Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)

Stop asking me to care about people who don't care about me.

They don't even care about *themselves*.

Do you know why I don't care? Because these people hate me. They hate my boyfriend. They hate my friends. They hate all the Black, brown, queer, educated, urbane, and immigrant people who want something better for themselves and their families. They hate them so much they will choose to live in squalor in their empty rural red state enclaves where Republicans exploit them. Because it's far, far away from the evil, evil cities they despise so much.

Occasionally people try to convince me to change my mind, but I honestly don't care about rural white conservatives. I don't care about their struggles. They're self-inflicted. I'm done. I care about the people who are trapped there. That's it.

One of the big themes of my work is there is no demon, no monster, more horrifying than a broken, oppressive society and the things it does to people.

Conservative obsessions about an "autism epidemic" and "trans social contagion" are best understood in the context of parents who believe their children are property complaining about receiving "defective" goods.

This is why they would rather have dead kids than live ones that don't conform to their wishes. And because it can't be their fault, they need someone else to blame. This is especially pernicious in the case of autism, which is strongly hereditary.

We're not normally allowed to say so, of course, because if we get angry about our oppression, cis people merely double down on treating us inhumanly.

And honestly, a lot of us are learning to hate not only the people directly responsible but all of the people standing back and letting it happen, too. If this is how we're going to go down, a direct replay of the Nazi purges, I hope you're even more miserable in the fascist shit hole you helped build for yourself.

It's not like you weren't warned.

Trans kids and adults are being pushed to thoughts of suicide right now because if this is how cis society is going to treat us, legally stripping us of our healthcare and our identities because of literal Nazi shit, why even fucking bother.

Being trans is demoralizing right now because we had a brief period where we were treated almost like human beings and then everyone abandoned us. Because our rights are "frivolous." There are too few of us. We don't matter. We're "weird," "gross," "fake." All any of us wanted was to live authentically and largely anonymously. And instead there's a giant fucking spotlight on us every single day, blaming us for Trump and reminding us we're not welcome. And our cis "allies" mostly don't care.

Anyway, I'm struggling to write lately. I wonder why.

House Republicans finally passed the SAVE Act, which will disenfranchise millions of people, especially women. It remains to be seen if Democrats care enough to fight it in the Senate.

Patriarchy feminizes everyone who isn't a "real man" in its eyes, and most cis-het men live in fear of being assigned to this subordinate status, which is the major driver of misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic violence -- men trying to prove to other men that they're one of the "good" ones despite their flaws.

Even Democratic politicians have mostly rolled over and played dead.

So the coup has faced virtually no opposition at the upper levels of government, and they can rely on Republican captured courts to insulate them from any legal consequences. Even liberal district courts find themselves largely powerless to compel compliance, particularly when the GOP controlled SCOTUS is right there to intercede on their behalf.

Trump / "DOGE" / Project 2025 guys have been so successful so far because US institutions have already been hollowed out for decades and everybody involved just does as they're told. There are no guardrails, if there ever were.

The liberal cope of bureaucrats heroically refusing to comply just doesn't exist. There are no meaningful whistle blower or other protections for civil servants, and most of these people can't afford to be laid off in retaliation.

Women, meanwhile, need to be subjugated and forced to marry and sexually service these men, producing as many children as possible. Trans people should be wiped out -- because honestly, we scare the fuck out of them, especially trans women. We represent everything their tiny little brains are afraid of about the modern world feminizing them.

"Men are depressed, broken, and addicted because they're bored of the modern world and feminized by service jobs and office work" really gets at the distilled, neurotic essence of this fascist movement, including its hostility toward trans people. Trump and Musk being some of the most effete, preening assholes on the planet just makes the irony even more vulgar.

You can't extricate the economic cargo cult from the masculine insecurity because they're both about the same thing, the idea men should be the only ones in the workforce (at least for "real" jobs) and should make enough money at literally any job to have a comfortable, upper middle class lifestyle like previous generations supposedly did, completely bereft of any understanding about why the post-WW2 generations were like that, at least the white people.

One of the worst people in the world made a valuable point: there is a cargo cult mentality behind trying to reinvent the post-WW2 economic boom by resurrecting domestic manufacturing.

"McDonalds workers in Denmark make more than Honda workers in Alabama." That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not the job, it's the politics, it's unions, and a legal framework designed to protect instead of exploit people.

Attaching male insecurity to the types of work real people do doesn't help either.

In a sense, this is true of the entire far right in the US, which is obsessed with what Curtis Yarvin called "the cathedral," i.e., the "liberal" media and academia. And while it's advantageous to control the media -- something Republicans learned a long time ago after Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement -- they are, as you can see, so hyper-fixated on DEI and "woke" and their supposed liberal adversaries within these institutions that they never bothered to build a popular movement.