Edmond’s. She told me how a swinging cargo container had crushed her heel and knee on the job two years prior, and how the injury had kept her out of work. After raising three kids as a single parent on her longshorewoman’s wages, she was struggling with her newfound limitations. She had to walk with a cane sometimes. 

“I don’t like talking about this injury because this injury took my life — you may as well say so,” she said.

The people I spoke with tended to invest a little more meaning in their working life than Terkel’s interview subjects. Edmond, for example, was proud to be one of the highest-trained women in a majority-male workforce. But when their bodies, bosses, and economic systems failed them, they were left asking the same bitter questions.

“Jobs are not big enough for people,” Nora Watson told Studs Terkel during her interview for Working. Watson was 28 years old at the time and working as a staff writer at an institution that published healthcare literature. She didn’t care much about the work.

Watson went on:

It’s not just the assembly line worker whose job is too small for his spirit, you know? A job like mine, if you really put your spirit into it, you would sabotage immediately. You don’t dare. So you absent your spirit from it. My mind has been so divorced from my job, except as a source of income, it’s really absurd.

Terkel, for his part, had built a sort of charmed career in TV and radio broadcasting, written a few books, and was starting to reflect on what it all meant as he plodded along through his 50s.

He seemed to get what Watson meant. He wrote in the introduction to Working that his book was, by its nature, about violence to the spirit and body. He wrote this as a middle aged man:

Ken Brown, a tycoon at twenty-six, respects the “work ethic” far, far more than Walter Lundquist, forty-eight. It isn’t the calendar age that determines a man’s restlessness. It is daily circumstance, an awareness of being hurt, and an inordinate hunger for “another way.” As Lundquist, who gave up a “safe” job for “sanity,” puts it: “Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

Working turns 50 years old next year, and while U.S. working conditions have shifted considerably since the book’s publication — political saboteurs have kneecapped labor unions, Congress hasn’t voted to raise the minimum wage since the Bush II administration, astronomical student and medical debt have crushed entire generations of families, and the captains of late capitalism have further exploited overseas workers while breaking up careers in the U.S. into a series of discrete “gigs” — the problems of the spirit remain.

Like a small-time Studs Terkel, I led a sort of charmed career. I worked for 8 years in local journalism, the job I’d wanted since I was a teenager, first at the alt-weekly and then at the biggest daily paper in the state. I even got to do my best Studs impression again in April 2019 when I interviewed public school teachers about the second and third jobs they worked to make ends meet.

The work was a core part of my identity that made me proud, until I became so depressed and neurotic that I couldn’t carry on. The pay was abysmal, the hours chaotic, the news unremittingly bleak, and the bosses unhelpful to say the least. Toward the end, I remember watching a veteran newsman retire and announce his plans to work on a book. A month later, I ran into him working at a gas station because he didn’t actually have the money to retire. I saw myself on a path to ruination.

I left the industry in May 2019 and never went back. I still have a pile of journalism award plaques that I keep in my shed with the scrap lumber. I’m just sentimental enough that I can’t throw them in the trash yet.

I’ve spent the last 4 years working as a technical writer. Some days I have felt a little like Nora Watson, although if the ghost of Studs appeared before me today and asked me about it, I don’t think I’d have much to say. It’s a living. It beats breaking my back or my mind.

I briefly attended therapy after losing my newspaper job and changing careers. I talked almost exclusively about the old job, what I missed, and how I hated what I’d allowed it to do to me — how I had dumped the load of my despair on my wife, how I had been less of a father than I should have been. My therapist was trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and she helped me to recognize the rising feeling of panic and the downward spiral of depression, and how to nip those feelings in the bud with coping strategies like deep breathing and self-distraction.

Therapy was good for me, but I also recognize its limitations. One valid critique of CBT is that it provides surface-level salve for the wounds of capitalism, effectively making us more pliant and efficient workers. I’ve tried to guard myself against complacency on that front. To quote Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, “We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms.”

In his introduction to Working, Terkel observed that the tragic figure of Willy Loman was growing younger by the year:

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.

We’re disciplined by the fear of losing our jobs to automation or layoffs or the obliteration of entire industries. We’re taught to practice gratitude for having a job and health insurance at all, and to lay ourselves at the feet of the almighty “job creators” pleading protection from booms and busts that seem as inevitable as weather systems.

But none of this is inevitable. We don’t have to find contentment where we are. How restless do you feel?

***

I embedded a few songs about working in today’s newsletter:

“Vaping on the Job” by Dougie Poole (The Freelancer’s Blues, 2020)

“Simple Plan” by Pedro the Lion (Achilles Heel, 2004)

“Pay Your Rent” by Andrew Bryant (Ain’t It Like The Cosmos, 2018)

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Compared to 15 years ago, South Carolina public school teachers are doing more work, administering more tests with higher stakes, for wages that increasingly get eaten by inflation, under intensifying scrutiny from aggrieved political actors — and in many cases, they’re doing it with more students than ever.

The last time I looked into the growth of K-12 classroom sizes in my state was 2019, and the picture was bleak. While state regulations1 set strict limits on student-teacher ratios in most types of classrooms, the state legislature had started granting waivers to those caps during the Great Recession and had not resumed enforcement.

Predictably, median classroom size soared as the state stopped funding its obligations to school districts, teachers’ promised pay increases were frozen, and teachers quit the profession faster than the colleges of education could graduate new ones. When I wrote about the trend for The Post and Courier in 2019, classroom sizes had begun to shrink but were still significantly larger than they were in the 2007-08 academic year.

I looked again this month. Things have gotten worse.

Across all school districts in South Carolina, median classroom size has grown by nearly 3 students, from 20.2 in 2008 to 23 in 2022. While state regulations cap most classroom sizes in middle and high school at 35 students, I found 2 middle schools and 26 high schools where the student-to-teacher ratio in core subject areas was above 35-to-1.

“It’s obscene what’s happening,” said Jamie Meissner, a fellow parent with 3 children attending elementary and middle schools in the Charleston County School District. I called her recently to talk about the practical problems associated with growing classrooms. She said her kids feel the pressure, too. All 3 have seen their teachers crying.

“My children have felt that their teachers are stressed and they’re constantly concerned about them being able to reach everybody,” Meissner said. “It’s heartbreaking, and it’s not the teachers’ fault, because truthfully they’re doing everything they can. I don’t see the resources coming into the classroom to support the kids. My kids see their friends rolling on the floor with social, emotional, or mental health needs that nobody’s addressing, and the teacher has to bear it all by themselves.”

I’m a graduate of South Carolina public schools who sends his kids to South Carolina public schools, and despite the bad headlines and flagging test scores, I’ve seen firsthand how our education system can change people’s lives for the better. I’m certainly better for it, and my own kids are flourishing.

But after a decade-and-a-half of austerity and a century-and-a-half of backlash to the universal public good of education in South Carolina, I’m left wondering how many more hits the system can take.

I’m sharing the data I found in archived State Report Card data from 2007-2022 via a publicly downloadable spreadsheet, in hopes that journalists, activists, and lawmakers will join me in pushing for full funding, better work conditions for our teachers, and better learning conditions for our students.2

The upward spiral

Problems of this scale are overdetermined. The runaway growth of classroom sizes in South Carolina K-12 schools is the result of a cascading series of policy and budget choices.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and the Republican-controlled legislature kneecapped school funding in 2006 with a tax handout to homeowners (Act 388) that routinely wrecks school revenues during economic downturns. As metropolitan school districts have grown thanks in part to an influx of workers for manufacturing concerns like Boeing, Volvo, and BMW, county governments have handed those employers massive tax incentives that cheated schools out of $2.2 billion in the last 5 years alone. And the legislature has not funded its own legally mandated Base Student Cost to districts since 2009, flagrantly violating the law every time it passes a budget — with outsize effects in our poorest rural districts.

The Great Recession-era waivers on classroom size caps certainly didn’t help (when then-Superintendent Mick Zais tried to eliminate classroom size caps permanently in 2013, the response from teachers was a resounding “Hell no”). Neither did the legislature’s decision during tight budget years to renege on their promises of annual “step” increases in teacher pay, which led to depressed wages more than a decade later. As South Carolina’s population has boomed, the state has been losing teachers in droves, many of them quitting in their first 5 years.

The teacher shortage was a crisis before COVID-19 hit the state in 2020, and it’s only gotten worse. South Carolina schools started the current academic year with 1,474 unfilled K-12 educator jobs, the highest number of vacancies ever recorded, according to the state’s Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, & Advancement (CERRA).

Teachers don’t always get an exit interview, and the state doesn’t always listen when they do speak up. Back in 2006, researchers from the Riley Institute at Furman University tried to be proactive, conducting extensive interviews3 with teachers and community members seeking input on what it would take to attract and retain high-performing teachers.

The number 1 priority for teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools was maintaining small class sizes.

The learning environment

Meissner, my fellow parent, is well acquainted with this crisis. She had a child in public Montessori teacher Sariah McCall’s class when she publicly quit the profession in a November 2018 open letter published in the Washington Post.

“The systemic abuse and neglect of educators and other public service workers in the state of South Carolina should have its citizens so enraged. The unrealistic demands and all-consuming nature of the profession are not sustainable. I am still a human being,” McCall wrote in that letter.4

The idea of keeping class sizes to a minimum dates back at least as far as the 12th-century rabbinic scholar Maimonides, who proposed capping class sizes at 40 students (incidentally, that’s the current cap on PE and music class sizes in South Carolina).

I recently caught up with Mahwish “Mev” Macintosh, a high school English teacher in the nearby Berkeley County School District. It was near the end of the school year — peak testing season — and she shared how both the testing burden and the size of her classes have grown since she entered the profession in 2001. She made it through rounds of budget cuts and reductions in force early in her career, and now she finds her work made all the more difficult thanks to high-stakes standardized and benchmark tests required by federal, state, and district rules.

She started this school year with 29 students in an English II class. English II has a state-mandated End of Course exam that factors heavily into school accountability report cards, and she figures that in the course of an average school year, she loses about a month’s worth of instructional time to testing disruptions.

In an already challenging job, new pressures come from every direction.

“If we’re trying to continue to promote a productive and meaningful and relevant learning environment, that’s the antithesis of it,” Macintosh said.

***

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Jamie Meissner and I have both been advocating for a $7,000 pay raise for teachers in Charleston County. I wrote an open letter to the school board about it last week. A local teacher launched a petition with more details if you would like to read it and sign it. School board members are whittling down the recommendations of the teacher compensation taskforce

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I was on a W.E.B. Du Bois kick in early May of 2022. I’d been reading parts of his John Brown biography for this piece on the brief but deep friendship of Brown and Harriet Tubman when I came across a 1920 essay of his (via Twitter, I think) called “The Souls of White Folk.”

I’m a latecomer to the Du Bois fandom; nobody assigned his work when I was growing up in South Carolina public schools, but I recognized the title of the essay as a play on his better-known 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. This essay on white people was so cutting, so prescient, that I did a double-take to make sure it really was more than 100 years old.

One of Du Bois’ lasting contributions to philosophy is the concept of “double-consciousness,” which he sketched out in The Souls of Black Folk:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

This concept, and Du Bois’ description of Black Americans as living within a “veil,” have been passed down and analyzed and problematized for a century now. I’m struck by the clarity of his earliest explanations, though. He read widely and investigated deeply, and he synthesized what he saw and experienced into hard crystalline prose that still cuts today.

In “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois discussed the apparent invention of whiteness in the 19th and 20th centuries. He wrote from experience as a teacher, historian, public intellectual, and sociologist who had experienced the scorn and pity of white folks across the country — and who had also experienced cross-racial solidarity on trips abroad, and recognized a sickness in U.S. racial politics that was beginning to spread:

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generous enthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the slave is discovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his master!

On the strength of this essay, I impulse-bought a Verso reprint of the book it was first published in, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.

It’s a strange, wide-ranging, experimental book. It is partly a collection of essays that originally appeared in The Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals, but it’s more than that. The first chapter, “The Shadow of Years,” is a capsule autobiography. Other chapters include statistical analysis of racial politics and political economy, a proto-feminist rallying cry, and a plan for postcolonial independence of African nations.

In between the essays, he inserts philosophical poems and fictional sketches ranging from high fantasy to religious allegory to science fiction. The final essay, “The Comet,” is a darkly comic piece of dystopian fiction that laid some groundwork for Afrofuturism (it also could have made for a great Twilight Zone adaptation).

Connected by these creative ligaments, the essays take on a philosophical unity, building something that isn’t exactly a manifesto, but a framework for observing and critiquing the world.

The fourth chapter, “Of Work and Wealth,” draws on Du Bois’ 15 years as a teacher and his experience covering the East St. Louis Massacre as a journalist for The Crisis. Teaching history, economics, and sociology to Black students at Atlanta University, he struggled to discuss current events with the class in a way that was authentic but not despairing:

I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be natural and honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard. What would you say to a soft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair, which knells suddenly: "Do you trust white people?" You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God.

Is it any different for teachers today, who can’t avoid parallels to the news when they talk about history? One difference is that, under white reactionary oversight, a Black teacher today can face firing, public humiliation, and even death threats for speaking plainly about racism. White demagogues accuse them of teaching “critical race theory;” here in South Carolina they have been hosting training seminars on how to film and expose teachers for the supposed sin of indoctrination

After deep reflection and anguish, Du Bois decided not to hold back. Particularly with classrooms of teenagers and young adults, he respected the students enough to draw their own conclusions. He insisted on providing them a critical framework:

In the teaching of my classes I was not willing to stop with showing that this was unfair,—indeed I did not have to do this. They knew through bitter experience its rank injustice, because they were black. What I had to show was that no real reorganization of industry could be permanently made with the majority of mankind left out. These disinherited darker peoples must either share in the future industrial democracy or overturn the world.

To Du Bois, a radical pedagogy was the only sane one. To deny the obvious to his Black students was foolish; to abandon them to despair was irresponsible. He wanted them to share in the wealth and beauty of the world, or else to overturn it.

Darkwater is available to read for free online via Project Gutenberg. If, like me, you prefer to read books on paper, the Verso paperback edition is available to order via Bookshop (this is an affiliate link, so I get a small cut if you order a copy).

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If you’d like to read more about Du Bois, I wrote this reflection on his 1956 essay “Why I Won’t Vote”:

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On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a “shield law” allowing the state Department of Corrections to hide the identity of lethal injection drug sellers.

This solves a problem that only exists in states that are trying to kill their own people. Pharmaceutical companies have quit selling lethal injection ingredients to death-penalty states, and the old supplies of drugs like pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride have run out. In 2010, South Carolina was 1 of 7 states that got desperate and ordered sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma, a company operating out of a driving school in London, according to the Greenville News.

Now when the state decides to take a human life, the condemned person can choose from a firing squad made up of anonymous volunteers, an electric chair containing parts manufactured by an amateur electrician, or a drug cocktail of unknown ingredients and provenance.

As I wrote in March, our politicians have shown nothing but dead-eyed premeditation and resolve when it comes to the problem of how to murder captive men. Meanwhile this week, Gov. McMaster has called the legislature back into session to hash out the details on a 6-week abortion ban — effectively a full ban in many cases — that will, if signed into law, result in a further increase of our state’s already abysmal maternal mortality rate.

I don’t have anything clever to add. “Pro-life” was always just a marketing term, and you can’t defeat the ruling party by pointing out its hypocrisy. We are governed by dealers of death until we defeat them.

***

I couldn’t make it to the state capital this week to raise hell about the abortion ban or the ongoing attempt to restrict discussion of race and gender in the classroom. Instead, I joined some teachers fighting back against the extremist takeover of the Berkeley County School District. The meeting opened with a moment of silence that was interrupted by some people in the back of the room yelling the Lord’s Prayer. They’ve done this at two meetings in a row now.

As you might remember, this school district in the Charleston suburbs was taken over in November by a newly elected slate of hard-right school board members backed by Moms for Liberty and the local GOP. Immediately after being sworn in, the new board fired the district’s first Black superintendent, fired the district legal counsel, voted to cut property taxes, approved a ban on “critical race theory” in the classroom, and set up a panel to begin reviewing and banning books containing sexual content that they deemed inappropriate.

It’s been a difficult school year, but mercifully the board has lost some of its focus from that first meeting. Attacks on teachers have devolved to the individual level. At a May 1 school board meeting, a handful of activists and the chair of the Berkeley County Republican Party spoke during public comments about their months-long effort to ban the 2006 young adult novel Sold by Patricia McCormick from high school English classes. They called the assignment “unconstitutional and ungodly” because the book contains a scene describing the rape of a girl sold into sexual slavery.

After hearing about the saga from some teacher friends, I found a used copy of the book, read it, and drove an hour to the district office (I live in a neighboring county) to deliver a rebuttal at the May 15 meeting. The rest of this week’s newsletter is adapted from my public comments on Monday night. Here’s a video if you’re interested:

I have a friend who taught high school history in the Berkeley County School District and quit in 2017. He was gracious enough to come directly to the board and explain his reasons for leaving the profession. They were numerous, but chief among them were low pay and a lack of autonomy.

Six years after my friend quit teaching, there remain some very good reasons to leave the profession today. Added to that litany of struggles in the past year is a neo-McCarthyite push to surveil, harass, and intimidate teachers by self-appointed speech police.

On May 1, the Berkeley County School Board heard from a handful of people who were upset that high school English teachers were assigning Sold by Patricia McCormick, a young adult novel about human trafficking. They called it pornographic and obscene and said that a person who gave it to a teenager could be arrested for distributing obscene materials to minors.

You should know that the advocates for book bans use the same playbook in every state, county, and school district they go. In Virginia Beach last year, the Moms for Liberty crowd called the superintendent of schools a "porn peddler" because he refused to remove books including Sold from schools there. Does that sound familiar?

In Texas, Florida, Idaho, and Pennsylvania, activists read the same page of this book, plucked out of context, and demanded censorship. Their work is made easier because, unlike the United Daughters of the Confederacy and various book burners before them, they no longer have to read the entire book themselves. They get their salacious snippets from a website called BookLooks, where they can grab a 1-page PDF of the parts that scare them and run down to the school board office to sound the alarms.

I have been reading this book, and while it is heartbreaking and unsparing, I would suggest that if an adult reader finds a book like this pornographic, it says more about the reader than it does about the text itself.

This book has been in BCSD class sets since 2007 without incident, but now, suddenly, we are led to believe this book is a threat to our children. Don't fall for the fearmongering. Patricia McCormick wrote last week in the New York Times about the ginned up controversy surrounding Sold and about why she and others, myself included, are defending its inclusion in high school courses:

To ban this book is disrespectful to the teenagers who want and in some cases need to read it. I’ve visited classrooms and juvenile detention centers all over the country since the book came out in 2006. At nearly all the visits, students come forward to say that they have been sexually abused or are being sexually abused — and that seeing their experience rendered in a book finally emboldened them to say so …

I always brace for a nervous or inappropriate reaction from the other children in the classroom. I wait for someone to laugh or scoff or gasp. They never do. They unfailingly treat such painful revelations with respect and empathy. Meanwhile, their teachers step in to provide help for a problem they may not have otherwise known about.

This is the work of teaching. It's emotionally difficult, and teachers work with our kids at a time when many of them have heavy burdens on their hearts and minds. I'm asking the school board not to make that job harder than it needs to be. Don't give in to the Moms for Liberty. Defend the freedom to read.

***

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For a store that lacks pretense and shuns the tech-forward approach of its competitors, Food Lion has a surprising secret: It knows a lot about me.

Or at least it thinks it knows a lot about me.

I recently got curious about the data grocery stores collect on their customers after reading an article in The Markup about the sophisticated surveillance and marketing operation at Kroger and Albertsons. The data-driven marketing efforts of those grocery chains (and their subsidiary brands like Ralph’s and King Soopers) are supposed to yield more than $1 billion in “profits opportunity” according to the stores’ recent merger filings.

I wanted to know what my grocery store knows about me. I’ve been shopping at Food Lion with my own “MVP” customer loyalty card since 2008, so I submitted a Right to Know request via Food Lion’s website1 and received an oddly revealing disclosure report.

Food Lion’s dossier on me includes 158 baskets’ worth of shopping data going back to February 2017, including dollar amounts and store locations. My wife and I spent $4,175.53 there over the course of the past year, and while our loyalty segment is listed as “tertiary” (as opposed to primary or secondary), our frequency is “average.” We buy a lot of vegetables, baking ingredients, and Asian food products, and very little meat, according to the report.

This all seems accurate. Food Lion seems to be making some inferences based on our shopping patterns. The company knows, for instance, that we have a pet in the household. This should be fairly obvious because I go there to buy wet food for our sweet toothless cat, Dolly Parton.

On the other hand, based on the disclosure report, it appears that Food Lion thinks we have no children in our home (we in fact have three kids). Our household income is listed as $15,000 a year (my wife and I each make considerably more than that), and my occupation is listed as “Sales/Marketing” (I’m a technical writer by day). Oh, and Food Lion thinks I’m a woman (I’m not).

Big Grocery is watching, in other words, but he’s not paying very close attention. You can read my personal disclosure report from Food Lion on DocumentCloud if you are interested.

In April, I sent a list of questions to Food Lion’s public relations email address. I know that companies like Food Lion will sometimes “enrich” their customer data with third-party data sets that can help make inferences about the race, finances, and online presence of customers like me. I wanted to know how Food Lion was making these inferences, how my data were being used and sold to third parties, and why their profile of me contained such wild inaccuracies.

In lieu of answers, I received a curt response from a corporate communications specialist:

“We at Food Lion understand the importance of privacy and take appropriate measures to safeguard the data of our customers. Our Privacy Policy is available for our customers to view our approach to privacy and the practices we have established to safeguard customer data.”

Friendly neighborhood data broker

In theory, Food Lion isn’t selling my personal data file, with my name attached to it, to any third parties. Instead, as I understand based on reporting about other grocers like Kroger, these data can help generate insights on the behavior of customers like me, a target demographic of moderately health-conscious parents in the suburbs. My data file gets de-identified before they share it with other companies, and Food Lion’s privacy policy page states that the company “will not attempt to re-identify the data unless permitted by applicable law.”

That’s in theory. In practice, large-scale data sets can be used to effectively re-identify customers whether the data broker intends it or not. One MIT study from 2015 looked at de-identified credit card metadata and found that, with just 4 purchase records, it was possible to uniquely re-identify 90% of the individuals from an anonymized set of 1.1 million people.2

According to my customer information disclosure report, Food Lion has 8 different Advertising IDs associated with me. These randomized strings of letters and numbers are in fact individually assigned, and are used by advertisers to microtarget us with ads across all of our apps and browsers.

I checked my mobile phone and my wife’s phone (both Androids), and two of the advertising IDs in the disclosure report corresponded with our phones. That’s a little spooky, given that neither of us are using the phone number I used to sign up for the MVP card, and neither of us has downloaded the Food Lion app or interacted with the company’s social media accounts. It’s troubling that Food Lion has obtained this information and won’t answer questions about what they’re doing with it, but it’s hardly surprising.

From the article in The Markup, I knew that grocery stores were making moves in the data marketing business. In Kroger’s case, the company created an entire data science subsidiary called 84.51° (named for the longitude of Kroger’s headquarters in Cincinnati). 84.51° claims to have more than 35 petabytes of first-party customer data, which is 7 times the amount of data collected via the Event Horizon Telescope to capture an image of a black hole. 

The client list of 84.51° reportedly includes many of the companies that sell products in Kroger stores, like General Mills, Kraft, and Heinz. “The data 84.51° provides to them is used to understand not just what the sales figures are for a given product but also the context of the purchase—context that can only be understood with data about the shopper,” reporter Jon Keegan wrote for The Markup. The company has claimed it can provide insights on, for example, a shopper who gets recipes from Pinterest and a shopper who “shops the perimeter of the store to keep up with his healthy lifestyle.”

The closest thing Food Lion has to 84.51° is its in-house digital marketing agency, Peapod Digital Labs. According to an October 2022 article in Marketing Dive, Food Lion and Peapod’s parent company, the Dutch multinational retailer Ahold Delhaize, “is now eyeing deeper collaborations with CPG [consumer packaged goods] partners and running custom campaigns that leverage the grocer’s first-party data.” Details were hazy at the time, but they involved displaying more ads on screens in the store. Peapod has also been working with a company called Quotient Partners to send notifications to shoppers’ phones about temporary price reductions.

Unlike Kroger, Food Lion’s privacy policy does not mention using facial recognition technology on in-store surveillance cameras, tracking my exact location within the store. Unlike Kroger, I see no mention of Bluetooth beacons that ping my phone with personalized offers when I walk into a store.

Food Lion does, however, “automatically capture certain data from your device, such as device identifier and connection data” whenever I connect to free Wi-Fi in one of their stores. And if I use Food Lion’s website or app, my clicks, mouse movements, and scrolls may be tracked by a third-party company called Glassbox.

‘Tough Times?’

One of the questions I asked Food Lion’s PR team was about the third parties to whom the company sold or shared my data. They didn’t answer, so I tried making some inferences of my own. 

On page 3 of my disclosure packet, I see something called a “Mosaic Household Description.” Turns out that phrase comes from Experian Marketing Services — yes, the same Experian that runs consumer credit reports.

I found a packet online3 listing Experian’s various household segments, from Power Elite (“predominantly white with a high rate of Asians”) to True Grit Americans (“down-to-earth, practical people who cultivate old-fashioned values”) to Urban Survivors (“They’re fond of gambling at casino tables and bingo halls”).

My household description is, apparently, Tough Times (“Older, lower income and ethnically diverse singles typically concentrated in inner-city apartments”). In a 2014 edition of the Mosaic USA E-Handbook, we even get this composite image of a Tough Times household. Meet Walter and Audrey:

I don’t know where they’re getting this stuff, but I can guess. My Food Lion is not in a wealthy neighborhood; most Food Lions are not. It sits at the border of Hanahan and North Charleston, the city where I live, which has one of the highest eviction rates in the country. The store is at the northern edge of what’s sometimes called a “food desert,” the part of my city where it’s difficult for people without cars to buy fresh produce. My friend Germaine Jenkins, who launched Fresh Future Farm to serve this end of town, refers to the policies that got us here as “food apartheid,” and I have to agree. Racist and classist zoning, combined with the razor-thin margins and risk-aversion models of supermarkets, create these deserts as a matter of policy.

So, Food Lion and Experian’s description of my household might be a crude guess based on the location of my grocery store. Or it might have to do with the way my wife and I shopped in college, living every week off of $50 or less of groceries at the Food Lion in Columbia’s Five Points (practically impossible now, I know). Maybe they know our kids go to a Title I school. Maybe it’s our frugality, although we’re not as frugal as we once were. I’m left guessing at this point.

Looking at the data Food Lion collected on my shopping trips all the way back in 2017, I remember money was tight back then, even with family graciously pitching in to help with childcare. My wife was working as a nurse and I was a newspaper reporter, and we had 3 kids under 3 years old. We were more tired than we had ever been. Someone who tracked all of our shopping over the time period since then could draw a sort-of-insightful portrait of our life and our slight upward mobility.

Our friendly multinational grocery conglomerate can glean a few facts about us: our love for carbohydrates, for example, or our kids’ weakness for Cap’n Crunch. But there are limits to this knowledge. They don’t really know us. Maybe it’s best that they don’t.

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Hey y’all — quick request. Lawmakers here in South Carolina are on the verge of passing House Bill 3728, a teacher censorship bill that seeks to shut down classroom discussions of history, race, and gender (it’s the same one I spoke against at the Statehouse in March). I’d love it if you joined me today or tomorrow morning in calling or writing to the lawmakers who are in a position to kill this bill.

My friends at Pro Truth South Carolina and the Charleston Jewish Federation have a handy form you can fill out to call or email the relevant legislators. Click here to fill it out. They have some suggested text. I’ve also written a few talking points that I’ll share below if you are interested.

Thanks in advance if you take the time to do this. I am so, so tired of my state’s most powerful people attacking the schools where my children go to learn and my teacher friends go to work. Just today, Gov. Henry McMaster signed a law that will funnel public school funds to private, religious schools. This is not only unconstitutional but profoundly immoral.

We still have a chance to stop the teacher censorship bill. I don’t know if they are listening to us, but we have to try.

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South Carolina House Bill 3728, the “Transparency and Integrity in Education Act,” is first and foremost a teacher censorship bill. If signed into law, it would threaten teachers’ careers for straying from the hard-right party line on matters of race, history, and gender.

That fact alone would be enough to oppose the bill, particularly at a time when the teacher shortage is beyond the point of crisis. But the bill would do much, much more than that.

House Bill 3728 would bury entire school districts in new layers of bureaucracy to enforce the speech codes. If it passes into law, expect an onslaught of litigation and mandatory internal investigations triggered by “parent advocacy” organizations that would be deputized into action as speech police.

Here’s what you need to know:

Censoring teachers

Like any speech code drafted by a single political party to silence its perceived opponents, this bill demands ideological purity. Section 59-29-620 includes a long, vaguely worded list of “prohibited concepts.” 

The concept of “meritocracy,” which is not defined in the bill, would be enshrined in law as an unquestionable fact. Teachers would face punishment for suggesting that “an individual … is privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.” Library books would need to be vetted as “age appropriate” according to new criteria to be established by the State Board of Education, and not by the criteria of media center professionals.

As punishment for a perceived infraction of these vague and arbitrary speech codes, the State Board of Education would have the authority to strip a teacher of their teaching certificate. The board would also punish offending school districts by withholding up to 5% of state funding. The state would punish all of our children to silence teachers who are brave enough to speak the truth.

Restricting teacher training

The instruction received by educators, in the form of professional development, would also be subject to censorship.

Schools would be prohibited from requiring staff to attend training on “gender roles or stereotypes, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or romantic or sexual relationships” [Section 59-29-620(C)]. These topics are unavoidable in schools and are fundamental to the work of school counselors, along with any other school and district staff who would seek to understand students’ needs.

New layers of bureaucracy

Entire new departments and unknown staffing hours would be required to enforce the speech purity codes in this bill. Each school district would have to establish procedures for parents to review and challenge instructional materials and provide “alternative educational instruction” for students whose parents object to any part of a course for any reason [Section 59-29-650(A)(5)].

Every teacher would have to post curriculum and instruction materials to a public-facing district website 7 days before the start of the school year, and would be required to update the website 3 days prior to introducing any new material during the school year [Section 59-29-650(A)]. This requirement is onerous, inflexible, and designed to open every classroom in the state to the scrutiny of Moms for Liberty, the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, and any other self-appointed censors with the time on their hands to undermine teachers.

An onslaught of lawsuits

This bill would lead to a pile-on of lawsuits against school districts. We know this because many of the bill’s sponsors in the South Carolina Freedom Caucus have used similar reasoning to sue the school districts of Lexington 1 and Charleston County for alleged insertion of “critical race theory” into a successful literacy curriculum. They are doing this after releasing a doctored sting video of a curriculum provider talking about “culturally relevant pedagogy.”

The basis of these lawsuits is a censorship clause slipped into annual state budgets for the last two years. The 8-part definition of so-called “partisanship curriculum” in the relevant budget proviso [2022-23 Appropriation Act, Proviso 1.93] is similar to the 7-point list of “prohibited concepts” in House Bill 3728.

The bill would create a “private cause of action,” a common provision in the wave of censorship bills introduced in state legislatures across the country. It would allow any parent or guardian to sue any school district for a perceived violation of the censorship rules. These self-appointed censors would have the authority to sue schools without even attempting to bring their concerns to the district first, and districts who lose these lawsuits would have to pay their accusers’ legal fees. [Section 59-29-680]

Conclusion

Superficially, this bill appeals to neutral values such as transparency, integrity, and avoiding discrimination. A closer inspection reveals it for what it is: A direct attack by aggrieved partisans against professional educators.

This bill sows distrust and division while empowering moneyed interest groups to exact revenge against their perceived enemies in the classroom. It mandates the micromanagement of teachers. The people who stand to lose the most are the children of South Carolina, who will grow up with an impoverished view of the world unless we stand with teachers now and fight back. Please reject House Bill 3728 and all bills like it.

There’s an old rumor in South Carolina that Walt Disney World was almost built in or near the town of Santee, S.C.

The rumor started making the rounds again last week after Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley invited Disney World to relocate from Florida to her home state. (This was a media stunt based on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis beefing with The Mouse, and it is 100% not going to happen.)

The old Santee rumor kind of makes sense. I-95 was being built through Santee at the time when Disney was looking to build its East Coast amusement park in the 1960s, the swampland in the area would have been cheap to buy, and the state government would have licked Walt Disney’s loafers to make it happen. I’ve never seen the rumor substantiated though.

So, let’s see about that.

Did Walt Disney consider South Carolina?

I’ll cut to the chase: It seems likely that the Walt Disney Company considered South Carolina for Walt Disney World, but I haven’t seen proof that the state in general, or Santee in particular, was ever a serious contender.

My new Twitter friend @RmJack13 shared the strongest evidence I’ve seen so far. It’s a September 1971 article by Coy Bayne in The State, Columbia’s daily newspaper, about the grand opening of Walt Disney World in Florida.

“The $400 million Disney World — which once eyed South Carolina — covers 27,000 acres and will employ 7,000,” Bayne wrote (emphasis mine).

The article explained how Disney had been hush-hush about its land purchases in Florida, fueling speculation as early as 1965 when developers secretly working for Disney started buying up land near Kissimmee.

“The same ‘developers’ were said to have looked at South Carolina and Charles Ridgway, Disney World Publicity Manager, confirmed this in a recent interview,” Bayne went on. The article didn’t specify which part of South Carolina was under consideration.1

And then there’s this, from a 2017 TV news report about a new concert venue opening in nearby Bowman, S.C. It’s a quote from Orangeburg County Administrator Harold Young:

"Years and years ago, Walt Disney and Disney World wanted to locate in Santee, South Carolina," Young said. "The mentality of us not wanting that there had Disney World to locate in Florida and not Santee."2

That’s the only public official I’ve seen mentioning the Santee angle. I emailed Young last night asking for more details. I’ll keep y’all posted if I hear back.

In considering the Santee rumor (or the Sumter rumor, or the Myrtle Beach rumor, depending where you grew up), it’s worth considering the scope of Disney’s midcentury operation. Walt Disney was an icy-veined weirdo and one of the most famous men on earth in the 1960s. The original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, was so popular after opening in 1955 that Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev nearly started an international incident when he was denied entry to the park for security reasons.

Walt, for his part, called Disneyland “my baby” and once said to an interviewer, “I would prostitute myself for it.”3 Like I said, strange dude.

Shortly after opening Disneyland, Walt Disney was getting restless to open a second park, which he conceived of as a sort of utopian city, on more open land with fewer neighbors to get in his way. Here’s a partial list of places Disney either considered building or was invited to build his second attraction, according to biographer Neal Gabler: 

• St. Louis, Missouri

• Brasilia, Brazil

• Aspen, Colorado (Walt looked into buying land to build a ski resort)

• Monterey, California

• Kansas City, Missouri

• Niagara Falls, New York

• Secaucus, New Jersey (it would’ve been near the Turnpike)4

I’ve read a few biographical accounts of Walt’s search for cheap and unencumbered land, and none mentioned South Carolina even in passing. That doesn’t mean the Santee story isn’t true. In fact, Disney’s land buyers were so cloak-and-dagger about their project (they code-named their work “Project X” and scooped up land on the cheap through hundreds of anonymized LLCs) that even if they did buy or survey some land in South Carolina in the ‘60s, it might be hard to tell from public records.

I searched the archives at newspapers.com for any further mention of Disney in Santee or Orangeburg County, and all I could find were passing references like this one from a 2003 letter to the editor published in The State:

Ask the folks around Santee about Disney World and how our state could be different had some businessmen, now no longer in business, been able to look forward.5

Santee never took off as a tourist hotspot, despite its golf courses and its location at the crossroads of I-26 and I-95. It sits on the shore of Lake Marion, a manmade lake with a sunken ghost town at the bottom.

I visited Santee once with a high school friend who painted hotel rooms there as a summer job. It’s a quiet place with fireworks stands for tourists coming from states where fireworks are illegal, surrounded by some real natural beauty if you stray from the interstate a bit. My friend took me to get lunch at Lone Star BBQ, a former general store from the failed railroad town of Lone Star, S.C., that was, implausibly, picked up and relocated to Santee to house a restaurant. We sat and listened to some bluegrass pickers on the porch, and that’s the first time I learned to love the banjo. It was no Disney World, but it felt a little bit like magic to me.

Jacques Derrida coined the word “hauntology” to describe what it’s like to be haunted by lost futures. I picked up the word via the punk critical theorist Mark Fisher and am probably misusing it, but I do feel slightly haunted when I read various states’ stories (true or legendary) about the Disney park that got away. What if Walt Disney had plopped down EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom in Santee, or St. Louis, or Secaucus?

I can imagine the crumpled blueprints overlaid on the abandoned outlet mall in Santee, hovering like ghosts.

***

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I’m not what you’d call a “Disney adult,” but I have kind of a sick fascination with the place. Here’s something I wrote in the first year of the pandemic about Walt Disney World:

 I’m waiting on a couple of sources for future newsletter issues. One is a followup piece about the uncontrolled growth of K-12 classroom sizes since the Great Recession; the other is about the consumer data that Food Lion has been collecting on my household since I started shopping there circa 2008. Stay tuned for more about that.

Brutal South is a free weekly newsletter about class struggle and education in the American South. If you would like to support my work and get access to the complete archive of subscriber-only stuff, paid subscriptions are $5 a month.

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I’m getting a reputation around town as the guy who will help you file a public records request. I can live with that.

Thursday afternoon at the State Library in Columbia, I’ll be leading a free workshop on how to use the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act to dig up information and hold powerful people accountable. If you happen to be in Columbia on April 27 at 4 p.m., come say hey! The event registration is here. I’m hoping we’ll be able to record the session, and I’ll share the recording later if it’s available.

Each state’s open-records law is a little different, but the main point I want to convey is: Public records are for everyone! Not just for journalists, not just for lawyers, and not just for grizzled veteran activists.

In preparation, I’ve been revisiting some of the biggest stories I’ve uncovered using public records. Humor me, please, on this trip down memory lane.

A sort-of ban on texting while driving

Price tag: Free

The question: In the fall of 2013, two towns near me — Charleston and Mount Pleasant — passed ordinances banning distracted driving. South Carolina was one of 3 states without such a law on the books at the time, so the councils of these two municipalities passed their own ordinances making it illegal to text, email, or enter an address in GPS while operating a vehicle that was not parked.

Five months later, people all around me were definitely still texting while driving, and I wondered: How many tickets had the cops actually written since the bans went into effect?

The answer: Almost zero.

This one didn’t even require a FOIA request. As my old journalism professor Doug Fisher used to say, FOIA should be a last resort. It can be a useful tool, but it sets a long deadline for responses and it can set you up for potential search and redaction fees. For this story, I went straight to the municipal courts and asked the clerks how many cases had come up involving distracted-driving tickets. In both Charleston and Mt. Pleasant, the answer they gave me was “none.”

I was working for the alt-weekly Charleston City Paper at the time, and apparently my online article on the subject flustered the spokesman of the Charleston Police Department. He called me up the next day to explain that, actually, officers were “aggressively enforcing” the new ordinance. 

So, I asked, how many tickets had they written?

His answer was … one.

My story ran in February 2014. Three months later, an industrious intern named Ashley Sprouse picked up the story and ran with it. She checked in with both police departments and found that they had written a combined 10 tickets for distracted driving.

Police spying on BLM activists

Price tag: Free

The question: In the weeks immediately after North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager murdered Walter Scott in 2015, local activists involved with the then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement told me they were being surveilled by law enforcement. Strangers were showing up at meetings taking pictures, and at least once, activists had confronted a North Charleston cop who was sitting in an unmarked Chevy Impala outside their meeting space.

I wanted to know: Were the cops monitoring BLM activists?

The answer: Yes.

I filed a FOIA request with the City of North Charleston seeking emails that mentioned BLM. The emails showed discussions of the group among North Charleston police and city officials, Charleston County officials, the American Red Cross, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED).

A SLED officer asked local officials to pass along “all information/intel from any agency regarding gatherings/protests, people coming into town, threats, etc.” The officer also offered their own “intel.”

“There are 30-40 people staying in a hotel in Summerville (unknown location at this time) that have come into town from Ferguson,” the SLED officer wrote, referring to the Missouri city where the police killed Michael Brown.

I never received solid answers on how SLED got that information. Local police flatly denied that they were infiltrating activist meetings, but I didn’t get official denials from any other agencies.

“These things were definitely happening and definitely scared people away with the knowing or not knowing of who was behind these cameras and what their intention was,” local BLM leader Muhiyidin d’Baha told me at the time. “There was a lot of fear, and there’s still a lot of fear, among the people that need to rise up right now.”

School bus fires

Price tag: Free

The question: In 2016 I was a new dad working on the education beat for South Carolina’s largest newspaper. I noticed a series of disturbing headlines from around the state about school buses catching on fire with kids inside. I looked at the photos of charred bus husks and kids stranded on the side of country highways, and I thought: This seems less than ideal.

How often, exactly, were South Carolina school buses catching on fire?

The answer: At least 177 times between 1996 and 2016.

I can’t remember if I had to invoke FOIA to get the data this time, but it helped that I knew what records to request. A previous reporter on the beat, Ron Menchaca, had written a story in 2007 about school bus fires, which were called “thermal events” in the dry terminology of state recordkeeping. The number of recorded school bus thermal events at the time was just over 100.

Writing in 2007, Ron found that South Carolina’s state-run school bus fleet was one of the oldest and most polluting fleets in the country, and that its rear-engine Thomas Built buses from model years 1995-1996 were especially prone to electrical fires.

Ron’s reporting prompted the South Carolina General Assembly to pass a law (overriding a veto from then-Gov. Mark Sanford) requiring the state to replace one-fifteenth of the state’s bus fleet, or about 375 buses, in every budget year.

Nine years later, I requested some statistics regarding the state bus fleet and found that the legislature had failed to fund its own mandate in all but two budget years. For four straight years of austerity during the Great Recession, the state bought no new buses at all. Our lawmakers were openly breaking their own funding laws (par for the course here, unfortunately).

So we still had highly flammable 1995 and 1996 buses (and a few as old as 1988) on the road, with kids inside. The average age of a South Carolina school bus had actually increased to 15.5 years old (up from 14 years old in 2007), and the average odometer reading had ticked up to 236,000 miles.

I’ve given up ascribing motives to the politicians who are sabotaging and ransacking our schools, and I can’t know if my article prompted any of them to action. I do know that as of New Year’s Day 2019, every 1995-96 school bus on the state fleet had been sent to the scrap yard and replaced with a new bus. The legislature paid for the one-time purchase of replacement buses mainly with non-recurring funds from the South Carolina Education Lottery, which is supposed to fund in-state college scholarships. They had to override a veto from Gov. Henry McMaster to buy those buses.

***

Ah, memories. I’ve used FOIA and publicly available records to dig up all kinds of grim stories.

I used student headcounts from the South Carolina Department of Education to show that two-thirds of charter schools were illegally segregated according to the state’s own definition. I requested a trove of the state superintendent’s emails and showed that she was exaggerating the public demand for a gag order on “critical race theory” in the classroom.

I used police incident reports to show that the Charleston apartment complex where a young man died in a suspicious confrontation with a police officer was a site of rampant overpolicing. In one of the more disturbing stories I’ve ever reported, I requested investigative files from a pair of sex abuse cases at a local high school and found that the school had placed one accused abuser in charge of investigating the other.

I say all of this not to brag, or even to suggest that my reporting made a difference (in many cases it did not). I want to provide some examples of the facts you can dig out with a basic knowledge of public records law.

What I am still struggling with, now that I’m out of the straight-news business, is translating public records into effective activism. It’s one thing to reveal a horrible truth. It’s another thing to change it.

If you’re interested in doing some public records research, muckrock.com is a great place to look for resources, including already-available public records and tools for filing and tracking your own requests. For South Carolinians in particular, the South Carolina Press Association’s Citizen’s Guide to SCFOIA is indispensable. I use it all the time.

***

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Before I let you go, I want to mention that the Los Angeles chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association has set up a scholarship in honor of my former Post and Courier colleague Greg Yee, a kind friend and excellent crime reporter who died unexpectedly in January at age 33. You can apply for the Gregory Yuen Yee Scholarship or make a donation by clicking here. I miss Greg. I’m glad to see his memory honored in this way.

Brutal South is a free weekly newsletter about class struggle and education in the American South. If you would like to support my work and get access to the complete archive of subscriber-only stuff, paid subscriptions are $5 a month.

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1. My brilliant friend Lyndsey Medford, author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires, had me as a guest on her podcast this week! You can check out the episode and read a transcript via her hopeful cynic newsletter:

hopeful cynic

relearning citizenship amidst public education's slow demolition

Listen now (36 min) | Paul is a good friend, Brutal South is a favorite read, and this interview is the education they never gave us. read a transcript of this interview Subscribe to Brutal South Get your copy of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World that is Sick…

Listen now

3 years ago · 1 like · Paul Bowers and Lyndsey Medford

2. A bunch of friends and I, including some local authors and the new poet laureate of Charleston, will be reading passages from our favorite dangerous books tonight from 5-7 p.m. at a Read Across South Carolina event at Buxton Books (160 King St., Charleston, S.C.). It’s a free event; you can see some more details on the event listing. Come out and let’s talk about fighting back against book bans, teacher censorship, and all that noise!

3. If you happen to be in Columbia, S.C., I’ll be leading a workshop next Thursday, April 27, about how to use South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act to pry out public information and hold powerful people accountable. This will be 4-5 p.m. at the South Carolina State Library (1500 Senate St., Columbia). Details and registration link are here; hopefully we’ll figure out a way to record the session too.

***

I keep checking in on the Nebraska state legislature. Two state senators from Omaha, Machaela Cavanaugh and Megan Hunt, have been holding an old-fashioned filibuster since late February, and a part of me hopes they never quit.

Sens. Cavanaugh and Hunt are demanding that their colleagues abandon a bill (LB 574) that would ban transgender healthcare for Nebraskans under age 19. Until this happens, they are loading up every bill in the legislature with amendments, talking at the stand for hours about unrelated topics such as their favorite foods, and trying every procedural trick in the book to grind the entire lawmaking process to a halt.

Until yesterday, not a single bill had passed in 2023.

“I will burn the session to the ground over this bill,” Sen. Cavanaugh warned her colleagues back in February.

“This bill harms me in an unforgivable way” said Sen. Hunt, who is a parent of a trans son. “No one in the world holds a grudge like me, and no one in the world cares less about being petty than me.”

Lawmakers in any state could have picked a similar fight. The ACLU is currently tracking 467 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S., including bills that would undermine employment protections, ban trans kids from school athletics programs, ban books mentioning trans and nonbinary people, and ban life-saving healthcare and counseling for trans youth and adults. 

I’m fascinated by the Nebraska filibuster because, at times, it seems to be working. The bill has not passed. Cavanaugh in particular has brought national media attention to the fight, showing her counterparts in other states what it means to dig your heels in.

Part of Cavanaugh and Hunt’s effectiveness is due to political savvy, part of it due to pure stubbornness. Nebraska is unique among the states in having a unicameral legislature. Republicans hold a majority in the technically nonpartisan body but are one vote short of the supermajority needed to break a filibuster. Cavanaugh and Hunt knew this going in.

Finally, exasperated Republicans changed the rules of the legislature March 28, restricting the number of times per day a senator can make certain motions on a bill. The filibuster continued, but the legislative process began crawling forward.

Yesterday, April 18, the Omaha World-Herald noted that the legislature had just passed its first bill of the year, a mundane change in the state liquor laws. The World-Herald gave the context at the very bottom of the article: “Legislative action has been slowed this year by Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha, who has mounted an ongoing filibuster in hopes of killing a bill that would ban gender-altering care for transgender minors.”

I’ve started to think about political speech, particularly speech in our state and local government chambers, as a form of liturgy, or ritualized call and response. The purpose of a liturgy is not to persuade opponents, but to reaffirm belief and feed the faithful. At times liturgy is a tool for education, like during a catechism. It is sometimes called “the work of the church” in Christian circles.1

We have a few tired formats for the liturgy. We hear the familiar soundbites on the news and we call out the hypocrisy of our opponents: “So much for the ‘pro-life’ party,” we grouse as anti-abortion lawmakers pass laws to end public health efforts during a pandemic and speed up the executions of prisoners.

At other times we call out fake piety. We reject the “thoughts and prayers” of politicians who are determined to do nothing (or worse than nothing) about the proliferation of guns after the latest school massacre. We talk about the blood on their hands, their fealty to the gun lobby, their fecklessness in a moment of crisis.

The purpose of these liturgies can’t be to shame our opponents (they are immune to it) or appeal to common values (we don’t share common values). Instead, we can use our words to inspire one another. We can help each other keep the faith, so to speak.

When I see the two state senators from Nebraska standing strong, pissed off and righteous, I’m reminded that we fight for a worthy cause. If they can slam the brakes on 1 of the 467 bills attacking LGBTQ people in this country, I can do my part against the attacks here in South Carolina.

As Congress is deadlocked, we’re seeing a renewed struggle in our statehouses, those laboratories of democracy and fascism. Two weeks ago, we saw Tennessee Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson mount a protest for gun control on the floor of the Nashville statehouse and get expelled by Republicans for breaking decorum – and teenagers in the audience loudly and correctly called their enemies fascists for what they had done. 

March 29 in Kentucky, as Republicans overrode a veto to pass an omnibus anti-trans bill and cops arrested chanting protesters who locked arms in the gallery, Rep. Pamela Stevenson stood to rebuke her colleagues:

“Somebody’s going to have to atone!”

Erin In The Morning

Kentucky Rep. Stevenson Rebukes Anti-Trans Law As Protestors Arrested In Gallery In Surreal Scene

Read more

4 years ago · 128 likes · 7 comments · Erin Reed

Statehouses have always been sites of struggle, and they have often been the places where oppression is enacted. This has been another devastating year for all but the most comfortable benefactors of patriarchy and white supremacy. But in the middle of all the hate and chaos, it’s been bracing to see real acts of defiance. This is how we keep fighting.

***

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I want to give a special shoutout to Erin Reed, whose Erin in the Morning newsletter has been a vital resource on the attacks on trans people and their families in statehouses across the country. Erin’s anti-trans legislative risk map has been a particularly important project. Not everyone has the means to pack up everything and move to a free state, and the map highlights the danger for our trans friends and neighbors.

Brutal South is a free weekly newsletter about class struggle and education in the American South. If you would like to support my work and get access to the complete archive of subscriber-only stuff, paid subscriptions are $5 a month.

Subscribe now

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I say all this to preface a pretty scattershot week in the ol’ newsletter.

I took an introductory improv comedy class with my best friend Steven over the last few weeks at Theatre 99 in Charleston, and we had our free recital in front of a bunch of family and friends last night. I think it went well! A friend and I riffed on Waffle House for a scene, I got to put on a fake Texas accent and pantomime wearing a 50-gallon cowboy hat, and I think I made my wife nearly throw up laughing.

One of the things I’ve been learning is that you don’t have to force the jokes, and in fact you probably shouldn’t, at least not when you’re a newbie. The comedy comes from the absurdity of the situation, and my job up there is to take that situation seriously.

Our instructor Meredith encouraged us to be as specific as possible in our scene-setting. At practice she’d often pause a scene and say “Specificity is caring.” If your scene partner is supposed to be your spouse, how long have you been married, and how is your love life? If you’re working as rangers in a national park, which park, and how do you feel about the wildlife?

My friend Belvin, who’s both a committed activist with the Charleston Climate Coalition and a regular performer at Theatre 99, encouraged me to keep going with it, and I think I will. He’s of the opinion that good improvisation and good activism have a lot of disciplines in common, like listening and paying close attention to your partner’s energy.

3 good reads

This being spring break, I thought I’d share a few good reads for the beach, the front porch, the ride lines at Legoland, or wherever you find yourself with a little downtime. Have you read something good lately? Drop a link in the comments.

Leave a comment

The Employees by Olga Ravn (New Directions, 2020, trans. Martin Aitken)

I picked this book up at Itinerant Literate solely based on the gnarly cover art and the blurb on the back cover by Jeff VanderMeer. It did not disappoint.

Recently translated from the Danish, this is a minimalist epistolary sci-fi novella written as a series of staff reports by the crew of a space ship orbiting the planet New Discovery. Early on we realize that some of the crew members are humans who left Earth behind, while others are humanoids created for the mission. Some of the humans have developed feelings for the humanoids, some don’t know which category they fall into anymore, and some of the humanoids are actively resisting firmware updates from their creator.

It’s an existentialist trip at times, like in this entry:

"I don't know if I'm human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?"

Hook it straight into my veins.

“By Human Hands: Russian Circles’ ‘Station’” by Brad Sanders

Some of my favorite music journalism of the past 5 years has appeared on Bandcamp, the human-curated music platform (whose staff, by the way, are in the midst of a union drive that I wholeheartedly support). One of my favorite writers is Brad Sanders, a metalhead from Ohio whose monthly Best Metal on Bandcamp dispatches have turned me on to cutting-edge music from around the world. When I invited Aaron Carey of the West Virginia black metal band Nechochwen onto the podcast, it was because I’d read a thoughtful profile of the band that Brad wrote.

This week Bandcamp published a gorgeous essay by Brad, illustrated by Joey Yu, about long-distance running and the physical intensity of the heavy instrumental band Russian Circles. Brad grew up in hockey country, and when he first started listening to this band he recognized their name as an homage to a hockey training drill.

Brad’s essay reminded me of a phrase that’s been rattling around in my head from Pedro the Lion’s 2022 album Havasu: “to play sports about my feelings.” This passage resonated with me:

This was music played by athletes, at least of a certain kind. Since leaving sports behind for the DIY circuit, I had lost the ability to see the link between creativity and the physical body. Exercise was for jocks; I wanted to be a brain in a jar. Russian Circles shook me awake, helped me realize that such an arrangement was neither possible nor desirable.

I could read this kind of writing all day. Bandcamp’s “Resonance” series is worth diving into; another favorite of mine was Jo Stewart’s essay about sailing on an Antarctic research vessel and listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

“Pineapple Flavored Shit Show: Twenty-Five Things to Eat in Charleston Before It’s All Underwater” by Andre James

I can’t sum up South Carolina’s tourist-restaurant-industrial complex much better than my friend Andre James does in the introduction to his new zine:

"Despite Charleston being a neo-antebellum Wonderland and to chattel slavery what Las Vegas is to legal gambling, I can't lie and say it's not a gorgeous place."

Andre is a food writer from Myrtle Beach, and I loved his previous zine “Dipped in Neon” about the food scene there. This is a great, no-holds-barred look at the culinary world in Charleston. The first two entries are about the crab rice at Hannibal’s and the garlic noodles at Pink Bellies, and my mouth is watering right now.

***

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In his 2010 book of prophetic wisdom, Can America Survive? 10 Prophetic Signs That We Are the Terminal Generation, the Texas televangelist John Hagee recalls standing on a hill overlooking Megiddo in Israel, looking down into the valley, and envisioning a lake of blood 200 miles wide and as deep as a horse’s bridle. 

In this and other bestselling books of prophecy, Pastor Hagee takes the book of Revelation literally and then prescribes a political program to bring about the end of human civilization as we know it. This is notable for a number of reasons, not least of which is that he has the ear of Republican presidential contender and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Like a lot of people, my ears perked up when Haley launched her campaign Feb. 15 in Charleston, South Carolina, and brought Pastor Hagee onstage to kick off the proceedings with a prayer. When Haley said, “To Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up,” I nearly fell out of my chair. Like some kind of theological pervert, I went to the public library that week and borrowed every book by Hagee I could find.

I’ve been taking notes on these books and will probably write a more general synopsis at some point, but this week I want to linger on Can America Survive? It is an audacious book of geopolitical soothsaying, and it raises some questions that it would behoove political reporters to ask Haley on the campaign trail.

This book is, among other things, the most virulent Islamophobic text I have ever read. It repackages the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory for a U.S. audience, warning of an “Islamic population bomb” (p. 37) and favorably citing the British UKIP booster Melanie Phillips’ 2006 book Londonistan (p. 126). Hagee warns of secret Islamist sleeper cells throughout the heartland (p. 11) while advocating for spying on U.S. mosques and pre-emptive military strikes against Iran (p. 50). Hagee questions “radical Islam’s loyalty to America” after citing a random series of newspaper clippings about “honor killings” and claims, without evidence, that Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a No. 1 bestseller in unspecified Muslim countries (p. 26).

Here is a passage from page 65 to give you a flavor:

How many thousands more will fall before our leaders snap out of this politically correct fog and admit we are at war? Will they wait until a series of nuclear dirty bombs set off at one time in seven cities send millions of Americans to their deaths? …

History in the future may call it “The Fifty-Year War” between America and radical Islam, but its final battles will be fought in the streets and cities of this nation. The jihad against America began on 9/11 … and it will not end until America defeats radical Islam or the flag of Islam flies over the White House.

The imminent attack on seven U.S. cities is a prediction Hagee makes at least four times in this book. His only source for this claim is a September 2005 article in World Net Daily by the right-wing pundit Paul L. Williams warning of an “American Hiroshima.” Hagee also claims that al-Qaeda has access to nuclear bombs and electromagnetic pulse weapons, and he even lists the seven cities they will allegedly attack.1 At one point he speculates that then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez might team up to smuggle dirty bombs across the Rio Grande in the care of undocumented immigrants (p. 68).

Hagee, the pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, is no stranger to presidential politics. He endorsed John McCain in 2008, but McCain distanced himself after journalists started reading Hagee’s books and watching his sermons. Most infamously, Hagee has claimed that God sent Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for a gay pride parade, that the Catholic Church is the “Great Whore” mentioned in the 17th chapter of Revelation, and that Adolf Hitler was a descendant of “half-breed Jews” who was sent by God to chase Jewish people back to Israel.2

Hagee fell out of favor with mainstream Republicans for a while, but his influence remained unavoidable. He is the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), one of the largest Christian Zionist organizations in the U.S., which claims a membership of 10 million people — 100 times the size of AIPAC. When U.S. President Donald Trump admitted moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2020 was really a sop to evangelicals, he was probably referring to the agenda of Hagee and CUFI.

The centrality of Israel in the evangelical imagination is hard to convey if you didn’t grow up debating the Biblical accuracy of the Left Behind novels and plotting out the timing of the Seven Bowls of God’s Wrath in Bible study. One theory widely held in some evangelical circles like Hagee’s is that Jesus will return to earth once a sufficient portion of the Jewish diaspora has returned to the Promised Land. In his book, Hagee refers to the immigration of Russian Jews to Israel as “Exodus II” and writes, “Their return to their homeland is another sign that we are the terminal generation.”

When Hagee predicts that the readers of his 2010 book are members of “the terminal generation,” he means this as good news for evangelical Christians, who will be called up to heaven in the blink of an eye.3 For everyone else on earth, the news is not so good: He believes that either one-third (p. 7) or one-quarter (p. 204) of all remaining humans will die in a single day, the whole world will suffer famine and war, every person’s skin will erupt in festering boils, and locusts the size of horses will sting people until they beg for death.

“Every river, every stream will become as blood. Every basin in your home will run with blood,” Hagee warns on page 204. “Now I ask you, do you want to escape the coming Tribulation? I do! And I am going to escape.”

For Hagee and people who believe him, supporting Israel is not about the right of Israeli people (nor, certainly, Palestinian people) to live in peace — it is about fulfilling a particular interpretation of esoteric prophecies so that Christians can go to heaven and God can rain down plagues on everybody else.

The “10 Prophetic Signs” promised in the subtitle of the book are flimsy interpretations of world events from the early years of the Obama administration, and he hides them near the end of the book. I’ll list the 10 signs here, exactly as they are written in the subheadings of Chapter 9:

1. OIL

2. THE KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION

3. THE MIDDLE EAST PLAGUE: MASSIVE RADIATION BLAST

4. THE REBIRTH OF ISRAEL

5. EXODUS II

6. JERUSALEM NO LONGER UNDER GENTILE RULE

7. WORLDWIDE TELEVISION

8. DAYS OF DECEPTION

9. FAMINES, PESTILENCES, AND EARTHQUAKES

10. AS IN THE DAYS OF NOAH

I’ve read the whole book, and I can tell you these signs are no more coherent or convincing in context. He speculates that some of the plagues mentioned in Revelation might really be nuclear strikes. One of the prophetic signs is literally just the invention of broadcast television.

“OIL,” the first sign on the list, gets a longer explanation than the rest. He is talking about petroleum.

“The billions of gallons of oil buried deeply in the bosom of the earth were planted exactly where God intended for them to be to fulfill His prophetic word millions of years before they were needed,” Hagee writes. According to Hagee’s gloss of research by a geophysicist named Robert Morgan, the largest petroleum deposits on earth are east of Israel “in the location pinpointed in the Bible as the Garden of Eden.” (He does not say where this is.)

According to Hagee, God will use these rich oil deposits as a “hook in the jaw” to drag a “Russian-Islamic coalition” into a doomed battle against Israel (p. 186). 

Not to get too far into the weeds, but Hagee’s prophetic signs require some creative interpretation of scripture. He is recycling a little bit from the 1970 end-times classic The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted a Soviet invasion of Israel as a fulfillment of the prophet Ezekiel’s “War of Gog and Magog.” Quoting Ezekiel 38:134, Hagee even manages to shoehorn England and the U.S. into ancient Hebrew prophecy:

Ezekiel’s “young lions” are the offspring of England, whose symbol is a lion; this would be the United States of America as an offspring of England. Ezekiel is describing in this verse the Russian-Islamic coalition coming to invade Israel and all that America will do is send a limp-wristed diplomatic protest. Does that sound familiar?

Can America Survive? veers randomly between prophetic warnings and regurgitation of neoconservative talking points. According to Hagee, God wants the U.S. to drill for as much oil as possible (p. 50), pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities (p. 50), reduce the national debt and reverse trade deficits (all of Chapter 5, “Death of the Dollar”), and send a surge of troops to win the war in Afghanistan (p. 14). These are all policy prescriptions that could have been copied and pasted from a neoconservative war hawk’s campaign platform, or vice versa. 

At one point Hagee claims (p. 49) that an unnamed “special source in Israel” flew all the way to see him in San Antonio and hand-deliver what he believed to be Iran’s plan of attack against the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia. “The source never tells me in advance that he’s coming; he just appears without notice, gives the message, and leaves,” Hagee writes.

Pastor Hagee’s prognostications are a laughingstock in some evangelical circles, including among those who treat end-times prophecy as literal. In the Southern Baptist and Reformed churches where I grew up, we were taught not to trust charlatans who claim to know “the day or the hour” of Jesus’ return, as Hagee does in other books like Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change (2013). The numerology, astrological pedantry, and tortured textual analysis in Hagee’s books would have been laughed out of my youth group Bible study.

But the central premise in much of Hagee’s teaching — that the U.S. should support Israel so the apocalypse can begin — is commonplace in American life. A 2017 survey of U.S. evangelicals conducted by LifeWay Research asked respondents to give reasons for their support of Israel. 52% agreed with the statement, “Israel is important for fulfilling biblical prophecy.” This is the constituency that cares deeply when a pastor like John Hagee joins a candidate on the national stage.

There is a tender moment near the end of Can America Survive? that may ring familiar for some readers. Hagee recalls sitting at the kitchen table one evening in May 1948 and hearing on the radio that the United Nations had formally recognized the State of Israel. It was a profound moment for a lot of people, not least because of the hope for a Jewish safe haven after the horrors of the Holocaust.

Hagee writes that his father was a scholar of prophecy and a man of few words. He remembers watching his dad put down the book he was reading that night at the kitchen table. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he sat in silence for a moment before saying to his son, “We have just heard the most important prophetic message that will ever be delivered until Jesus Christ returns to the earth. This is the greatest miracle of the twentieth century.” (p. 193)

Any candidate bringing John Hagee onstage in Year of Our Lord 2023 knows exactly what they’re getting into. His teachings and alarming worldview are well known. If Haley’s team wanted millenarian zeal on the campaign trail, they got it with Pastor Hagee. They’re getting a lot more in the bargain, though, and we’ll all pay the price if he gains the president’s ear again.

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If you really want to read more of this stuff, I previously wrote about Hagee’s working relationship with Haley and his 2013 book Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change:

Brutal South

Stand for America and fall for anything

In 2014 a Texas televangelist named John Hagee predicted that a series of four lunar eclipses coinciding with Jewish holidays would be a sign of the Biblical end times. This was known as the “blood moon prophecy.” The eclipses came and went in 2014 and 2015, the trumpets didn’t sound, and Jesus didn’t return to conquer the earth. Still, Hagee made a …

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5 years ago · 5 likes · Paul Bowers

For a longer look at Haley’s track record, stretching back to her time as governor of my state, check out the South Carolinian’s Guide to Nikki Haley:

Brutal South

A South Carolinian's guide to Nikki Haley

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is expected to announce a 2024 run for U.S. president on Feb. 15, according to th…

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4 years ago · 27 likes · 8 comments · Paul Bowers

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Before sunrise Wednesday morning, I kissed my wife and kids goodbye and began driving halfway across South Carolina. I had taken the day off work and made arrangements with my family. For the first time in my life, I was going to testify in front of state legislators in Columbia.

The subject of my testimony was House Bill 3728, a teacher censorship bill not unlike the one Republicans have probably introduced in your state, wherever you are reading this in the U.S. today. It includes a long but vague list of “prohibited concepts” centered around race, history, and gender; it threatens teachers with the loss of their jobs and school districts with the loss of 5% of their state funding; and it would open the floodgate for lawsuits against schools by self-appointed right-wing speech police.

As I listened to death metal and sipped black coffee from my thermos on I-26 Wednesday morning, I thought about what I should say. Like anyone who has watched the South Carolina General Assembly mismanage, neglect, and defund our schools, I found it hard to summon anything but rage. I needed to be strategic with my words, even though a string of expletives would have felt better.

The bill in question had already passed the House of Representatives with a strong showing of support from the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, a hard-right faction within the state Republican Party. The Caucus’ vice chair, one R.J. May III, recently appeared on local news station WLTX to claim this bill as a key early victory for his group.

Brutal South

Here comes ‘freedom’

I saw a truly asinine spectacle yesterday in the South Carolina House of Representatives. A handful of lawmakers had proposed a bill (H. 3868) to designate the second Saturday of November as “Women in Hunting and Fishing Awareness Day.” This is the kind of frivolous nonsense that pads out the horrors of every legislativ…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · Paul Bowers

In a state where Republicans command a trifecta of power in the House, Senate, and governor’s mansion, we have become keen observers of the rifts and factions in the ruling party. The Freedom Caucus has opened one such rift this year with its antics, perhaps most infamously when Rep. May derailed a bill declaring “Women in Hunting and Fishing Awareness Day” by trying to insert a biological definition of “women” in the bill.

I found my way to the Gressette Building, a low brutalist office tower on the Capitol Complex. By the time I was seated in a conference room with the Senate Education Subcommittee, I had decided on my angle.

This is what I said in my allotted three minutes:

I am a parent of three public school students in Charleston County, and I oppose House Bill 3728. My remarks today are addressed to the Republicans in this room and in the Senate.

What you have before you is a teacher censorship bill, in large part written and promulgated by an aggrieved partisan wing within your own party calling itself the South Carolina Freedom Caucus. They are a national embarrassment to your party, and if you pass this bill you are delivering them an early and crucial victory while lending them the institutional legitimacy of their host party — your party.

I know better by now than to assume I share common values with my neighbors, but I am going to try appealing today to the value of freedom, actual freedom, and not as the Freedom Caucus would seek to redefine it. I’m asking you to defend free inquiry by students and the freedom of teachers to hold open and honest classroom discussions about current events. Defend us from speech codes written by the “Freedom Caucus,” and do not hand them the power to sue and de-fund school districts into oblivion while intimidating teachers and chasing them out of the profession.

I know it is not news to you that our schools are beyond the point of crisis because so many teachers have departed the profession in the last decade. Many of those teachers were my friends, neighbors, family members, and teachers of my children. Their complaints are myriad and righteous: low pay, a lack of autonomy, a mountain of paperwork, a lack of respect for the profession from the local school board all the way up to the Statehouse chambers.

I have heard them lament the state of the schools and resign in agony from the work that they loved and believed they were put on this earth to do. But do you know what none of them ever said to me? None of them ever said, “Boy, I wish there were restrictions on my speech and on what books my students could borrow from the library. I wish my district office had an added layer of bureaucracy to monitor and punish me. I wish there was an array of moneyed interests waiting outside my classroom to vilify me, to sue me, and to have me fired for speaking the truth.”

This bill is not merely a solution in search of a problem. It is a problem unto itself, in a state that does not lack for problems. I ask you in the name of freedom, real freedom: Kill this bill before you kill our schools.

I am grateful that I got the chance to speak; a friend of a friend who couldn’t make it yielded her time to me. I hope my words were not in vain.

In all, 23 speakers spoke against the teacher censorship bill. None spoke in favor of it. As I listened, I thought about the sheer effort it took for everyone to arrive in this conference room. Three high school students and a chaperone drove up from Beaufort County. Two veteran teachers from Greenville County in the Upstate took the day to testify, and my friend the educator AJ Davis drove up from Charleston County. The president of the Pickens County Branch NAACP shared her painful experiences growing up in segregated schools and implored the subcommittee not to censor uncomfortable history. These busy, brilliant people rearranged their entire day to speak for three minutes apiece.

The Senate Education Subcommittee took no action on the teacher censorship bill, possibly because some of its members were tied up in another hearing booked at the same time. Elsewhere in the Gressette Building Wednesday morning, a subcommittee of the Senate Medical Affairs Committee was hearing testimony on Senate Bills 627 and 623, a pair of bills that would ban access to gender-affirming healthcare for children under 18 and affirm a medical affidavit requirement to change gender identification on birth certificates.

Most of my friends wearing trans pride ribbons to that hearing didn’t get a chance to speak. The committee did hear from experts including a pediatrician who told them what they were proposing was medically reckless and actively harmful. No experts spoke in favor of the bills. The subcommittee voted 4-3 along party lines to advance the bills anyway.

Somebody said once that voting is like praying to a god who hates you. On my more cynical days I believe it. We can’t vote any harder, and we don’t get credit for eloquence when our arguments fall on deaf ears. The long-term solution to our problems is mass organizing and building collective worker power. It’s daunting, but there is no other way.

I don’t know if my words on Wednesday morning amounted to anything. The Republicans on the subcommittee perked up when I mentioned the fate of their party, but I don’t know — can’t know — what they took away from our encounter.

After the hearings, out in the crisp cold daylight on the Statehouse lawn, I met people who had traveled from across the state to oppose these latest attacks. Organizers with ProTruth SC and South Carolina United for Justice & Equality had set up a microphone for people who hadn’t gotten a chance to address the subcommittees. They spoke about the joy of being their authentic selves and the pain of being scorned and attacked by our most powerful public leaders.

Around midday, Marcus McDonald from Charleston Black Lives Matter climbed the Statehouse steps to bless us with a song. I’d seen him play the trombone before, including at July 2021 protests where he kept us marching to a beat until Charleston police arrested him and threw his instrument on the ground.

On Wednesday, he faced the crowd and improvised something lyrical. A cool wind blew by, and the crowd grew quiet.

I don’t know if our words are all in vain. I have pessimism of the intellect down pat, but I am still learning optimism of the will. I am glad that I went.

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Brutal South is a free weekly newsletter about class struggle and education in the American South. If you would like to support my work and get access to the complete archive of subscriber-only stuff, paid subscriptions are $5 a month.

Subscribe now

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