Adam Serwer

And you're doing that because you have no appreciation of the quote unquote principles of Western civilization.

The good ones, you know, just to be clear, not the ones that, you know, led to the industrialization of chattel slavery, but the ones that say individual people have value and rights that must be respected.

And, you know, these people have nothing but disdain for those things.

And I think in part, you know, when you look at the people around the Trump administration and Miller is like an example, like we have a society now that selects for people who are excellent at getting attention, not necessarily people who are competent at the work that they do.

Not understanding what classical liberal principles are is just an example of that.

Well, you know, Langston Hughes famously said that the South was a fascist government, right?

During the rise of fascism in Europe.

And I think he was right about that, you know, even though we can distinguish between, you know, classical dictatorships and harem vote democracies.

But I think what is different here, what is novel, is that, you know, after the Civil War, the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments were like, the thing we need to really prevent is oppression of people by their state governments.

Because, you know, the original founders thought, oh, the state governments will protect the

their residents from tyranny by the federal government.

But it turned out that philosophy was one that was employed by men who wanted to own other men as property, other people as property.

They revised the constitution to say the federal government will protect the rights of the individual people.

So I think what's unusual here is we have sort of a reverse reconstruction

where the Redeemers are in charge of the federal government.

And rather than, you know, the sort of redemption era red shirts running around with guns intimidating people who are, you know, associated with, you know, local and state violence,

elites.

It's the federal government who's invading states and oppressing people there on the basis of their skin color or legal status.

Or as we see in Minnesota, there's no way to contain this kind of state violence to the quote unquote undesirables themselves.

American citizens who want to defend the ideals that they were raised to cherish are also in the line of fire and will also be killed as a result.