Good morning! Here is my Friday ramble. Apologies in advance for all the f-bombs.
Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, July 17th. I am recording on Thursday evening, July 16th. It is 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Donald Trump is not yet ready to give whatever stupid address he’s going to give tonight at nine—or, knowing him, a little bit after nine, because he’s going to make everybody wait.
He’s supposed to talk about election fuckery. I’m going to have a lot of thoughts about that, I’m sure, which I’m going to discuss on The Five 8, the live YouTube show I do with my friend Stephanie Koff—LB. You can tune in tonight at 8 PM for my thoughts on whatever it is Trump’s talking about.
I hope that he’s not going to do the thing that’s rumored, where he’s going to allege that they found some bullshit “evidence” in Georgia and that therefore, Ossoff and Warnock are ineligible or illegitimate. That’s the rumor. I hope it’s not true. It would be in character for Trump to say that—not least because one of those senators is a Black man, and he’s from Georgia. That’s, historically, as we’re about to discuss, kind of a big deal. And Trump knows this because he’s an inveterate, disgusting, racist pig.
I want to talk about this great book I’m reading. It’s called The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 to 1915 by Joseph Kelly. It is not out yet. I have an advanced copy, because I am a lucky person. Comes out next week. Everybody should preorder this because it’s really quite something.
The book is basically about all the stuff that happened, not just during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but in the years before the Civil War, and what popular opinion was about the institution of slavery, what people in the South really thought, how the “Lost Cause” narrative got developed, and ultimately how Reconstruction worked until it didn’t. It worked until they decided to stop it and pull the plug on it. And that’s something we’re still reckoning with today in 2026.
But I was reading this as I was feeling my feelings about all the crazy. Because there’s a lot of crazy. There’s just so much crazy now, and it’s so frustrating, because I feel like I’m just saying the same thing over and over again. And after a while it gets to be exhausting. It just gets to be exhausting, to do that. Even though I know that what I’m saying is right, and I want to get the word out. It’s exhausting.
And I mention this because I know other people feel this way, too. I think it’s a way that people are feeling now We’re in, like, Year 10 of this shit, with Trump. I know we had the brief four years of Biden, but that really wasn’t a break—not in the way that we all needed.
But I came to a chapter in this book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 to 1915, by Joseph Kelly. And it made me pause. And so I want to just read it. I want to read a couple paragraphs from this from this book, because I think you might get something out of it like I did.
This is from chapter six. The chapter is called “How the South Won the Civil War.”
Kelly writes:
The presidential election of 1872 was a national referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Had or had not all that suffering and all the dead ushered in a new era of democracy? Was the government prepared to enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or was it not? A democratic victory at the polls, President Grant feared, would lose what his own soldiers had won by their last full measure of devotion. His prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina was crucial to the struggle. It secured the first free and fair democratic elections in the history of the American South. It was the first national election in which any large number of Black men would consent to their own government. And Grant was determined to protect that long denied right of franchise. But his zeal splintered the Republican party. One section abandoned Grant and his “Stalwart” Republicans to endorse the newspaperman, Horace Greeley, as a “Liberal Republican” candidate. Greeley was the nation’s biggest media mogul. During the war, his paper rallied public support for Lincoln and emancipation. But six years after the war’s end, like many Northerners, he suffered what historians have come to call “moral fatigue.”
And that’s the part that hit me—the moral fatigue. So I’m continuing on now:
Erstwhile foes of slavery wearied of the unending fight to make white southerners honor the equal rights of their Black neighbors. The constant whining grievances of white southerners wore them down. Some even began to believe the Lost Cause and sympathize with southern planters for having been stripped of their wealth and social status. After one wearying cabinet meeting, the secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, confided to his diary that Attorney General Amos T. Ackerman had the Ku Klux Klan “on the brain.” The whole cabinet was forced to hear in “terribly minute and tedious detail,” the story of how night riders had castrated yet another Black man. Fish had heard such reports too often. It was “a bore,” he said, “to listen twice a week to this same thing.” Greeley became the figurehead of those Republicans who were willing to give up on Black equality. Southern Democrats got behind Greeley on a “fusion” ticket. Had the Klan been allowed to operate, Greeley might have won. But Black voters delivered eight of the old Confederate states for Grant, and the election turned out to be a landslide. Grant won the popular vote by 12 percent, and he carried the Electoral College 286 to 66.
But after the election, even Grant exhibited symptoms of moral fatigue. He was troubled by how many Northerners had rallied behind Greeley, and he longed to accomplish what Lincoln had promised to do just before he died: “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Getting white southerners to shake hands with white northerners meant he had to relax his grip on the Klan. It was time to bury the hatchet. In the summer of 1873, the president bestowed clemency on the hundreds of Klansmen who were awaiting trial. And in what he hoped would be interpreted as an act of benevolence, he pardoned those Klansmen who were still serving sentences, like Samuel Brown, who had more than four years left to serve a five-year prison term.
Southern nationalists interpreted his gesture as a license for terror. They reorganized, this time not as one interstate Klan, whose reputation was so tarnished that a revival would have rekindled Northern sympathies for Blacks, but in rifle clubs and other deceptively innocuous associations. They probed for weaknesses in the federal government. How much terror could they deploy without triggering the Ku Klux Klan acts? Bands of white terrorists sally forth, testing just how much violence they could get away with.
So again, that’s in this great book that I’m reading called The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 to 1915, by Joseph Kelly.
A couple of things about it that hit me. First of all, there’s the whole idea of moral fatigue. I don’t want to minimize the suffering and horrors that went on in the Civil War—between the people that fought in it, and especially Black people in the United States, enslaved Black people or not. It’s no contest. It was much worse then than it is now.
However, there is a lot of outrage now. There’s moral outrage that we have all the time, because of stuff that’s happening that’s just fucking evil. There’s evil happening every day because of Trump, and because of the people in Trump’s orbit.
And it is like Kelly writes in the book: the Southerners and their whining grievances. I mean, that’s pretty familiar, right? We hear whining grievances all the time. “My God, they cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy in the new Odyssey movie! I mean, come on!” Just stupid shit—but also, real shit.
And the takeaway for me in this is that you can’t get merciful with these people, because they’re never going to change. I think Grant learned that. I think Rutherford Hayes learned that. They tried to do the turn-the-other-cheek thing with the Southern racists and it did not work. You cannot reform a Nazi. You can’t rehabilitate Nazis. There’s only one way to get rid of Nazis. One thing we can do is to shame them all, so they run back under the goddamn rocks that they crawled out of when Donald Trump came along.
But I think the example here of that time period is, Grant and the other Northerners and people who believed in emancipation, and how they justifiably suffered from moral fatigue, but they allowed Reconstruction to fail. They allowed it to fail. It wasn’t important enough. And we’re still paying the price for that.
So the takeaway for me is we cannot succumb to moral fatigue, even though this is all exhausting.
And by “we,” I mean me. I’m talking to myself here. I’m not accusing anybody watching this of moral fatigue. I’m saying I feel it. So I know other people must feel it. But the thing is, it’s a privilege to feel that way. If you’re in a position where you feel moral fatigue, then you’re in a position where you’re comfortable and safe. And other people aren’t. So it’s important—even though every day, there’s more shit. Every day there’s more shit, it’s a fire hose of shit from these people, just like they said it was gonna be. Everything is like they said it was gonna be.
We have to keep calling it out. Pete Hegseth is a fucking racist and a fucking sexist and a fucking homophobe. He’s also an idiot, but he’s all of those things. And that is not acceptable in public life. It’s not acceptable. It’s not.
Todd Blanche is a liar. He’s a liar who enables rapists, real sex-trafficking rapists, because they happen to be wealthy white men. That’s who Todd Blanche is. He will always be. And to confirm him, to even be in the same room with him and give him the chance to a position once held by Amos Akerman, is disgusting.
And we can’t stop saying that. (By “we,” I mean me.)
There’s going to be a lot of, “Lindsey Graham was so nice.” And the same thing will happen when we finally found out that Mitch is dead. These men were traitors. They were neo-Confederates. All of their policies did things like erode voting rights, dismantle the gun laws so that there’s a lot more bloodbaths in our schools, and harm women, and harm minorities, people of color, Black people. That’s their life’s work.
And they’re traitors. They got in bed with Trump, who—they knew who he was. They knew he was a Kremlin hack. They knew he was a mobbed-up piece of shit. And they got in bed with him anyway, because they thought they could control him or whatever. They did that, they’re traitors and nothing should ever soften that blow. Nothing should ever soften how we feel about them. I don’t care if they’re dead. I don’t care.
ICE. ICE is still going around the country killing people indiscriminately. They are the Ku Klux Klan now. The Ku Klux Klan in the South and ICE? Same fucking thing. Same thing. A bunch of fucking racists in masks, parading around, killing people willy-nilly, terrorizing people without any repercussions at all, because they’re being abetted and aided and protected by the state, by the federal government, and by the people in charge. That’s who they are. I like to call them the Gestapo, the ICE Gestapo. They’re really the Ku Klux Klan. That’s what they are. They’re worse than the Gestapo. They’re disgusting racists, and they’re cowards.
And that’s the other point. These people are all disgusting cowards. And I think we have to just keep calling them out. We have to keep calling them out. And again, by “we,” I mean me.
So my resolution is to keep doing that. I’m going to keep calling them out. I’m going to keep saying it. Hegseth: racist. Trump, of course, everything, every disgusting adjective that you can use applies to this man—and to think that people still think he’s okay.
It’s not okay. It’s not okay. That’s the message. It’s not okay. It’s just not okay. And pretending that it’s okay, and thinking that these people will change if we only give them a little bit more, or we appease them? That doesn’t fucking work. It didn’t work for the Nazis. It didn’t work for the Klan. And it’s not gonna work with these guys. The organization needs to be eradicated. Ideally that means long prison sentences or exile. If you don’t like the country, leave. Isn’t that what they say? “Love it or leave it?” If they don’t like the United States as a diverse, multiracial, lots of different religions and gender equality, if they don’t like that, they can get the fuck out of here. That’s it. We’re right, they’re wrong. End of story.
There’s no compromising. There’s no finding common ground. You don’t find common ground with Nazis, you don’t find common ground with Klansmen, and you don’t find common ground with these people, these disgusting MAGA traitors.
So that’s what I got. That was an attempt by me to wake myself up and reinvigorate myself from my symptoms of moral fatigue. And I’m going to keep saying it till it happens:
We shall prevail.
Footage in the clip is from the film Birth of a Nation.
