Pictured: a young, wrathful Frederick Douglass.
Comparing America’s racist immigration control and enforcement measures to 1930s Germany is… inaccurate. 2026 America is now emulating what it was before 1860. The
When:
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Indigenous, black, tan, brown, Asian, and people are arrested because the look like ‘the other,’
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lies are written off as memes,
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the Monroe Doctrine is foreign policy,
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cities are terrorized by secret police,
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non-conformists are shot in the streets,
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political opposition is met with federal investigation
all of America’s episodes of villainy are back in play.
Genocide, colonialism, plunder, militarism, more plunder, expansionism, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, even more plunder, hypocrisy, calamity profiteering, segregation, McCarthyism, monopolies, interventionism, propagandizement, dumbing-down, and a lot more plunder — this is the “great” some in America seek.
You make a great point, but WTF does Tyler Durden have to do with anything?
There are many ways to read media, and one of the popular ways to read Durden and his project is as explicitly fascist. The speech your meme references sounds to my ear like white-male-grievance-porn straight from the Daily Wire editorial page.
I’m not saying you should adopt this reading, just that you should be aware of it.
Thanks for that. And true, Durden was not the best to offer. I meant it to be jarring. I meant it to reach out to the disaffected youth and the millennials and the middle of the road white boys. It is anachronistic. And, you might note, it’s no longer about Douglass in that last sentence. It’s us. We, now, are, and should be, pissed off.
The thing is, black anger has always been regarded a threat. My anger has always been a threat. So, I picked one of my heroes as a picture. One of the first of ‘the other’ to take command of his own photographic image. But the current state of affairs — which has never changed — caused me to co-opt the words that, in some readings (like the one you shared), spurred on the Tea Partiers, the “basket of deplorables”, and the Red Hats. An inversion, or, if you like, a suplex for those words.
It was not the smartest, or most apt move. But, it’s what I chose. And published. And am responsible for.
Thanks for your insight.
I think you did wonderfully. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. Your post was moving, jarring, and most of all, thought provoking. Everybody fancies themselves an Art Critic, it would seem. Keep it up.