It’s been an helluva treat getting to learn and share anti-Confederate Southern history with all who partook this summer. I am immensely grateful to everyone who donated to the guests and participated in the streams. Special thanks and appreciation to all the guests who are keeping the anti-Confederate struggle alive. For citations, please check the conversations I have had over the past eight weeks—they have given me an awfully potent potlicker.

If we are ever going to have a shot at meaningful anti-fascist culture, we have to address the unthinkability of the nation’s Blackest, most diverse, and queerest region—the South. In the popular imagination, the South exists everywhere but reality. It is backwards, gothic, grotesque, charmed, cursed, or anomalous. The South feels both less and more than America, something that couldn’t exist anywhere else yet also contradicts everything we believe about the nation. Typical American narratives of steady moral progress and American optimism don’t get off the ground in the South. The Southern text simply can’t support that kind of fantastical story.

In the lead up to the 2024 election, I remember the panic driving liberal fears about a second Trump presidency. Bless their hearts, liberals were not crying wolf when they warned a second Trump presidency would accelerate right-wing politics. Nevertheless, their messaging felt reactive and hyperbolic. It was the kind of doomerist rhetoric that cast Trump as an existential threat to the US. Their invocations of Project 2025 created a kind of liberal esotericism—panicked references to a secret text Trump and his cronies could easily disavow. They preached that Trump would be the end of American democracy as if equitable access to power was a privilege most Americans already possessed enough to lose. In lieu of pointing to actual policies the Right was already test driving, Trump’s liberal opponents proceeded with harried tones of shock and outrage. All this speculative horror about the collapse of the US only offered their further-right counterparts easy outs—look grounded, don’t engage the panic, mock the speculation for what it is.

From my back porch in middle Tennessee, I was befuddled by the hypothetical nature of the conversation. If the South was not so unthinkable, so conveniently excluded from American self-awareness, the discourse would have looked dramatically different. That’s the rub. For liberals, the South has been America’s abject. Because it is too backwards and unwrangleable to fit into liberal sentiments about the US, the South is excluded from the national self-conception. For conservatives, on the other hand, the South is a testing-ground, a place where the old power structure is willing to collaborate. One seeks estrangement; the other seeks abuse. Either way, Southerners lose.

Despite all the ways much of the nation couldn’t stand to look at it, there was a body of evidence for what a second Trump administration would look like. Not speculation, but actual working models of contemporary American fascism. In 2024, we knew what would happen if the far right gained total access to the levers of American power because the South has been the laboratory of conservative plantation politics for centuries. After all, Europe’s fascism copied off Confederate homework. In the South, American fascism is not a matter of speculation but sociology.

The unthinkability of the South, however, is more than a diagnostic error. Ignoring the South covers over a panoply of anti-Confederate traditions that connect a good many Southerners to a lived history that pre-dates the US. Because plantation politics have escaped Southern containment, anti-Confederate politics can no longer go unthought. In an epoch when right-wing power is no longer limited by internal government checks like the Supreme Court and external counter-hegemonic powers like the USSR, the anti-Confederate tradition offers tools of resistance that are not bound to upholding the moral sentiments of American good conscience, dominating electoral politics, or maintaining global hegemony. These are politics fit for times of collapse, privation, repression, misinformation, and hysteria. Anti-Confederacy is a model for staying with the trouble.

Plantation politics

The South shaped by the plantation is not an organic political outgrowth of North American land. On a continent already populated by a diversity of political models, the establishment of the country and its colonial antecedents required long, violent effort. Extensive military campaigns against Indigenous nations and constant skirmishes with outlaws were required to eliminate competing social orders and force inhabitants into the new American political project. Hunting grounds and communal lands had to be privatized in order to plant plantation cash crops. Codes of family, race, religion, and education were invented to make any other way of life seem unthinkable until the colonial order became common sense. Ultimately, all that enclosure and privatization made the practices of survival—mutual aid, commoning, collective self-management—criminal, which also meant carceral mechanisms for enforcing that new criminal code had to be invented and perfected. The US emerged by destroying every alternative way of staying alive. Once again, despite reams of propaganda, the historical record is clear: the US is not a natural occurrence.

No single site has embodied this horrific American reality more than the plantation. The plantation holds every part of America’s colonial foundations—ethnically cleansed land, anti-Black slave labor, anti-social neglect of poor Whites, weaponized gender roles, gross ecological abuse, strict hierarchical codes, aspirational bootstrap economic lust, and stratified wealth.

When we talk about Confederate politics, we are talking about a social order that prioritizes the plantation. Even after the defeat of the CSA, the Confederate plantation never left the South. It was reinstated in modernized form by Northern capitalists who collaborated with Southern planters to establish sharecropping agriculture. Eventually, its parts were disassembled and scattered throughout the region, left to metastasize into wedding venues, prisons, Right to Work policies, neighborhood-killing interstate routes, White Flight, localized school funding, and a whole host of gawdawful country music. From the rice, tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, and indigo of the plantation to the sharecropping, debt peonage, and convict leasing of Jim Crow and beyond, the South has historically been the region that heralds the most exploitative, anti-worker labor practices precisely because the South is the site of the plantation.

Today’s Confederate politics do not have to fly the Stars and Bars (though plenty still do). Instead, Confederate politics pop up where these contours of plantation life take shape. Confederate politics are in the enclosure in Tennessee that has made homelessness a felony offense. Confederate politics apply to the Trump administration’s renewed attacks on the former plantation colony of Cuba, and their attempts to reestablish an extractive relationship to an island that was shaped by many of the same plantation forces that shaped the American South. Confederate politics are playing out in the Trump administration’s call to create strategic apartheids by redistricting the South to disenfranchise Black voters.

Confederate politics and anticommunism

Left politics have been a way of continuing practices like self-management, community care, and commoning that the US has perpetually sought to disrupt. In this sense, left politics are an echo of the community-focused political inheritances fragmented by plantation life. What resonates in Southern left politics is not foreign policy chess matches or admiration for European political experiments, but a postcolonial avenue for reassembling communal forms of governance destroyed by centuries of genocide, ethnic cleansing, exploitation, and erasure. If we understand communistic politics originating in communities prior to Marx’s exploration of them in his European setting, we see the ways the US has practiced anticommunism long before Stalin threatened to send in troops to support Black nationalists in the South or socialist uprisings in the colonized world made liberals and conservatives scared of organized labor. In one form or another, something resembling anticommunism has always been a tool of Confederate politics. It stirs up right-wing panic, scares White and Black liberals into patriotic formation, and marshals foreign policy resources into domestic disputes.

Presently, we are experiencing a resurgence of the most virulent strains of US anticommunism in NSM-7, the executive policy classifying all left-wing activities as terroristic. To support this new classification, Mike Johnson recently called for an additional $350 billion of Pentagon funding for “fighting communism on our own shores.” NSM-7 has already been deployed in the absurd sentencing of the Prairieland 19 in a deeply conservative Southern district and in the charges leveled against the Minnesota 15 who defended their neighbors from ICE violence. (While it does not fall under NSM-7 because it occurred during the Biden Administration, we cannot tell this history without also mentioning the crackdown on donors who contributed to bail funds for anti-Cop City forest defenders.) Additionally, the State Department recently released its report on Cuba, naming the DSA, Hasan Piker, Code Pink, and others involved in Cuban mutual aid efforts as threats. The report also talked about Cuba as a seedbed of racial revolution because of the ways it has taken in radicals like Assata Shakur.

The case of Cuba is particularly instructive. When we set aside patriotic epistemologies and trace Southern pathways instead, we see Cuba is Southern kin. Founded by many of the same plantation interests as the American South, Cuba holds a deep relationship to the continent. The southern city of Miami is home base for much of the right-wing terrorism that has targeted Cuba since the revolution. Aiming for the overthrow of plantation society, the Cuban Revolution, like the Haitian Revolution, is one of the Americas’ flagship revolutions. And, similar to the ways the good news of the Haitian Revolution was deliberately squelched to keep similar revolutions from sparking off throughout the Caribbean and the continent, the Cuban Revolution has been marred in all the usual characteristics of Confederate disinformation—resentment, hysteria, counter-revolutionary sabotage, and Lost Cause nostalgia about agrarian (read: plantation) life. No matter how complicated its place in the international order, revolutionary Cuba has been an American fugitive space echoing the maroon communities of Ogeechee and the Great Dismal Swamp.

Vigilant enclosure has always been anticommunistic because it is anti-commune. Systems of radical exploitation and privatization only work when no other alternatives exist. So long as spaces as big as Cuba or as small as an anarchist meeting resist enclosure, they will be subject to anticommunist repression. The threat of maroonage—sabotage and escape—has been gravel in the gears of plantation life since its inception.

Where I see anti-Confederate politics

From the jump, the aim of anti-Confederate struggle has been the overthrow of the plantation system. In the early years of colonization, this struggle played out in the constant wars and skirmishes between Indigenous nations and planters. Its middle period was characterized by slave rebellions, White desertion of Confederate ranks, and the specter of the Haitian Revolution.

Perhaps the greatest betrayal in a long history of capitalist betrayals, was the reinstitution of the plantation system by the victorious Yankee government. The reinstitution of the plantation showed that American interests were not invested in the abolition of the conditions of slavery but in resolving the frictions caused by differences in how to institutionalize the exploitation of America’s laborers. It was a move that revealed the true interests and alliances of American power—domestic capitalist production for the imperial stockpile.

At the end of the Civil War, Northern capitalists and Southern planters alike were given access to a South that had been built and cared for by formerly enslaved people who, in the immediate wake of Confederate surrender, were already arranging communes, engaging in subsistence farming, architecting the future of their 40 acres and a mule, and planting cash crops on their former plantations to partake in the economic advantages of the new world. The reinstallation of the plantation system in the wake of Northern victory was not a peaceful continuance of power under new management. It was a violent, deliberate enclosure of the nascent economic and political lives freedpeople were quickly assembling in the wake of total war. Freedpeople had to be kicked off the plantations and lands they came to occupy, planters who fled the South had to be reinstalled, and special arrangements had to be made for Northern disaster capitalists. For those who had the most to gain from a Confederate defeat, the anti-Confederate struggle reached deeper than the overthrow of a rebel government. It hastened the apocalypse of the sociocultural arrangements within the Confederate chrysalis.

Abolition has always been a constructive project. It is the transition of resources from death-dealing systems to community-building projects—housing instead of cops, schools instead of prisons, libraries instead of hostile architecture, public transportation instead of surveillance. Consequently, the abolitionist horizon of anti-Confederate politics is a commitment to reparations and the conditions required for them to actually mean something.

Abolition reminds us reparations have negative and positive outlays. The original promise of reparations, 40 acres and a mule, was 1) the constructive promise of Black autonomy in the wake of 2) a dismantled plantation system. The promise of constructive repair only meant something in the context of a South whose vision of freedom, for a brief moment, surpassed the end of slavery and included the total end of the system that made slavery possible. Reparations without abolition is a hell of a recipe for separate but equal, investment without equity, development without autonomy.

In recent years, left-of-center Democrats have begun revisiting the New Deal to rekindle imagination for sweeping programs that overhaul infrastructure, create jobs, and put Dems on the offensive again. And there is certainly wisdom in making conservatives fight for every inch of ground. If we have learned anything from anti-Confederate history, it’s that compromise and accommodation only give Confederates time to recover and adapt. A radical, constructive vision is necessary not simply to galvanize voters but to create conditions that put the far-right on their heels. But, if the history of the Southern left has proven anything, it is that New Deal politics are not a silver bullet. They too often bring with them the limits of patriotism with its coalitions built around national upkeep rather than solidarity with the poor. As the sharecroppers of Hammer and Hoe can attest, we cannot simply dump money into sweeping, New Deal-style infrastructure initiatives without also addressing the inequalities created by labor exploitation, housing precarity, racial caste society, and policing. Flooding an unchanged American social logic with resources doesn’t mean there will be more to trickle down. If history has shown anything, it’s that that kind of liberal magnanimity will only exacerbate disparities.

The South reminds us abolition must be in all things, and it must be a necessary condition of any New Deal-style initiatives. For the sweeping programs we need to be meaningful, they must also dismantle the surveillance state, abolish ICE, call to account work-to-death jobs, prevent housing speculation and landlord abuse, and end for-profit healthcare. If sweeping projects cannot repair long-standing inequities by tearing up the loaded scales of American power and investing in projects that prioritize the well-being of the marginalized, they are not anti-Confederate.

Southern leftism

The South ain’t for libs

Thinking the South—participating in its joys and griefs, mapping its battlelines, developing anti-Confederate strategy, connecting to its resilience—is nearly impossible without a left analysis because the South does not fit liberal narratives. For one, the South is an intersection of multiple transnational projects: Blackness and the international color line; government-seized Venezuelan oil processed in Gulf Coast plants; Cuban socialism, the Haitian revolt, and the anticolonial witness of the Caribbean; the Savannah River Site and advanced military technology built at Lockheed and Boeing; international corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola; the long reach of the School of the Americas. So long as our political analysis begins and ends at the boundaries of the nation, the South will be a bewilderment. For anyone taking the South seriously, internationalism is a nonoptional lens.

Importantly, the imperial boomerang isn’t nearly as much of a reality for the South as it is elsewhere in the US. Because the South is globally Southern—a complicated remnant of the imperial periphery in the imperial core—the boomerang never fully departed. The South’s infrastructure, policing, education, environmental integrity, and economic resilience have been sabotaged and plundered by the same forces that killed the Iraqi energy grid, trained cartels to police Mexican drug territory, napalmed Vietnam, and installed a capitalist dictator in South Korea. While still enjoying the relative protections of being housed in the Empire, as a site of Blackness, queerness, cheap labor, and plantation afterlife, the South is where the US starts to lose the distinction between imperial target and imperial base.

Moreover, none of us in the South ever truly belonged to the US. Enslaved Black people were renditioned here, Indigenous peoples exist in the fragments of ethnic cleansing, workers have been kept from anything that builds their autonomy, and planters, the ones who benefited from this whole order, became traitors. The South is both more and less than the US; it is the country’s ancestry and its afterlife. I believe this spectral footing on American soil explains why extralegal violence is a recurring reality of Southern history—the nation never fully realized, so culture was left to do the work of maintaining law and order. The frameworks of internationalism, racial and class analysis, historical critique, and anticolonialism have a greater descriptive strength than liberal analysis with its ahistorical tendencies, emphasis on individuality, privileging of nation-states, and entrenched system of property rights. Liberalism is difficult in the South because none of these things—the nation, the individual, private property, the present—ever fully took hold.

Twanging reform v. revolution

Orthodox left politics have framed social change in terms of reform and revolution (and the general strike). The South reminds the left that rebellion and reparation remain viable as well. The horizon of my politics, of my leftism even, is determined by my hopes for reparations because I see it in all things.

For example, if I, as a White musician, want to protect my job from AI-sloppification, I have to address the long line of cultural theft that made AI possible. Where a STEM-pilled technocrat would assume the solution to AI slop is to improve AI technology, those attuned to the history of the South understand the roots of AI slop are in White appropriation of Black religious customs, minstrel shows, the theft of the banjo, the White-ening of non-Black immigrants and workers, and the creation of entertainment industries built on fetishizing Black culture. Black culture met with social equity is the only solution to the culture scraped, scrambled, and stuffed into an uncanny commodity form built on White theft. While the culture industry is one particularly compelling example for me as a musician, the same case for reparations can be made for every contentious issue right now: housing, infrastructure, education, healthcare, climate change.

My conviction is that anti-Confederate politics are deeply multipolar. They span rebellion, revolution, reparation, the general strike, and reform. They are practiced in militancy with landlords, hearts and minds work with neighbors, voting rights drives on the electoral front, tense partnerships with liberal interests, and uncompromising clarity about when to abandon middle-class politics when it inevitably begins to prioritize patriotism over people.

As the witness of slave rebellions, freedom-seeking communities, and sharecropper resistance bears out, anti-fascist politics will look distinctly local, enculturated in the practices that existed before their encounters with European theory. While Marx and Lenin had something to say to Alabama sharecroppers and mine workers in the Great Depression, they were not saviors. Instead, like everything Southern—our food and music, fashion and dance—European theory found its place as a potent ingredient in the dish of Southern resistance. Effective left politics in the South, and thus the US, will always be twanged—they will be as sly as they are confrontational, expressive as they are disciplined, religious as they are humanist, haunted as they are materialist, rebellious as they are methodical. Southern politics of liberation are issued in the kind of “bless your heart” code Southerners have adopted.

Revisiting these histories alongside the people who continue to practice them, many of the contradictions facing non-Southerners on how to practice left politics in the US have already been resolved in the South. The binaries that plague the coasts—race and class, identity and infrastructure, culture war and class war—are a bad fit for a region where class and identity, base and superstructure, the demons of capitalism and bodies it possesses reject the rigid categories of European orthodoxy. At the risk of sounding too big for my britches, I’d venture to say much of the South has moved on to newer, more compelling contradictions.

Southern materialism

Against the panics of Confederate politics, the South reframes the well-trodden leftist battle between idealism and materialism from the differences between Hegel and Marx to the battle between panic and well-being. It means the battle between avarice and mutual aid, trans panic and trans liberation, hysteria about “social equality” and organizing against institutionalized sexual violence, White massacres and Black rebellion, the virtue of White femininity and the invisibilized labor of Black women, White flight and urban infrastructure. Materialism in Southern twang does not mean disavowing ghosts but discerning which ghosts are delusions of the privileged and which arise from the actual history of what remains unsettled in the South. Where vulgar materialists insist on rationalism, the South frames materialism as a political framework rather than an intellectual one. It is a commitment to the well-being of bodies and ecosystems rather than reliance on sentimental notions of the American way of life, Southern charm, Lost Cause nostalgia, or resentment. A twanged materialism is compatible with religious life that provides mutual aid, community safety, symbols of revolutionary optimism, and means of cultural preservation amidst conditions of erasure. It is incompatible with religious institutions that compromise with, let alone promote, Whiteness, consumerism, anti-union ideology, and proliferate ostentatious spectacles that deprioritize the realities of hunger and ecological belonging.

Anti-Confederate materialism also provides a means of analysis that is not reliant on the systems of education and literacy that have been sabotaged by Southern elites. Being religious doesn’t make you delusional, being illiterate doesn’t make you stupid, being force fed state propaganda doesn’t make you irredeemable, and living in a state whose electoral politics reflect Southern apartheid does not make you damnable. Part of building an anti-Confederate politics is realizing the cultural memory of the South is more resilient, elastic, and sticky than we think. We can keep feeling when the stories vanish, keep mutual aid when infrastructure is defunded, keep education when illiteracy is sabotaged, and keep joy when surrounded by doom. This is because we have developed kinships that run deeper than American belonging.

The South and race

What to do with Southern Whites

When I first read Dixie Be Damned many years ago, I finally felt like I had a story that fit all the feeling I had been carrying my whole life. All that sass, meanness, generosity, distrust, impulsivity, and performative heehaw foolishness—it came from somewhere deeply aligned with my values. I had many reasons for convening the Anti-Confederate Southern Reading Club: elevate the importance of Black liberation struggles to a country music audience, have an excuse to talk to inspirational Southerners, and provide context to what kind of Southern music I am making. But one question has been digging at me most. When I learned many years ago that the Confederate ranks were full of deserters, I was spurred to uncover what compelled a critical mass of Southern Whites to abandon the cause I was always told represented them most. What critical conflict with the planter class is Whiteness covering over, and how do we recover it?

In Black Reconstruction in America, WEB DuBois notes that of the 5 million antebellum Southern Whites, 2 million owned slaves, and only about 8,000 wielded enough economic and political influence to have any meaningful stakes in Confederate power. The great morass of Southern Whites were poor, illiterate, and lived hand-to-mouth outside any organized economic scheme. In places like my home state of North Carolina, Whites were seen as useless, ungovernable indolents who could not summon enough citizen virtue and work ethic to be useful to the planter class. For many Whites, their only link to the planter class was anti-Black racism. Even then, for those drafted into the Confederate ranks, their individual bias was not compelling enough to keep them from deserting. The Confederate cause was truly an aristocratic one that did not represent the interests of the overwhelming number of Southerners, including Whites.

Andrew Zonneveld and his colleague Modibo Kadalie hypothesize that Jim Crow gets projected further back into the historical record than is historically accurate. In their estimation, Jim Crow was not an organic outgrowth of American culture but was yet another top-down imposition from the Southern planter class. By approaching Jim Crow as something with goals it sought to accomplish rather than a mute evolution of White culture, they open Jim Crow to analysis that runs deeper than obvious condemnations of racism.

The propagandistic Lost Cause and Jim Crow story that the planter class represented the interests of the majority of Southerners serves us the myth that American Progress happens by shifting majoritarian conscience rather than overthrowing oligopolistic cliques. It is the myth that White people can never belong to anything else, Black folks have no real claim to the South, and radical change is impossibly distant rather than imminently possible.

Part of the lie of Whiteness is that Whites do not have our own reasons to betray the planter class. The lie of Whiteness is that racial identity is our only pole of solidarity, and so long as we believe that Jim Crow is more foundational to our social belonging than anything else, we will 1) tolerate abuse along the lines of gender, sexuality, and class, 2) atrophy our empathic capacities by excusing the oppression of Jim Crow’s targets, and 3) make liberation a task particular to Black people. So long as Jim Crow teaches us there is nothing but race, White people will only be able to paternalistically support Black liberation like a charity or casually join in like a social trend.

What I want White people to recover from an anti-Confederate account of the South are avenues for us to divest from our Whiteness and invest in new solidarities. For many Whites, class is the only structural barrier keeping them from fleeing whole hog into Whiteness. In moments when class puts them in a pinch—Confederate austerity or the Great Depression—they find it easier to side with Black folks. But when times get easier, they go back to the convenience of White affinity. Black folks have never had the release valve of Whiteness. For them, the pinch is always on. Consequently, class consciousness is not a silver bullet for ending White supremacy. But no matter how unsteady, it is one of our more reliable exit signs. Even at its weakest, class consciousness offers revelations about the costs of Whiteness and lifts up imagination for how we might exit hierarchy and practice democracy.

Conclusion

If nothing else, revisiting living anti-Confederate history has made me aware of how deeply Southern my socialism is. The struggles I find compelling, the lenses I use to make sense of them, the solidarities that animate me—they all have deep roots in the South. Personally, I have found it difficult to conclusively join parties and tendencies because they each feel like they’re missing something a little too essential. At the risk of sounding glib, I believe this is because my politics reflect anti-Confederate interests. Not anti-fascist, not state socialist, not anarchist. Just anti-Confederate. Like the hellbender who can only exist is specific Appalachian and Ozark streams, I’ve got a specific ecosystem.

Accepting my location isn’t me eschewing the necessary work of linking up with parties or organizing along the best practices handed down from comrades elsewhere. But it is clarifying about why some things feel dissonant, where I can be of help, and what hindrances I may unintentionally bring to others in the struggle. The horizons of my revolutionary optimism are Southern. In the same way Marx found a link to international struggle in the factories of industrial England, the South has enough revolutionary work to chew up a lifetime.

But most importantly, if I have learned anything from anti-Confederates it’s that you just keep going. Out of spite or hope, in joy or in sorrow, we keep the hope of abolition alive. No Confederate will live forever so we must be there to build and celebrate after his end.

It keeps happening. I’m just too irresistible 💅. This time I’m going viral promoting ✨crime✨ (jk jk, my FBI agent can’t tell when I’m joking). TikTok even took this video down for a while for promoting nefarious actions, but the AI gods looked kindly on my appeal, so it has been reinstated. Fired up by our recent win over data centers in Nashville and a deep disdain for the surveillance state, I wrote this lil funk-country bop.

Also, here’s a clip of me letting the city council know I support them passing the country’s strictest regulations on data centers.

So far, this new song is outpacing Hillbilly Hymn which means, despite putting out a record barely two months ago, I’m going to have to release this track as soon as we can get it in working order.

I’m coming to your town

This is shaping up to be my biggest year of touring ever. Quantity-wise, I don’t know if I’ve ever played this many out-of-town shows in a year. Quality-wise, I’ve never had the opportunity to open for so many killer acts. This summer and fall, I will be opening for The Montvales, American Aquarium, Noah Gundersen, and Mama’s Broke. Killer stuff. While we haven’t announced all the dates, here’s what I can let you in on. Would love to see ya out on the road.

Here’s just what I’m at liberty to announce. Stay tuned for more updates tho.

Get more show details here

I’ll be announcing new merch like Sawzall stickers and No Confederates in Country Music shirts. So stay tuned. I could always yap more, but this is a good enough place to call it. Thank y’all for all following along for all this.

The more I chip away at my music career, the less energy I have for attacking other artists. I’ve realized most folks are just trying to make being a musician work in an era where Big Tech has put artists in a vice squeezing them for every bit of profit. On the one side, our dweebs-in-STEM overlords gamify the cost of living and, on the other, they suction up every bit of revenue before a few crumbs trickle into an artist’s pockets.

Saving Country Music started up in the heyday of bro-country when White nostalgics, toxic softbois, disenfranchised Chicks libs, and redneck lefties made strange bedfellows in their hatred of the infidel-truck-sticker version of country monopolizing the scene. The Austin-based blog, authored by Kyle or, as he refers to himself, “Trigger,” populated its feed with screeds lambasting the likes of Florida-Georgia Line while lifting up anyone challenging that world. In the peak of dogshit country, Saving Country Music gained a loyal following for being one of the only dissenting voices within the genre.

Trigger recently wrote a scathing review of Bryan Andrews’ Independence Day. (I’m not linking it here because I’m not going to drive traffic to a review I find mean-spirited and ill-informed.) While Trigger is entitled to his own critical perspectives of Andrews’ project, his review veered into the personal, attacking the artist’s character and intent. It was unkind, mean even. But not my business. I was happy to stay in my lane until Trigger went into the comment section to claim Bryan Andrews is harming my project. Here’s the receipt:

I don’t know Bryan personally though we are mutuals online and interact every once in a while. Where I identify with indie country—something more contemporary than alt but toothier than pop—Bryan leans into a commercial, top-40 sound. He got invited to play CMAfest this year as a political artist; I can’t 100% confirm, but I’m pretty sure my verbal offer didn’t go through because I am too political. Bryan is extremely progressive. I’m something more radical than that. But, in all of this, Bryan Andrews and I are coworkers. We’re slinging slop into the same algorithm furnace so our bosses can park their Cybertrucks by the front doors of the attention factory.

Accordingly, here’s my response to Trigger’s comment (name-calling redacted):

It’s always been coworker music all the way down

What Trigger sees as algorithm-chasing grift, I see as work. In an era where tech oligarchs have hyperstratified the digital commons, the only way to make it as a musician is to drive traffic on their digital grounds by making hook-heavy, unsubtle content. If you can’t anchor your audience to the 3 seconds between scrolls, your shots at coming up as an artist are pretty much DOA. This isn’t just a small artist problem; it’s an all-of-us thing. Even the major labels have started chasing social media clout, signing acts simply because they have mastered virality. The ability to work a crowd, write a banger, or hold a note are having to compete with dominating the attention economy as signable skills.

I recently became good friends with someone despite their initial aversion to me because they saw my content online well before meeting. In fact, I later found out we only met on the insistence of a mutual friend who proposed it almost as a social challenge—”meet Nathan and you’ll find out not everyone online is faking it.” The dislike that preceded our meeting wasn’t because this new friend disagreed with my takes or disliked my music. They simply didn’t find me believable. In fairness, when all you have to represent a person is what the algorithm rewards, why would you find anyone believable? It doesn’t matter if you’re acting like yourself or a clout-hungry, fame-fiending alter ego, contending in the attention economy is never not a performance. Even when it’s replicating the real thing, there’s nothing in the FYP that isn’t a simulacrum in one way or another.

As in any workplace, there is critique, disagreement on best practices, and workplace pettiness. But that’s shop talk. My coworkers don’t have to make the narrow kind of music I like. They don’t have to be shrouded in non-cringe mystique. They don’t even have to have unimpeachable character. I just want my colleagues to have careers. Expecting me to turn on a fellow artist because Trigger does not understand the conditions of our job reveals an ignorance of a significantly more important reality: artists are workers.

Country music comrades

Imagine thinking Bryan Andrews is overreacting. If “politics” is his whole personality, that’s a perfectly reasonable response to a social order that has jeopardized people’s access to food and healthcare, is kidnapping families in plain daylight, characterizes trans people as terrorists, and, at this point, might as well be signing off on school shootings. After all, no one in history has killed more people than the US. Contextualize that however you want, but if you think people are “irrational” for being rageful at that, you’re the outlier.

Even assuming Bryan Andrews is the laughably self-obsessed person Trigger fantasizes about, left-wing politics are not about following people with perfect moral character but building power that eliminates hierarchy and exploitation. It’s a team sport, and so long as they hit their shots, it’s of no consequence if one of the players likes to peacock on the court. Good Lord, as if my politics are being harmed by someone who shared his CMA stage with Justin J. Pearson, a progressive US House candidate running in a district that was recently redrawn to cut out Tennessee’s only Black district.

Obviously, Trigger spouts the kind of libertarian talking points that reveal an illiteracy in these subjects. So let me make it plain. First, if Bryan Andrews is out of pocket, that is for his comrades, not blogboy lurkers, to rein in. Second, anti-Confederate politics require a diversity of tactics. As far as I’m concerned, Bryan Andrews is fine to go full bore and “make it his entire personality.” Frankly, more of us should. My lyrics and online presence aren’t as explicitly, consistently political as Bryan’s, and, believe me, that approach has its limitations too. Third, Trigger’s claim that Bryan Andrews is failing at changing hearts and minds is a pitifully limited assessment of what matters. That cliched hearts-and-minds malarky assumes:

1. there is no use in galvanizing a base of invested followers

2. there isn’t any strategic function to making a loud-mouthed ruckus in a country music industry that bends over backwards to accommodate right-wing propaganda

3. changing hearts and minds has ever fomented substantive change, and isn’t the kind of naive sentimentalism that distracts from actual best practice

4. your heart and mind matter, assuming you possess either

Suggesting that I should have beef with someone who is using one of our most impenetrable right-wing propaganda tools—country music—to remind people that they should be angry, rageful even, at all this constant death-dealing is an insultingly low estimation of my conscience and an even lower assessment of my commitment to the words I have put into my songs. Bryan Andrews is a comrade in a cause that is bigger than salvaging some revisionist country music McGuffin.

Save yourself

Being raised country, I’ve learned there’s always somebody who wants to use something precious to you—family land, good water, country aesthetics, cheap labor. I’m irritated as shit that Trigger wants to use my name. I didn’t write a record about losing my dad, becoming a father, and channeling the rage I picked up from the wreckage Uncle Sam left my community for Trigger to use my work as a foil in his country music soapboxing. He’s welcome to talk about my record, which, by the way, he still hasn’t reviewed. But he’s not welcome to take advantage of my name. I’ve never been sure what Trigger thinks he’s saving in country music, and I think if I really chased it down, I might not like the answer anyway. Regardless, I’ll say what I’ve said to the many zealots who have proselytized a gospel that generates plenty of out-groups but doesn’t get anybody free: I don’t need saving.

Where: This Substack right here.

We’re over halfway done! If you’ve made it this far, congrats! If you’re feeling the fatigue of trying to keep up with an 8-week commitment, I getcha. This continues to be an anti-capitalist book club—it’s not about overburdening you or demanding performance. A good shortcut is to check in on the live streams and videos as you find time. Treat it like a podcast you can listen to as you are in the car or are doing dishes. There’s still plenty to glean from our conversations without referencing the source material.

We are smack in the middle of Hammer and Hoe—at this point the Alabama communists have picked up militant steam, diffused energy into liberal-left coalitions, and now are confronting the future of the party. Next we will be reading At the Dark End of the Street, a deeper telling of the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that breaks through the narratives of respectability pushed in the dominant American story.

Thank you for your donations. They go a real long way to paying honorariums to our guests. This thing is entirely funded by passing the plate. No Chorus, PACS, Soros, etc. Just us. You can always become a paid subscriber or donate on my Venmo if you feel the unction.

Donate on my Venmo

Upcoming

Week 6 (July 8): Tea S. Troutman of Scalawag Magazine

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 10-11

Recommended Reading:

• May Day: Exporting the Southern Plantocracy (Scalawag Magazine)

• May Day Week of Writing Series (Scalawag Magazine)

Further Reading:

• America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham

Week 7 (July 15): Pratik Dash of TIRRC Votes

Reading: At the Dark End of the Street Ch 1-2

Additional Resources:

• TIRRC

Week 8 (July 22): tba

Reading: At the Dark End of the Street Ch 3

Previous Weeks

Intro Video

Anti-Confederate Southern History Intro Video

Week 1: Andrew Zonneveld of On Our Own Authority! Books

Anti-Confederate Southern Reading Club Week 1 w/ Andrew Zonneveld

Reading: Dixie Be Damned

• For discussion: Ch 1 “A Subtle yet Restless Fire,” Ch 2 “Ogeechee Till Death”

• Recommended: Introduction

Additional Resources:

• On Our Own Authority Books

Further Reading:

• “All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands by Andrew Zonneveld

• Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays by Modibo Kadalie

• Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, The Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom by Modibo Kadalie

Week 2: Allyn Maxfield-Steele and Andrew Krinks of Nashville Peoples Budget Coalition

Anti-Confederate Southern Reading Club Week 2 w/ Andrew Krinks and Allyn Maxfield-Steele

Reading: Dixie Be Damned

• For discussion: Ch 5 “Wild Hearts in the Southern Mills,” Ch 7 “‘We Asked for Life’!”

• Recommended: Ch 3 “The Lowry Wars,” Conclusion

Additional Resources:

• Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

Further Reading:

• White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization by Andrew Krinks

Week 3 (June 17): TN State Sen. Charlane Oliver & TN State Rep. Aftyn Behn

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 1-2

Part 1: TN State Sen. Charlane Oliver

As a reminder, Sen. Oliver has been defunded by her Republican colleagues as retaliation for protesting against their attacks on voting rights. Donating to her campaign is a way of keeping working class representation in the TN State House.

Please support Sen. Charlane Oliver’s work in these ways:

• Donate to Senator Charlane Oliver’s campaign

• Senator Charlane Oliver’s Substack

• Charlane Oliver Instagram

• Senator Charlane Oliver Instagram

• Charlane Oliver TikTok

• Check out the Equity Alliance.

Here are the readings mentioned in the interview.

• We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson

• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley

• Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl

Part 2: TN State Rep. Aftyn Behn

Follow along with Aftyn Behn:

• The Behn Factor (Substack)

• Aftyn Behn Instagram

Additional Reading:

“The Rise of End Times Fascism” by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Week 4 (June 24): Melissa Florer-Bixler

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 3-5

Check out Melissa’s writing here:

• Melissa Florer-Bixler’s Substack

• Melissa Florer-Bixler at the Christian Century

• How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace

Melissa also recommends these books if you enjoyed our convo:

• The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America by Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll

• The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Week 4 Special Session (June 26): Carsie Blanton

Keep up with Carsie Blanton’s work:

• Catch a show.

• Buy some records and merch.

Recommended readings:

• Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney

• The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders (pdf)

• The Folks Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956 by Aaron Leonard

• This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song by Barbara Dane

• Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism by Joseph M. Thompson

Musicians Carsie Blanton recommends.

Week 5 (July 1): Iesha Franceis of Union of Southern Service Workers

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 6-9

Additional Resources:

• Union of Southern Service Workers

• Raise up the South Instagram

Finding the Books

Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford

Purchase this cool shirt/book combo from our friends at Punk Truck Stop.

Purchase from Firestorm Coop.

Dixie Be Damned PDF.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley

Hammer and Hoe PDF.

Purchase from IWW Store.

Purchase from The University of North Carolina Press.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire

Purchase from the Zinn Education Project.

I think this is the whole PDF.

What to Expect

Guests. I want this bookclub to be more than an opportunity to scratch an intellectual itch. My hope is that these stories compel you, that they spark equal parts rage and hope, wisdom and courage. What we’re studying is living history, and in an effort to bring us into that dynamic life, I will be bringing in guests (musicians, organizers, activists, etc.) to talk about how they are organizing, conceptualizing, and fighting for the South.

Learning together. In-fighting, name-calling, and bad-faith soapboxing is fed behavior. The vast majority of us are raised in more American propaganda than we know. The fact that we’re even here suggests a commitment to learning our way out of it. So I have a two-part ask: 1) give one another grace for the messy ways we are deprogramming, and 2) don’t use your own messiness as an excuse to avoid accountability. If somebody says something ain’t it, apologize, do better next time, and move on. Being anonymous and online isn’t an excuse to be uncomradely. Learning happens in contexts of trust and belonging, so please try to cultivate a trustworthy space as you engage your peers in the chat.

While I don’t expect harmful behavior to pop up here, it should be clear that I’ll boot and block anybody who ends up being racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, misogynistic, classist, ableist, or engaging in any other kinds of cop behavior. If I haven’t caught it already, shoot me a DM if you come across anybody using slurs, name-calling, etc. We genuinely don’t have time for that shit.

This is not capitalist learning. This is an anti-capitalist book club, y’all. The point isn’t achievement, performance, or competition. Admittedly, the amount of reading I’ve laid out is ambitious, but I’m making this schedule with the expectation that you will participate in whatever way works for you. Some weeks, you may not be able to do any of the reading. Other weeks, you may read more than what’s been laid out. Either way, these resources will remain available online for when you’re ready to engage them. Think of this group as a structure to help facilitate your learning rather than a set of demands you must meet.

Big tent. These readings draw from a number of approaches to anti-Confederate politics–anarchist, communist, Black liberationist, even electoral. My overarching aim is to undermine the myth of the right-wing South. Just because right-wing politics are dominant doesn’t mean those politics are organic, settled, or representative of the entire South. If you end up joining a specific tradition or party as a result of this group, great, but at the very least, I want to leave you with a sense that the South has always been contested. This reading group isn’t an endorsement of any one tradition–the sides are yours to take.

Coming Soon.

I’m still gathering resources for more reading, listening, learning, and activism. If you know orgs, books, podcasts, unions, etc. people should join, feel free to drop them in the chat! Stay tuned for the big list.

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 6-9

Follow USSW here:

• Union of Southern Service Workers

• Raise up the South Instagram

Preface: this book certainly exists

I must preface all my engagement of JD Vance with this: I do not trust this man. I do not believe he is working with sharp instruments. I do not believe he is a sincere, and thus accurate, autobiographer. Frankly, I do not believe he wrote significant portions of this book. Despite all this, I do believe JD finds the story of Communion interesting, and after suffering through it, I also do not believe JD knows what real drama is. I am only addressing this literary backroom because I know there will be people who mistakenly engage this apologetic screed in good-faith.

I’m starting my conversation about this book with the understanding that JD Vance ain’t nobody except a fad amongst the libs. If it were not for coastal know-nobodies who believe they are cosmopolitans because they can reserve dinner in Paris though they will never be invited to the fish fry, the world’s most famous Appalachian cosplayer would still be stuck in the obscurity of a venture capitalist boardroom. No matter what anybody at The New York Review of Books says, JD is not the missing link of White culture. He hasn’t consumed enough white Monster and crashed enough turbocharged lawnmowers into pokeberry thickets to have earned my culture’s most prestigious title. JD’s significance is to The Atlantic what data centers are to billionaires—snake oil and hype, too big to fail but a failure nonetheless.

It is also worth commenting on how to properly contextualize this book. Communion is closer to other apologetic works like Mere Christianity than it is to genuine memoir. It is a text aimed at winning the reader over by running a show-pony faith through a series of hoops conveniently selected by a self-serving author. However, where CS Lewis and many other apologists contend in the intellectual sphere, framing the superiority of their Christianity through passably-intellectual argumentation, JD takes a different route. Communion starts from the argument that Christianity is an unrivaled source of virtue. With this as its primary orientation, the book’s argumentation occurs in the arena where virtue arises—autobiography and narrative.

This is nothing surprising or particularly profound. Religious traditions come with their own emphases—the Pentecostals love ecstatic experience, and the snake handlers love charismatic feats. Where the intellect was the dominant realm of Lewis’ Protestantism, virtue is a foundational category for Catholicism. However, in an era of American nativism, the notion of virtue and its reliance on autobiography takes on additional meaning. In keeping with the conventions of America-first culture that are dominating the contemporary Right, Communion works in the personal drama of the American testimony with the ultimate intent of demonstrating the redemptive, irresistible, and prevenient pull of the US homeland. In the same way telling the story of how you love your family is a more powerful demonstration of familial belonging than a paternity test, placing yourself in the evocative drama of the American project is the most compelling proof of bonafide belonging.

But really tho, JD Vance should have been me

I tell people at my shows JD Vance should have been me. It’s a silly bit, but I mean it sincerely. I am the actual embodiment of what JD claims to be—likeable, Appalachian outcast, and caught in the American twist-a-whirl of being White enough to access white collar culture yet too beholden to hillbillies to ever fit in without lopping off something I love. Plus, we share an unshakeable dislike of liberals for their hubris, their belief that America does not require domination to endure, the campist rhetorical strategies they have codified in the last two decades, their willingness to sell off jobs, and the do-nothingness of their moral grandstanding. Like many post-Appalachians, JD and I do not trust an easy life. As someone who is actually living it, let me definitively say, being one of us is pretty unremarkable. It is certainly not remarkable enough to leverage into legitimate political power, let alone write two books about.

The most meaningful differences between JD and me are what we have done with our social locations. White men caught in the transitions from working class belonging to Whiteness, imperial abuse to imperial promotion, the hardship of our grandparents to the spoils of acceptance into the American project have to choose their place. In all that liminal space where your default affinities are suspended by the possibilities of social advancement, choices have to be made about where you will place your loyalties. More on that later.

Unfortunately, I really am the right person to respond to this book. In addition to some common autobiographical details, I have a couple other relevant competencies when it comes to taking on Communion. I am a leftist country musician—I understand the task of telling your best story, negotiating the trade-offs between embellishment and nakedness in an effort to present your political vision in the most persuasive light possible. Plus, and I hate to have to admit this, through a complicated series of life events, I was once a theology nerd. In fact, I have a seminary degree. I know theology and its attendant disciplines of philosophy, history, textual analysis, and cultural criticism all too well. And while I no longer identify as religious, I am deeply literate in and appropriately appreciative of the ways religious traditions facilitate community, mutual aid, and emotional strength. Much of this awareness comes from spending the better part of the last ten years juggling music and a career as a hospital chaplain, helping religiously-diverse families sort through the resources and limitations their values bring to their ability to cope with illness, loss, and trauma. Very, very, very, very unfortunately, I really and truly am the right person to respond to this cursed book of Appalachain’t incantations.

Bad theology for bad actors

Certainly, there is plenty to refute in Communion’s theology, and I’m willing to bet JD would prefer to direct critical engagement in that direction. After all, perpetual debate has become a tactical staple of his right-wing peers.

But I do not believe debating theology is a particularly persuasive task. It usually only works for people who have made themselves radical citizens of the Church because only a true believer is moved by the words of other true believers. Everyone else can squirm their way out of it, and it is clear JD has too many competing citizenships to be that type of Christian. For evidence, look no further than how JD hems and haws his way out of Rome’s criticisms of his administration’s immigration policy:

“What did they take issue with, exactly? The diplomats never specified. Did they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations so long as we didn’t say mean things about illegal immigrants? Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.

I’m sure they avoided specifics out of a desire to be, well, diplomatic, but what they said was too abstract to be helpful. Obviously I’m not going to always agree with them. And if our country’s interests conflict with their views, I’ve got an obligation to the American people.”

I do not believe the underlying dynamics that keep JD in his narrow Catholicism are primarily motivated by loyalty to the Church so much as getting to run with a cohort of men who style themselves as intellectual, upstanding, and magnanimous. JD belongs to an ecclesial men’s club more than he belongs to the Body of Christ. Addressing this loyalty is more important than debating theology. Contesting JD’s theology—the ideas that articulate his Christian belonging—is like arguing about the garish paint color in a shoddily built house in a poorly planned neighborhood in a devastated ecosystem. The ideas may be easiest to notice, but they are last in a long line of more fundamental problems.

Historians of American religions are keenly aware that, with slim few exceptions, it is only a matter of time until religious cultures take on uniquely American form once they arrive in the US. America is a force so powerful it even outstrips the cultural characteristics of the world’s great religions. Despite holding out for a while, the specific strain of JD’s Catholicism is no different.

Communion’s Catholicism is a relatively new brand marked by evangelical sympathies and rootedness in American Whiteness. It is distinct from its Roman predecessors that populated America before the turn of the millennium. After significant efforts to mainstream Catholicism via Fox News appearances, reactionary conservative movements like the Legionaries of Christ, and inclusion in the pro-life coalition, Catholicism has lost the unamericanism that made it an enemy of the Klan. We are a long way from the paranoia that JFK would be more loyal to Rome than the US. Under the umbrella of this new Catholicism populated by post-evangelicals and conservative media talking heads, Catholicism is less the religion of immigrants invading America and more what it was intended to be in the Americas—a tool of assimilation.

On a more granular level, it is important to understand that JD’s Catholicism is blogboy theology. With its DNA in American culture wars over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, trans panic, and White backlash to Black Lives Matter, JD’s religion is more beholden to the Matt Walsh’s of the outrage-o-sphere than the Cyril’s, Basil’s, Athanasius’s, Augustine’s, Thomas’s, Ignatius’s, and, certainly not, Rahner’s of Catholic tradition. In a dead give away for those unfortunate enough to be initiated into hyperniche theological disputes, Communion’s glib rejection of therapy in favor of the social regulation of the Church is an old masculinist trope popularized by conservative theologians upset at the decline of Christian hegemony in the West. Panicking that pastoral theology has become too therapeutic is a well-trotted hobby-horse uniting a class of miserableass old men who have used theology as a means to become little more than professional complainers. The argument holds little water, but it does generate an in-group.

What I find most interesting is that this wave of pseudo-intellectual tradbro Christianity is animated by the discomfort of lost young men. JD’s story in Communion is neither original nor triumphant. It is based in intra-right reactionarism responding to the vacuity of the previous right-wing regime centered on international nation-building and the hedonism of prosperity gospel and rockshow evangelicalism. Now that the pillars of wealth, international hegemony, and revelrous individualism have proven politically, socially, and spiritually dissatisfying, these men have turned toward an alternative image of hegemony. No matter how sophomoric or disingenuous, this new cadre finds comfort in their first experiences of rigor, accountability, and tradition, because these hurdles feel like the touch points of hardwon social belonging. Finding your place in a fraternal hierarchy feels an awful lot like inclusion when you are accustomed to touch-starved masculinity created by years of social atrophy.

However, their jump from individualism to communitarianism is a horizontal move. It simply rearranges deck chairs on the Lost Boy Titanic. This nostalgic Christianity offers new social configurations of the same White fraternity, instills new ethics of sacrifice for the same patriotic cause, lends new intellectual tools for reproducing the same reactionary positions, provides new logics of diversity and difference for upholding the same hierarchies, and meets different therapeutic needs while installing the same resentments.

Accumulation (on any plane) will not save you

In the past I have said this era of right-wing culture is defined by the production of nativist narratives—the domestic drama of the pioneering White civilizing the American wilds. Where the militancy of the Bush era required emotionally unavailable soldiers, this era of American right-wing ascent is defined by the softening of men. They return to a sense of community and family, possessing enough emotional intelligence and vulnerability to form attachments. They dramatize their lives as spiritual inheritors of American soil as if they occupy an unbroken succession of true American belonging.

What these nativist narratives lack is an awareness that Whites who do not come from the planter class in America are little more than trash washed up on American soil. We arrived here, at best, through the profound miscarriages of European life and, at worst, in the rapacious aspiration of New World greed. Like the survivors of the Middle Passage and the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, those of us who came to be known as White are also subject to the deracination inherent in the American project, albeit without genocidal consequences. JD sees the contributions his overworked, indebted, under-franchised grandparents made and believes this is the story of Whites who made it work rather than workers who America seduced into Whiteness at the expense of their complex kinship with America’s underclass. Because this narrative of progress cannot be honest about the tremendous loss underpinning the entire American project, it creates the inevitable product of permanently forestalled grief: resentment. For all that feigned sincerity, that wide-eyed American optimism, that well-performed emotional intelligence, the kudzu of resentment grows over everything in Communion.

After years as a hospital chaplain helping people sort through the functions and dysfunctions of their cultural scripts, I’ve learned that all religions help you cope with something. The question is not if your religion is helping you cope but what it is helping you cope with. For some, religion offers a story more powerful than racial injustice; for others, it provides grounding amidst the pains of chronic illness; and, for many, it is a complicated salve when you need to get through the difficulties of loss. The coping in Communion’s theology is the palliation of a man who believes power and privilege should be comforting but only finds it riddled with imperial anxiety.

“Privilege” is one of those overused words that is just sharp enough to stay in circulation while being just abstract enough to be messy as hell. It needs strong context to generate much insight. In the context of chaplaincy where identity and culture impact our ability to respond to trauma and loss, I have come to realize that privilege usually manifests as social, psychic, and spiritual fragility. Our points of privilege are places where we have not had to learn real resilience and have instead relied on the fruits of domination to sustain us. Much of the internal work of losing privilege is learning to grieve because grief is the process of constructing agency in the face of significant loss. Where privilege presumes mastery of life’s circumstances, grief occurs where life cannot be possessed or controlled. In this narrow sense, privilege is faith that a dominated world will do the work of steadying your soul for you. JD’s blogboy Catholicism is an effort at assuaging the privileged who are confounded by a world that fundamentally refuses mastery. After all, submitting your life to the reactionary sect of a rigorous, millenia-old tradition because you can’t figure out if blue-haired enby’s are a civilizational threat is the kind of disproportionate response only an extremely irresilient person would resort to.

Where JD presents his faith journey as a testimony (the unofficial evangelical sacrament of narrative defined by the arc of Eden-fall-struggle-reconciliation), I see the insatiable hunger of a man possessed by the logic of accumulation. When accumulating prestige could not sate him, JD turned to money, and when wealth could not satisfy either, he turned to virtue. Each step offered something more abstract, more nuanced, and less obvious in its emptiness.

The real revelation of Communion is not the supremacy of Catholic virtue but how deeply the parasite of American power has eaten into this man’s vital spiritual organs. It is the story of a man who had one of everything on the menu offered by American dominance, and he only found empty calories. Communion is not a salvation story; it is a case study in addiction and neurosis. The story of JD’s coming to faith is the morality tale of a man born in an ivy patch who places faith in the soothing power of the fingernail that scratches the itch but spreads the poison.

JD ain’t outlaw country

What I want to impress on the reader-who-should-not-read-this-book, is that Communion presents an author whose existential premises and conclusions stand in sharp contradiction. He adores his grandmother and wife for embodying gift and grit, yet he cannot embrace a feminist ethic. He lifts up the social and cultural wounds of American capitalism, yet he faults immigrants. He claims the Church is home to the hard truths of virtue, yet hand waves at their criticism of his administration’s abuse.

When Matthew Remski asked me to read this book and I begrudgingly agreed out of deep commitment to the principles of comradeship (which I am beginning to reconsider at this point), I took time away from my bigger project this summer—the Anti-Confederate Southern History Book Club. Reading Communion alongside Hammer and Hoe, the story of Alabama Communists in the Great Depression, it became clear to me that JD Vance only superficially belongs to anyone.

The story JD tells of American progress is rife with a patriot’s sense of moral relativism. It is the moral relativism of nation-builders who accept the genocide of Indigenous people, the horrors of chattel slavery, the slaughter of non-Americans for imperial expansion, and the exploitation of poor workers in the name of economic development. It is the kind of story you can only tell when no one in your moral community has been meaningfully impacted by the costs of making this nation. If the victims of America’s original sins count as real moral subjects, then you can’t simply chalk it all up to the accidents of America’s gradual moral development or flawed leaders being products of their time.

What reading the history of anti-Confederates has confirmed to me is that Southerners have no convenient stories to tell, no American apologetics to peddle. Southerners either choose to believe the brutal reality of America or they spiral into delusion. (This lack of a middle ground is why I believe we are bad at being liberals down here.) As a moral site, the South demands you pick an uncomfortable lane—participate in all this killing or resist it. Our place in America was as traitors or outlaws, vigilante stormtroopers for the planter class or apostates of the country that laid claim to us. Consequently, a good many of us are keenly aware that the US is neither an organic political outgrowth of life on this continent nor has it been created and sustained through righteousness. The South reminds us this nation has been built on blood and ugliness.

Communion frames the suffering JD’s family endured as a sacrifice they offered to the American project, a testament to their faith in a national metanarrative. For all the ways I find JD disturbingly insincere, I do believe he is sincere in his belief that the story of American belonging connects him to this family lineage. I am convinced of his sincerity not simply because it explains the absurd moves he has made as America’s chief sycophant but also because he fits a type. In abusive family systems, there are often key family members who play the pivotal role of upholding the family myth that all that abuse has its reasons, compliance is the best option, and the abusers aren’t really that bad. These people are often complicated caretakers of the family culture. They are familiar with the abuses endemic in the family because they have personally experienced them, yet they cannot imagine belonging anywhere else, believing any other story, or building any other system. JD is the conformist older brother apologizing for Uncle Sam in the abusive American family. His only way of maintaining kinship is to include everyone he loves in the myth of an America that has good enough reason for its ongoing violence, and he loudly expects the rest of us to conform to that myth as well.

Assuming his self-report is accurate, JD and I have many things in common. We both admire our grandmothers, we intimately know the effects of addiction, we know Appalachia (him not so much), and we have given years of our lives to witnessing the blood required by the American project. His as a soldier deployed to Iraq; mine as a hospital chaplain supporting families ruined by social murder.

Like JD, I too have been fortunate to travel parts of the world I never imagined I’d be able to visit. In Communion, JD talks about how traveling Europe filled him with a sense of heritage and the dread of losing it. The cathedrals falling out of use in secularizing Europe reminded him of the accomplishments Christian societies were capable of and the ruin portended by declining Christian hegemony. In Europe, JD imagined a story that included him.

When I walked through Notre Dame, visited the palaces of Madrid, and stood before the gold-glinted altars of old Spanish churches, I was overcome with the sense that these aristocratic places were not built for my ancestors. My people would have been in the lesser churches built for the peasantry outside the towering cathedrals reserved for the ruling factions. What I saw were the ways the powerful have always wrapped themselves in superficial splendor, likely more for their own comfort than anything else. I saw how the gold of Spanish tabernacles was a way of banking the plunders of the New World; how the palaces and castles of old Europe were marvels of what the elite could accomplish when they invested their innovation in the needs of internecine warfare; how, for all their bluster, the monuments of the Old World are no match for the even older Earth. What JD calls ancient is barely that when you measure time in terms of trees and rocks and the six inches of soil that sustain all life. Ultimately, I have more belonging to the dirt where I have worked and played than I do to the ruins of Europe’s bellicose elite.

In Christianity, JD finds the answer to the only death he claims he fears: civilizational death. In the traumas of the Middle Passage, the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, the battles between secessionists and free staters, the South knows civilizational death. We have lived past his worst nightmare and know there are forms of kinship and resilience deeper than the American story and its need to find cohesion in the fragile Christianity of reactionary men. The South of the poor, the survivors, Black and Indigenous folks, the imprisoned, and the heretics has already outlived America. This place is America’s afterlife, and how you reconcile to us determines whether or not you experience civilizational heaven or hell.

The final word

Wrapping up, I have to make sure two points are clear. The first point is slightly petty but must be said nonetheless. Communion is thoroughly unremarkable. Its brand of Catholicism is neither profound nor robust—it is a traditionalist facade for unhappy American men desperate to find a feeling of rootedness amidst the banalities of an everyday American existence they were told would be extraordinary. In terms of drama, Communion doesn’t offer much. JD hasn’t so much lived a life worth telling as he has overestimated the insights he has gleaned from a life that is only remarkable in the eyes of those insulated by wealth and status.

As a literary work, Communion is a mess. It cannot decide on a tone, waffling between self-discovery and bootlicking, thumbing its nose at most of the characters it introduces us to while also telling us it is a story of gratitude and repose. If I were JD and my entire world was populated by people I disliked, I’d probably fix my heart and find a new world to live in instead of writing another book about it.

The inconsistent intellectualism of this book is also telling. Like the dilettantes who have defined this era of right-wing culture—Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk, to name a few—Communion only cites sociology and philosophy when it is convenient, playing stupid when it cannot do anything other than be just that. JD critiques feminism but only lean-in feminism. Yea, babe, everyone with a backbone hates that shit, especially feminists. JD bends over backwards to defend nuanced and fictitious reconstructions of the people back home but lumps all critics of patriarchy and racism into the thought-terminating cliche of the “woke mob.” JD even pokes at blue-haired people. Tired. Communion is the highest evolution of disingenuity—deceit without the self-awareness of its malicious intent. It is sincere only in its vapidity, and, unfortunately, many will only latch on to its sincerity.

Much of what JD discloses in this book shows a deep lack of social mooring. He is a pitiable and pathetic man oblivious to the fact that much of what he shares in an attempt to be relatable only shows him for what he actually is—a social scarecrow full of straw and good at running off creatures. The majority of my time reading Communion, I was filled with the kind of disgust you feel when you are overcome with second-hand embarrassment for someone you also revile. In its theology, politics, and self-conception, this book is like watching the worst man you know make a fedora his entire personality. It is as embarrassing and undersocialized as JD’s peers: Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro, and Pete Hegseth. Unlike a sofa, this book is deeply unfuckable.

My second point is less petty, and, frankly, it should end all consideration of this book. Without equivocation, Communion is a masterwork of moral obliviousness and absurdity to the point of genuine moral evil. JD Vance and his colleagues are responsible for bombing boats of Venezuelan fishermen, kidnapping and torturing immigrant children, bombing Iranian schools, accelerating the Palestinian genocide, and imperiling food and medical access for millions of people. Publishing a book about your quaint, domestic faith, a faith whose superiority is supposedly evidenced by the virtue it inculcates, while you are responsible for murder, torture, and immiseration is nothing short of genuine pyschopathy. There is no virtue in causing starvation, child abuse, rape, murder, war, and genocide. Any religion, nation, creed, or story that calls these acts anything other than evil is carrying water for demonic men, laundering their violence through empty virtue and family values. For all the ways JD Vance has built a career on trying to seem like a relatable everyman, remember that a remarkable few of us are capable of the levels of duplicity, moral dissociation, and violence that JD has enacted. Communion is the Helter Skelter of a man morally deranged enough to publish a quiet book about coming to faith while the daily headlines show fresh blood on his hands.

Keep up with Carsie Blanton’s work:

• Catch a show.

• Buy some records and merch.

Recommended readings:

• Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney

• The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders (pdf)

• The Folks Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956 by Aaron Leonard

• This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song by Barbara Dane

• Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism by Joseph M. Thompson

Musicians Carsie Blanton recommends:

The Burning Hell

The Coup

Dominic Behan

Check out Melissa’s writing here:

• Melissa Florer-Bixler’s Substack

• Melissa Florer-Bixler at the Christian Century

• How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace

Melissa also recommends these books if you enjoyed our convo:

• The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America by Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll

• The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

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(photo by Savannah Lauren)

Being a parent has radicalized me because it’s pushed me farther into the work of keeping people alive. It’s as simple as that.

Since I became a dad 3 years ago, I’ve seen this empire starve and bomb children in Gaza, let babies die in Cuban NICU’s because of a pet-project blockade, watched masked cowards steal parents and children from one another, seen police teargas people protesting the state-sanctioned murder a baby because his mom needed diapers, and witnessed the state of Tennessee kick 400 sick children off their necessary medical aid because of their documentation status. All while they don’t release the full list and redact the names of powerful men.

Seeing what it takes to make life happen—the light and the labor of people who vest the universe in us—has put into sharp relief the fragility, nihilism, and predation of the wealthy, the bomb makers, the private prison shareholders, the do-nothings who gamify food and housing.

Being a parent reminds me everyone should eat, so every empire must fall. Parenting has set my moral compass toward abolition.  That is what joy and life demand.

Happy Father’s Day.

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Follow along with Aftyn Behn:

• The Behn Factor (Substack)

• Aftyn Behn Instagram

Additional Reading:

“The Rise of End Times Fascism” by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

As a reminder, Sen. Oliver has been defunded by her Republican colleagues as retaliation for protesting against their attacks on voting rights. Donating to her campaign is a way of keeping working class representation in the TN State House.

Please support Sen. Charlane Oliver’s work in these ways:

• Donate to Senator Charlane Oliver’s campaign

• Senator Charlane Oliver’s Substack

• Charlane Oliver Instagram

• Senator Charlane Oliver Instagram

• Charlane Oliver TikTok

• Check out the Equity Alliance.

Here are the readings mentioned in the interview.

• We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson

• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley

• Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl

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Where: This Substack right here.

We made it through the first book! Next up is Hammer and Hoe. Where Dixie Be Damned is Southern anarchist canon, Hammer and Hoe is a foundational text of the Southern Left. While it’s not something we’ll be spending much time addressing directly, as chapter 5 of Dixie Be Damned pointed out, there are meaningful differences between how these traditions envision social change. That means these texts will have some meaningful differences in what kind of stories they tell, how they set about that task, and their interests in telling them.

I’m still finalizing a few guests, but this update will include the bulk of our guests along with links to recommended readings, related orgs, and news about their work. As a heads up, I will probably go live on a Saturday or Sunday here and there with some surprise guests.

Thank you for your donations. They go a real long way to paying honorariums to our guests.

Upcoming

Week 3 (June 17): TN State Sen. Charlane Oliver, TN State Rep. Aftyn Behn

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 1-2

Additional Resources:

• Charlane Oliver Website

• Charlane Oliver Newsletter (Substack)

• Aftyn Behn Website

• The Behn Factor

Week 4 (June 24): Melissa Florer-Bixler

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 3-5

Additional Resources:

• Melissa’s Florer-Bixler’s Substack

• How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace

Week 5 (July 1): Iesha Franceis of Union of Southern Service Workers

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 6-9

Additional Resources:

• Union of Southern Service Workers

• Raise up the South Instagram

Week 6 (July 8): Tea S. Troutman of Scalawag Magazine

Reading: Hammer and Hoe Ch 10-11

Recommended Reading:

• May Day: Exporting the Southern Plantocracy (Scalawag Magazine)

• May Day Week of Writing Series (Scalawag Magazine)

Further Reading:

• America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham

Week 7 (July 15): Pratik Dash of TN Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition

Reading: At the Dark End of the Street Ch 1-2

Additional Resources:

• TIRRC

Week 8 (July 22): tba

Reading: At the Dark End of the Street Ch 3

Previous Weeks

Intro Video

Week 1: Andrew Zonneveld of On Our Own Authority! Books

Reading: Dixie Be Damned

• For discussion: Ch 1 “A Subtle yet Restless Fire,” Ch 2 “Ogeechee Till Death”

• Recommended: Introduction

Additional Resources:

• On Our Own Authority Books

Further Reading:

• “All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands by Andrew Zonneveld

• Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays by Modibo Kadalie

• Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, The Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom by Modibo Kadalie

Week 2: Allyn Maxfield-Steele and Andrew Krinks of Nashville Peoples Budget Coalition

Reading: Dixie Be Damned

• For discussion: Ch 5 “Wild Hearts in the Southern Mills,” Ch 7 “‘We Asked for Life’!”

• Recommended: Ch 3 “The Lowry Wars,” Conclusion

Additional Resources:

• Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

Further Reading:

• White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization by Andrew Krinks

Finding the Books

Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford

Purchase this cool shirt/book combo from our friends at Punk Truck Stop.

Purchase from Firestorm Coop.

Dixie Be Damned PDF.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley

Hammer and Hoe PDF.

Purchase from IWW Store.

Purchase from The University of North Carolina Press.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire

Purchase from the Zinn Education Project.

I think this is the whole PDF.

What to Expect

Guests. I want this bookclub to be more than an opportunity to scratch an intellectual itch. My hope is that these stories compel you, that they spark equal parts rage and hope, wisdom and courage. What we’re studying is living history, and in an effort to bring us into that dynamic life, I will be bringing in guests (musicians, organizers, activists, etc.) to talk about how they are organizing, conceptualizing, and fighting for the South.

Learning together. In-fighting, name-calling, and bad-faith soapboxing is fed behavior. The vast majority of us are raised in more American propaganda than we know. The fact that we’re even here suggests a commitment to learning our way out of it. So I have a two-part ask: 1) give one another grace for the messy ways we are deprogramming, and 2) don’t use your own messiness as an excuse to avoid accountability. If somebody says something ain’t it, apologize, do better next time, and move on. Being anonymous and online isn’t an excuse to be uncomradely. Learning happens in contexts of trust and belonging, so please try to cultivate a trustworthy space as you engage your peers in the chat.

While I don’t expect harmful behavior to pop up here, it should be clear that I’ll boot and block anybody who ends up being racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, misogynistic, classist, ableist, or engaging in any other kinds of cop behavior. If I haven’t caught it already, shoot me a DM if you come across anybody using slurs, name-calling, etc. We genuinely don’t have time for that shit.

This is not capitalist learning. This is an anti-capitalist book club, y’all. The point isn’t achievement, performance, or competition. Admittedly, the amount of reading I’ve laid out is ambitious, but I’m making this schedule with the expectation that you will participate in whatever way works for you. Some weeks, you may not be able to do any of the reading. Other weeks, you may read more than what’s been laid out. Either way, these resources will remain available online for when you’re ready to engage them. Think of this group as a structure to help facilitate your learning rather than a set of demands you must meet.

Big tent. These readings draw from a number of approaches to anti-Confederate politics–anarchist, communist, Black liberationist, even electoral. My overarching aim is to undermine the myth of the right-wing South. Just because right-wing politics are dominant doesn’t mean those politics are organic, settled, or representative of the entire South. If you end up joining a specific tradition or party as a result of this group, great, but at the very least, I want to leave you with a sense that the South has always been contested. This reading group isn’t an endorsement of any one tradition–the sides are yours to take.

Coming Soon.

I’m still gathering resources for more reading, listening, learning, and activism. If you know orgs, books, podcasts, unions, etc. people should join, feel free to drop them in the chat! Stay tuned for the big list.

But I would die content if I only accomplish one of my moonshot goals: disentangling the slippage between country🇺🇸🫡 and country🦝🌾. Without a doubt, country music is plagued by fictitious, dead-end binaries that do little more than keep country music devotees nibbling on the algorithmic bait. The endless feuds between authentic and fake, trap beats and twang, and pop and alt are the kinds of internal disputes that keep the country music in-group activated via fantasies of an outside threat.

But this one is different. I swear.

Country🇺🇸🫡 v Country🦝🌾

One of the goals of reading history is to recover moral sources that have been obscured by the propaganda of the present. In the first week of our Anti-Confederate Southern History Reading Club, Andrew Zonneveld told a story of Spanish colonizers who, upon raiding an Indigenous food bank, were astonished to find it was unguarded. They could not imagine a universally necessary good like food being unconditionally available to the community. Andrew’s story points to the ways the system of property ownership and enforced scarcity imposed by the US and its colonial antecedents are at odds with the the communities already inhabiting the continent.

Prior to colonization this continent was populated by models of kinship, land stewardship, and conflict resolution—in short, politics—that didn’t rely on privatization, incarceration, race, or rigid gender roles. These were modes of Indigenous life that could integrate with the political needs and fragmented cultural inheritances of formerly enslaved West Africans and indebted runaways in the various maroon and freedom-seeking communities that dotted North American backwaters. For the people who did not benefit from installing plantation life on the continent (ie, an awful lot of folks), practices of commoning and expansive kinship were not difficult to imagine, let alone perform. What was difficult, and what still cuts against the grain of how humans tend to best live together, was the system of privatization and profit that required extensive, nearly perpetual conflict with indigenous, indebted, and enslaved people. At the risk of putting it too glibly, these early periods of colonization were characterized by the battle between opposing notions of “country.”

While the battle lines are not as obvious today, this struggle continues to play out in our interactions with police and prisons, the surveillance of trans people, the predation of ICE, our fights with landlords and for-profit housing, the creation of the suburbs, and the imposition of data centers despite overwhelming community disapproval. My deep down conviction is that one of the only country music conflicts worth actually getting lathered up over is the continued struggle for the reclamation of expansive country spaces against the enclosure precipitated by the American country. In the hospitality of a grandmother’s table, tolerance for community dogs and obnoxious, backporch whippoorwhills, disregard for trespassing signs, the proliferation of foraging-friendly patches of blackberries and ramps, and the creation of family that rejects the strictures of race and blood, country life still contains remnants of a social order that resists privatization. Though the frontlines have shifted, the battle between land and flag, kinship and commodity, place and property, gift and profit, country🇺🇸🫡 and country🦝🌾, persists. And, after years of pretending it doesn’t need to disentangle these conflicting notions, the meaning of “country” in country music is still up for grabs.

Out/Rage

Usually, when I set out to write songs, I American Picker my way through the morass of feelings and thoughts I’ve let pile up in the abandoned barns and smokehouses of my psyche. My goal isn’t to execute a song idea; my goal is to organize some emotional clutter. So, the process of writing has this retrospective effect in which I realize the themes I’ve been living out after I’ve been able to sit back from my writing and reflect on what I ended up creating.

Reflecting back on what I’ve written the last few years, I realize I’ve been going through a season of rage. More precisely, I’ve been figuring how to live with it, developing the kind of spiritual infrastructure required to sustain indignation at a world that commits social murder at a genocidal pace. The tasks of learning to live with that kind of rage abound: sharpening anger into wisdom, refusing the anaesthetics of glib hope or cynicism, getting keen on how to communicate rage in ways that invite empathic connection rather than individualistic performance, growing my capacity to feel (rather than recoil from) the emotional pain that rage presumes, nurturing a sense of tenderness strong enough to counterbalance all that apocalyptic lust. In this season, rage has intersected with every part of my life including the music I make, my commitment to the world I am promising my children, the people and orgs I will and will not work with, the frank conversations I am willing to have, and the water I am no longer willing to carry.

It’s not lost on me that much of what I’m witnessing online as well as in communities of well-branded resistance to the Trump administration is not rage but outrage. I’d even venture that if you never touch grass and your entire political life is dictated by online avatars, you might think there is only outrage.

But outrage is dangerous because it’s a helluva simulacrum for genuine rage. Outrage feels righteous, and it takes up an awful lot of the same emotional and social space as rage. Plus, outrage is great at driving traffic. Like all the yawping and yelping about trap beats in country music, outrage is great at generating algorithm-friendly frenzy, but it tends to do so in ways that drive entrenchment, limit cooperation, and diffuse transformative energy into cathartic expression.

In the American context, so much of the difference between outrage and rage boils down to whether our most closely-held, almost subconscious loyalties lie with country🇺🇸🫡 or country🦝🌾. It’s a matter of attunement. When the story you’re most invested in is written by and for the nation, the first rupture in that story leaves you with either outrage or resentment, naive shock or entrenched bitterness. This is the nihilistic logic of false hope betrayed: promises never backed with anything other than grift will never be capable of repair once they inevitably fail.

Outrage starts and ends at the betrayal of American progress. Rage starts at commitment to moral sources whose realities outstrip the fantasies of patriotic myth. Rage is what happens when you are more loyal to care than profit, to loving your neighbor than enforcing flag code, to the wellbeing of creation than the ownership of it. Rage is the result of bearing witness to the trauma and social murder required to continuously convert community into Empire.

I do not have much room for outrage anymore because I have no desire to rehabilitate the illusory moral fabric of this American project. I’m investing in rage conjured from an insistence on what I know to be unshakeably, immutably true—every belly should be full and every Empire is a thief. I can’t lose faith in a promise I never trusted. I can’t feel betrayed by a country that never earned my hope. I can only insist that my roots are dug into soil that runs deeper than this country, and those roots have produced heirlooms that will seed the future. Everything else in between is rage.

Nashville People’s Budget Coalition

…and read Andrew’ book (my friends love it):

White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization

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To support Andrew’s work and learn more please check out:

On Our Own Authority Publishing

“All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands by Andrew Zonneveld

Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays by Modibo Kadalie

Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom by Modibo Kadalie

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