I feel a simmering anger at the way Reconstruction was taught to me, even in higher education. I majored in history, but even in our advanced classes, the truth was glossed over.  Reconstruction was not taught as the dismal failure that it was, where the South successfully threw off the first attempt at multi-racial democracy with sustained violence and corruption.  The federal government just gave up, and the Lost Cause myth and Jim Crow were allowed to flourish.

If we’d been taught that better, we might have an understanding of what’s happening now.  On one level, the Civil War never ended.   The battle over whether America is a white apartheid state or not has yet to be decided.

We are in an active state of civil war right now.   MAGA fascist Washington against blue states and cities.  You may not know, because the newsmedia is not covering it as the emergency it is.  

On September 30, ICE assaulted a Chicago apartment building in the dead of night with Blackhawk attack helicopters, rappelling down onto the building, smashing the windows, dragging the occupants out, some naked, shackling them in rental vans.  At the end of the multi-hour siege, ICE claimed to have arrested several “gang members.” But no warrants were ever displayed.  No badges.  No rights.

FOTUS calls it “training.”  But it is a demonstration of State power against American civilians, citizens.  Those FOTUS calls “the enemy within.”  Ordinary Americans who didn’t vote for him.  

The newsmedia folds it into the default “culture war” narrative.  No!  This is war war!  Military units and munitions deployed against American civilians in American cities because they displease the Dear Leader.  The “both sides” framing obscures the asymmetry of State violence. 

Confederates called it “Redemption” when they toppled Reconstruction.  Now MAGA claims to be “making America great” as they dismantle democracy and wage war on their fellow citizens.  

YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP!

This is real.  This is happening now.  Our military is turned against us.  Our rights are being shredded.  FOTUS is selling FOTUS 2028 hats.  We could end our lives with this country in a state of squalid unfreedom.

Don’t wait for permission to be alarmed.  You won’t get it.  The powers that be want us to be docile, distracted lambs to the slaughter.  Don’t let the quotidian grind numb you to what is happening.  The cold war of American history has become hot again.  Don’t deny it!  We have to fight however we can.

This time, we have to finish it once and for all.  Our descendants shouldn’t have to fight this war again in another hundred years. If Nathan Bedford Forrest had danced at the end of a rope, he wouldn’t have been around to found the Ku Klux Klan.  The decent, democratic people of this country can’t make the same mistake again.