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Cabaret is a film that serves as a stark reminder of how quietly a society can fall into fascism, especially when those with privilege are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities taking place. Set in 1930s Berlin, the movie explores the rise of the Nazi party and its impact on the lives of ordinary people, particularly those in the entertainment industry.

The story follows the lives of a writer named Brian and a cabaret performer named Sally Bowles, who both become caught up in the political turmoil of the time. One of the key themes of Cabaret is the danger of complacency in the face of fascism. The film portrays a society in which the majority of people are either indifferent or actively supportive of the Nazi party. This isn’t really shoved in the audience’s faces though, since the real plot revolves around a bisexual love triangle.

It has Surprise Nazis, like The Sound of Music.

This willingness to ignore the third reich is especially evident though in the character of Max, a wealthy German Baron who is happy to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Nazi regime, even as he turns a blind eye to the horrors being committed by the party. Max's character serves as a reminder that those with privilege often have the luxury of ignoring the suffering of others, as long as it does not directly affect them.

The character of Sally Bowles also highlights the dangers of complacency and privilege in the face of fascism. Sally is a talented performer who enjoys the freedoms and opportunities that come with life in Berlin's bohemian community. However, she is also naive and self-centered, with little interest in politics or the world outside her own narrow sphere. As the Nazis begin to tighten their grip on power, Sally remains oblivious to the danger, choosing instead to focus on her own personal ambitions. It is only when she is directly confronted with the realities of fascism that she begins to understand the gravity of the situation, and instead chooses to turn a blind eye…

Another key theme of Cabaret is the role of propaganda in the rise of fascism. The film shows how the Nazi party used performing arts, specifically singing, to promote its message and win over ordinary people. This is most evident in the character of the Emcee, the flamboyant and charismatic host of the Kit Kat Klub. While the Emcee initially seems like a harmless figure, he gradually becomes more and more sinister as the story progresses, using his position to spread Nazi propaganda and sow the seeds of hatred and intolerance.

Overall, Cabaret serves as a powerful warning about the dangers of fascism and the ease with which a society can fall into it, especially when those with privilege are willing to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. And one group that is historically brilliant at pretending bad things aren’t happening, or only happen to them, is straight people.

But before we proceed to tonight’s entertainment, please like and subscribe to my channel, and sign up for the patreon if you’re feeling generous. And now, a word from this video’s sponsor!

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The thing is. We grew up hearing ‘Nazis are bad.’ This wasn’t really a shock to any of us. In fact, late night cartoons and even spoof movies made a punchline out of somehow making the villain of the story some random group of Nazis. And Indiana Jones.

It was a for-granted indication that no matter what violence this group of villains endured, parents groups would consider it ‘safe.’ Because they were Nazis.

We knew what the Nazis stood for and stood against. That truth and justice heroically stood against Nazi bigotry and intolerance — again, something easily made into a punchile^{[sic: punchline]}. Fruity Hitler also wasn’t out of the cultural awareness either.

So given that the culture was aware of what made the Nazis bad, how are we watching a certain group of people slip into that cultural mindset of fascistic intolerance all over again? How is it so easy for certain groups of people to blame immigrants, ethnic or religious minorities, queer people, or even women for all the problems in the world — instead of holding their leadership and government institutions accountable?

It’s not even enough to say ‘this keeps happening’ and, instead, more accurate to say: this won’t stop happening. Why is it so easy for straight, white, cisgener^{[sic: cisgender]}, (usually) men to slip into this kind of militant bigotry like we see in Cabaret, and like we see beginning to play out today. And in spite of a large chorus of our society claiming that we don’t have anything to worry about, nearly everyone who lived through things like the events in Cabaret are pointing out the red flags.

It’s hard to plot out the dance steps to the organized, violent xenophobia — often because it’s not usually deliberate. It’s a reaction to present events that take different forms. Sometimes there’s financial hardship, other times not. Sometimes there’s a new ethnic group entering the state, other times the ethnic group is well established. Sometimes there’s a political counter-movement, other times not.

Two things seem to be constant in this pattern. The first is that there is a perceived threat to the hegemonistic way of life. The second, is that figureheads arise who point out that things were better before and that they’re worse now because of a specific reason. That reason is… almost always a group of people that they don’t like. A later stage of this process involves the leadership of this group insisting that to make things go back to what they were, they just need to… get rid of the thing that’s different. Or rather… the thing they perceive as being different.

There’s a lot of writing about fascist regimes, how to spot them developing, or spotting patterns in their ideological belief systems. But what it boils down to… seems to be a matter of what they perceive, and how they chose to trust their perception over all else.

And the easiest way to explain this is with cake. If you don’t have any cake, are you going to get upset that you don’t have any other cake? Generally not, no. You may get some cravings now and then, but these are spontaneous. Usually, you have to be reminded that cake exists to really want it. In which case, getting a spontaneous reminder about cake — when you have a medical condition that makes your body allergic to carbohydrates — kinda sucks. But cake was never an expectation in the first place so it blows over.

However, if someone promises you cake as a reward for, say, a series of rigorous and perhaps deadly scientific experiments… you’re going to get really excited about the cake! And even though you did not have the cake before, if the cake was a lie, you’re going to feel like the cake was taken away from you.

Now the tricky part about this class of baby fascists is that, even though cake was never an option, they perceive a promise of cake. Cake which they would have never received and never will receive. So they are angry.

And while anger can be a potent and necessary motivational tool, if you spend too long being angry — getting what you want isn’t going to make you feel better — you just want to have your anger justified. You want permission to be angry.

Now in this analogy, the cake is an applicable symbol. It can be sex, status, money, opportunities, rights, freedom — the ability to harass people without repercussions. Those are things though; the underlying motivation seems to be a need to be able to have influence over the world. For whatever manifestation it may take — cake is influence. And privilege is qualified by any kind of social expectation that you will get it.

So. As much as you may have felt that you were promised cake, but do not have any cake, you feel like there is an injustice. However, if you see that others have cake, you may begin to feel covetous.

[Meme cutaway]: Hannibal Lecter: “He Covets.”

You may be very inclined to feel that these people who have cake are a threat to your ability to have cake. A key component of this anger is the fear and outrage of a perceived victimhood, which offers a sense of righteousness when taking steps to righting a perceived wrong.

And this is where the metaphor unravels and we can actually start talking about the real thing. Because modern manifestations of fascism organize around a particular kind of propaganda. It begins with two perceptions: that there is not enough cake to go around, and that the reason you do not have cake is because someone else has yours. Both of these premises are false.

First: there is always enough cake to go around — if there isn’t, it’s due to the actions of an elite class who hoard the cake. And they think they’re safe hoarding it because we’ve let them believe that they are just immune to diabetes.

Second: the blame for ‘who has all the cake’ is deflected from who is actually causing the problem by scapegoating a group of people who have few methods of legal protection.

It’s the language of privilege that makes it difficult to really understand why it seems so easy for fascism to recruit from the privileged. Especially when, within their own propaganda, there is a paradox about privilege itself. On one hand, privilege doesn’t exist! They hold up a handful of examples — to the Nazis, it was Jewish Bankers. In our culture, dissident, angry, white people are directed towards people of color. How can ‘white privilege’ exist when individual white people have it worse off than Oprah?

They cite various scholarships programs, or laws designed to afford opportunities to women and people of color. And they hold up these instances and say: “there’s no assistance for straight white men, therefore these ‘supposed minorities’ have privileges we do not have.” To them? Case CLOSED on racism, sexism, or homophobia. Nevermind that these opportunities are in place to offset a society which still to this day favors straight white cisgender men.

However, on the other side of this paradox is the insistence that having privilege SHOULD afford those who have it with a greater amount of the influence that they seek. What’s the point of having privilege if you don’t have opportunities to use it? The language of entitlement and expectations are used to establish a sense of what life should be like for this group of people.

This often calls back to periods of time in national history where this demographic of people enjoyed a great amount of cultural influence. Privilege does not exist when they need to describe the normative condition of how their lives OUGHT to look. Privilege does NOT exist when they need to frame their social victimization to justify the fervor around their outrage for not having the cake! that their non-privilege should afford them.

This is dumb.

Like. It’s so incredibly dumb, that you wonder how people who engage in this discussion can’t point it out. How can xenophobic, exclusionary movements of totalitarian control over a population resulting in genocide and ethnic cleansing that have shaped human history be rooted in this kind of errant, egregious dumbness?

Well, to quote Voltaire… “anything too stupid to be said… is sung.”

A regularly-documented aspect of fascism is the degree to which pageantry is used to… normalize it. And Make a spectacle of it. Somehow it accomplishes both of these things. Spectacle makes it seem fun and inviting, while at the same time a regular performance of fascistic showmanship makes it seem like something that is socially acceptable to participate in. The “well, if everyone’s doing it” mentality.

There’s a much more sinister side to this than just offering up some comedic levity. In queer circles, we speak to the importance of using representation in media to normalize queer identities. Not everyone is going to grow up knowing the many different kinds of queer people out there. By having these characters and their experiences represented in media, it can establish a sense of familiarity.

However, the use of pageantry can be used against minority groups. While the initial spark of injustice seems to be required to rally these groups together — economic problems or what have you — these actual causes begin to matter ‘less’ than having open permission to be hateful and bigoted without social recourse.

In early-stages of rallying around hate, certain rhetoric is passed around within the hate group. When it was still in the beer halls, early Nazis targeted Jewish Bankers, and held them up as an instance of the kind of greed that was keeping “pure Germans” from their full potential. (Whatever that means — because Hitler was actually Austrian…)

And sure, there were probably some bankers who were Jewish that were making life rough. But there were also a lot of non-Jewish bankers; and maybe the shitty shared quality was the ‘banker’ part, and not the Jewish part. Some things never change.

However the rhetoric circulating in these hate groups said that because Jewish bankers were bad, that all Jewish people must have been bad. Enough time spent marinating in this echo chamber, the less these qualities actually applied to Jews of a particular profession, and the more it was accepted — among the early Nazis and their supporters — that these are just self-evident truths, for which no explanation or justification was required.

The initial rationality behind the hatred was removed; ongoing persecution required no justification, and became a matter of begging the question. They deserve persecution so they must be bad; they are bad because we know they are; they deserve persecution because they are bad.

The transition from ‘spreading awareness’ about a class of perceived [air quotes] “undesirables” begins with this abandonment of reason. They literally abandon reasons for why they should persecute this class. The hallmark here is the comfort with which they begin to justify the ridicule of this group.

Raising an alarm against some kind of threat to privilege, children, or the moral fiber of society — these are good for calling people to action. There is a threat, some righteous cause to fight for. But that’s not enough: you have to make the people comfortable with hatred. Hatred can’t feel like hatred or people may reject it. Hatred has to feel ‘normal’ to be publicly and personally acceptable… which is where comedy comes in.

Comedy is an incredibly complex human interaction. It’s often considered a cheap thrill by theatrical standards, we consider it an easy form of entertainment when it comes to fart jokes or slapstick. However, comedies that engage audiences on an intellectual level — such as TV shows like Veep or Arrested Development — are often looped in with those base-level entertainments on merits alone.

Whether or not it’s easy to make someone laugh (and for the fact that some people make it look a lot easier than it is), that should not dismiss the complex neurological process of comedy. As much as we may dismiss comedy as lesser-than media, there is no specific part of the brain that is specifically responsible for laughter. This results in a range of neurological, psychological, and philosophical debate about why we laugh.

However, especially when philosophers are concerned, they all seem to hold a common element of linking laughter to both danger, and social connections, even if they disagree on how these elements result in laughing. Suffice to say, laughter seems to be seen as the result of a pleasant reaction or resolution of tension. That’s why we laugh after jump scares in horror movies.

A joke is seen as a kind of psychological maze for which the punchline is an escape: the relief to the tension of anticipation results in laughter. This is compounded in socialsocietal situations where we crave connection to other people more than we crave a satisfying outcome to the maze. Definitely explains why you may watch some comedians, and from the comfort of your couch they seem to be bombing, though the crowd seems to be laughing themselves to death. Also why they add a laugh track to sitcoms even when nothing is funny.

The joint connection itself is a relief, and a formative element of a positive memory. This element of social connection can be very beguiling, as often documented by film critics. At movie premieres, it’s more than just screening the movie. There’s food, drinks, entertainment, mingling — these things foster a good memory before the movie even starts. Many people at movie premieres will remark that the screening itself was fantastic — only to later watch the movie on their own, without the rose-tinted glasses and realize that it wasn’t very good actually.

I’m sure it isn’t hard to see how this applies to the spread of bigoted propaganda. And this is one of the most concerning turning points in Cabaret. The host sings a loving ballad about his beloved, regarding the discrimination this gorilla faces, and how he doesn’t care at all about how she looks or her feral habits. This number is cute and light, and very earnest — and the audience naturally laughs because it’s so absurd.

The film’s audience, in contrast to the cabaret’s audience in the early 30s who don’t know what’s around the corner for Germany, is tricked into being tickled by this warm comedic number. The shock comes with the final line of the number…

[Oof!] Big ooof indeed. To the in-universe audience, this is just a joke. And people who are offended at the establishment using its platform and production to play into existing stereotypes “just need to learn to take a joke.”

The combination of being lulled into a sense of groupthink through joint participation in a joke, regardless of quality, in conjunction with the familiarizing act of a joke’s role in presenting a sense of relief and comfort — it’s no surprise that this is yet another tactic in fascistic pipelines. Hook people in with the threat, familiarize them with comedic theatrics, and install a sense of pride through pageantry.

The Nazis specifically came at the public through a two-pronged approach. Although he was nothing but a lowly paper hanger, Hitler had a knack for spotting world-class talent and giving them an unbridled platform, changing the course of art history. But on the other hand, for the working class, his cabinet empowered ‘base’ entertainers — comedians, thespians, singers, and, yes, the proprietors of clubs and cabarets. Which… is another unfortunate parallel we see expanding before our very eyes today.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that there are a slew of stand-up comedians who are explicitly going out of their way to target trans people. As a culture, we really ought to use it as a litmus test about who, in the profession, actually goes out of their way to make original content. Going after minorities or small communities is a low-hanging fruit. It doesn’t take a whole lot of talent to point to something different and say:

Though these days comedians don’t even bother discussing anti-trans hate in their stand-up. It’s pretty much just a bigoted tirade that the audience howls at because the culture has conditioned them to believe that being told not to hate people is synonymous with oppression!

Meanwhile, the stand up comedians playing into this static, snapshot of culture are the same ones claiming that the public holding them accountable for saying hateful things is an infringement on their freedom. Which says a whole lot more than I think they mean to, because if you have freedom, and you use it to choose hatred, you need to consider that hatred isn’t exactly the gateway drug for more freedom.

Many stand up comedians like to talk themselves up as having this philosophically esoteric role to the culture as being the first and last line of defense for freedom of speech. Ignoring the flood of reporters and now even elected representatives who are censored and silenced. But… but… without stand-up comedians, society would never be able to push boundaries. The role of stand-up comedy is to make people uncomfortable when a society gets too comfortable with its own status quo… or something along those lines.

And then they turn RIGHT around to complain about why they can’t use comedy to target minorities anymore. You know. The people who are pushed outside the fringes of social acceptance.

I think in a lot of ways stand-up comedians are jealous... of people who belong to these minority groups. (And I do hate using the term minorities, but bear with me.) They long to exist as these fringe rockstars who push boundaries, meanwhile people outside the straight, cis, white hegemony do that just by existing.

(No, that isn’t the last time I’m going to use that clip.)

Not to disrespect stand-up as an art. Lewis Black, Kathy Griffin, the late great Robin Williams, and George Carlin. And now Hannah Gadsby. Funny as hell, and they don’t attack people in need of help. They've punched up. The targets of their comedy were either self-directed, individuals or institutions who do have a large amount of influence, or social trends among the hegemony as a whole.

Targeting trans people, or other minorities, accomplishes a process of othering these people by highlighting their differences as different from the norm. The aforementioned comedians who I feel are worthy of respect, instead, often target the INSTITUTIONS that propagate this ‘othering.’

On top of the great difficulty that it takes to make these acts entertaining, there is a great deal of power that this kind of charisma holds. Crowds of people may be easily swayed by a charismatic figure. And such a figure who seems so comfortable with their subject material that it can be passed to a crowd as common sense. Through framing and context, the masses agree that because this person on a stage is making a joke out of it, that it must be true. And if one thing they say is true, everything they say must come from that self-evident context.

What is said doesn’t need to be true — but if it is spoken with enough confidence, people will believe that its true. And the primary component of telling a joke is that it’s only funny if you say it with confidence.

A famous quote by Bertrand Russell — and I apologize if he’s problematic, he’s been dead for fifty years. But the quote, which remains exceptionally poingnet, goes: “The whole problem with the world is fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people are so full of doubts.”

This harmonizes with Socrates' famous line: “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” Or Albert Einstein’s: “Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before the age eighteen.”

The more we learn, the more knowledge we realize we do not possess. The more we may be informed that previously-held beliefs are false, and the less we may trust new information.

But this is the tricky thing about doubt… you have to know what to place it in, and how to do it. Doubt, like any other intelligence, is a skill. How do you know what should be questioned and what should be taken for granted? If you apply this skill wrongly, you may offer up sympathy for the devil.

We’re entering a period of time where an inordinate amount of narrative effort in fiction is driven by a need to deconstruct someone’s rationale for WHY they’re villains. I mean we really shouldn’t need a whole lot of explanation to understand why that’s probably a problematic element of society today.

In the instance of someone being a total dickwad, an empathetic society would rather support the victim than focus on the perpetrator in question. Granted, our culture has this fixation on victim blaming. As if someone is asking to get burgled if they have their valuables in a jewelry box instead of a safety deposit box. Cut to the: “well what was she wearing?” argument.

Of course, empathizing with victims in a pragmatic way would result in making changes to core elements of society that generate these crimes or aggressions in the first place [laughing] and we’re allergic to that.

There’s a mindset that, if we interview, analyze, and reason with individuals within fascism — those who even 20 years ago would have been easily considered villains, yet saying that today somehow makes it ‘political’ — that if we get inside their head we can figure out what makes them tick. That it’s important to understand WHY they’re fascist. What elements of the culture are feeding into this?

Which… first… yeah we’ve been doing that but at the same time I’m not seeing a whole lot of administrative directives aimed at redirecting people away from fascist pipelines. This is what people have been screaming at Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and even YouTube to do for ages. And failing that, with business lords citing freedom of… the market… or whatever — we looked to our democratic leaders to oppose an indoctrinating political system whose sole purpose is to usurp democracy and we continually get a big ol’ ‘meh.’

The ending result of this is an after-school special about bullying. A lot of TV shows had one. The main characters are getting horribly bullied, and they get mad at their bully for bullying them, so they concoct some revenge scheme, and then they learn that their bully was actually bullied themselves, and then they feel bad and apologize for their revenge, and their bully is never held accountable for being an absolute dick!

[Note: previous paragraph said over My Little Pony footage.]

I’m not outing myself as a Broney. My co-writer had a stoner phase and was held at gunpoint to binge a lot of kids shows.

This particular episode is shitty because it sets a precedent for ignoring wrongs against you, in lieu of empathizing with the people wronging you. This is formative children’s media…

Why is it fostering a sense of martyrdom? Sure, friendship and cooperation are great, but when it comes to this friendship-vibes-only, how much are you supposed to endure before you stand up for yourself?

And this is compounded through a collection of modern animated films. Dreamworks’ The Bad Guys itself was a movie focusing exclusively on this. With the added twist of the surprise villain (Which is now a staple of Disney too)… who you could spot the second he was on screen. But still, the primary discussion of that film was “Let’s talk about WHY the bad guys are bad.”

Meanwhile: the only thing I want to talk about was why are only the main characters furries? Couldn’t they throw in an anthro or two in the background?

While I thought it was a decent animated movie, the conclusion the film comes to is that people are ‘bad’ because that’s how they’re treated their whole lives. Which may or may not be true, but the script does outstandingly little to outline what ‘bad’ means, when I feel that there — on a societal level — needs to be a much more nuanced understanding of badness.

People committing petty crimes are ‘bad’ because they’re locked in a cycle of poverty and this is how they have been conditioned to think is an acceptable way to make ends meet. While the depiction of carnivores in Bad Guys establishes this on a visual level, there’s little done to explore this nuance, or offer any kind of resolution to the problem. In fact, by the end of the movie, there is no social prerogative for society to change its perspective on visual profiling.

The only social development is that the population learns that you can’t trust furries. Any of them.

The audience is meant to take away the real messaging of course, to not judge a book by its cover. Give the ‘bad guys’ a chance. But it does very little to establish different treatments for different kinds of badness. The only form of ‘badness’ it demonstrates is robbery, and even then the only real difference between the hamster and the wolf is how much we are implored to empathize with their emotional arc. How are we to separate the people who are bad without the opportunities to be good, and people who are just bad?

And provided enough emotional context, are we being conditioned to believe that everyone can be good given the opportunity? Are we really meant to take away that there are no villains, only people you haven’t made friends with yet? Just negotiate with fascists and find a suitable compromise between freedom and genocide? Hitler was a sober vegetarian who liked dogs, you know! YEAH!

To what ‘badness’ is owed empathy and to which kind do we need to be on the lookout for? Maybe if we just give that apparent bad guy or rival a chance, we’ll learn that they’re not bad, and that we should apologize for not seeing how rough they had it in spite of the complete lack of their ability to communicate their hard shit. It’s OUR FAULT that we didn’t have enough empathy.

And this is on TOP of the aforementioned ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’ trope that’s been established lately. Where you don’t know WHO the Disney Villain is. That it’s NOT the seemingly obvious bad guy, but instead, the person you wouldn’t have expected.

Which culminates in this grand encouragement to empathize with those that the public decries as a villain, [Clip of Elon Musk] but constantly be on guard to wait for a moment when the REAL bad guy shows their true colors. [Clip of AOC]

All the while this media does very little to establish a methodology for how to differentiate between either of those, or to point out when someone really is as straightforward as they seem. That person holding up a convenience store is likely in that situation of generational poverty regardless of their decisions. But that person at a rally threatening violence against trans people, immigrants, or people of color… They have made some CHOICES.

[Meme cutaway]: “Choices”

Taking people who turn to violence or violent rhetoric, and trying to find clues in their past to justify WHY they would do that inherently seeks to frame them as a victim. What was done UNTO them to MAKE them feel this way? They are framed as a victim of a larger societal construct. Which. [Bangs mic against head] Jesus christ, people—

[Suddenly TV static to black and white, old-timey getup]:

-inclined to feel that these people who have cake are a threat to your ability to have cake. A key component of this anger is the fear and outrage of a perceived victimhood, which offers a sense of righteousness when taking steps to righting a perceived wrong.

[TV static back to normal]

The more this kind of focus is placed upon analyzing these fascists as lost boys who society left behind, the more we reinforce these structures of self-victimization. Especially insofar as it validates a fear that society has forgotten about those of privilege, and to what privilege itself is allegedly owed.

And at the end of this is the promise that investigating why someone would want to commit to this kind of organized bigotry would offer some technique on how to prevent it. But granted, especially in America, there are two ‘p-words’ — pussy, and preventative.

So we end up in a cultural state where we have no recourse for how to redirect people out of fascist circles, leading to a collection of trans women fighting back a cumulative nervous breakdown from their efforts of trying to stem the tide of this pipeline without a road map. In spite of all this information we have, we still know very little about how to de-radicalize people from these violent spaces.

And without the information being used — and there is a LOT of information — to develop practical solutions to a literal threat against contemporary Democracy, [laughing] we just have a heap of data about fascists’ emotions. Party.

We have next to no documentation about the success rates of citizens, creators, influencers, and entertainers who are throwing darts in the dark to figure out what’s going to stick. And also next to no public interest in the people who are victims OF this hateful, violent rhetoric.

Because you’d think that in an empathic, compassionate society, those are the people — the people whose very lives are an affront to fascism — to whom our interest would be drawn. But no. Let’s feed into the privilege of people who feel like their privilege owes them more out of life, by making everything about their emotions.

[Over "SARCASM" on screen]: Fascists: they’re the REAL victims of fascism —

The moral weight of their choices are the real casualties. Which is a romantic notion, if you don’t take into account actual fascists in real life. The hordes of SS officers being called to testify at Nuremberg who expressed not a feather of remorse for their actions.

And I don’t even want to blame all of our leaders and lawmakers for not making efforts to legislate the kind of circumstances that could make a whole population comfortable enough to not feel like their way of life is at risk. Raise wages to match the cost of living, impose rent control to force landlords to price competitively, subsidize essential goods, generate public options for power, water, and communications. Because there are people who are trying to do these things.

The problem is, when it comes to a substantial portion of the population—

[Suddenly TV static to black and white, old-timey getup]:

-anger can be a potent and necessary motivational tool, if you spend too long being angry — getting what you want isn’t going to make you feel better — you just want to have your anger justified. You want permission to be angry.

[TV static back to normal]

Which is how you end up in situations where the population actively resists actions that will make their lives easier. And this can be indoctrinated through any number of methods— usually by saying “this helpful thing is actually part of an organization you hate.” You hate the organization, so you hate the thing. Coupled with a strong centrist movement that thinks that life can be beautiful as long as you ignore anything that isn’t — well this is how you get fascists.

And all of this isn’t just in reference to the Third Reich or The KKK or their sad little modern imitators. There are a large number of groups in human history who fought from the bottom rung of the ladder to improve their living conditions. From slave revolts over the span of the Roman Empire — to several waves of French peasants who, over the course of a century, toppled a disconnected and clueless ruling aristocracy, and changed the political landscape of Europe to this day. As much as we look at those battles and say: “Yes those were righteous causes.” The Third Reich and the KKK also felt their causes were righteous.

Which brings us to today where — sigh[humorless chuckle] — a significant group of people seem to hold queer people responsible for all the world’s problems. And not, you know, the ongoing greed-mongering, crony-capitalist, post-colonial, nepotistic, pseudo-democratic oligarchy which we like to pretend passes for a society that lends power to the people.

But let’s NOT blame the people running that show, and instead let’s blame preferred pronouns as the root of all evil. That’s… That’s it… That… [Taps head smartly]

We — the left-leaning, progressive, and socially-minded of us — typically celebrate the downtrodden and underclasses standing up for their own dignities. But it’s this language of ‘righteousness’ that seems to work against us at times. Righteousness is a vague term, and (I find) more accurately describes a kind of air that someone carries themself with, rather than an objective sense of doing what is right or just. Which explains a lot about our society, actually.

But it’s the specific word ‘righteous’ that messes it all up. Because while there may be — through some ethical philosophy — an objective sense of what is truly righteous through any singular definition of the word… in a pragmatic sense, the word really does boil down to perspective. For whom is justice liberation; and for whom is justice regression?

In our fights and struggles for the minorities and second-class citizens to be recognized with dignity and respect, the language of our struggle did not go unnoticed. And the privileged, who celebrate heroism and heroic deeds, envy these battles and they envy our figureheads for representing the values they can only ascribe to their ancestors. They cannot live out these battles in their lifetimes — so they make a show of it.

And we’ve seen this song and dance before. We’ve heard this music, the lyrics calling out to condemn those who barely have any rights to begin with. These songs, these dances. They’re not new. We’ve seen them play out over and over again on stages all around the world. These people put on a show to tell the world how repressed they are, even though they’re in the biggest show in town.

But it’s all so hollow. Like a story written by an AI. They plagiarize our struggles and our fights and appropriate it into their pageantry. But our struggles, our victories, our lives will always outlast their theatrics — because theater is only a story… And every story, eventually, comes to an end.