Sowing and reaping, etc.

Vol. 75

In This Issue: ESSAY | NOW READ THIS | IN PERSON | FINAL FRAME

The last two weeks have been rough. I threw out my back at the gym and then hobbled home to the news about professional conservative troll Charlie Kirk being shot and killed during a speaking event on a campus in Utah, followed in extremely short order by news of another school shooting in Colorado. 

Then I got terrible news about a friends’ health. Another friend posted video of a random man in a car with no plates cruising their neighborhood just to yell anti-trans and anti-gay slurs at them. Then news came that two major LGBTQ events were being cancelled (one in Madison and one in Green Bay) due to receiving credible threats of violence. 

It was only when I hobbled outside to bring the garbage and recycling bins in from the curb and saw landscapers pulling out a beautiful native pollinator garden from my neighbor’s yard that the dam finally burst and I found myself actually getting teary-eyed.

I am genuinely upset that the garden is being removed, to be clear. A previous owner spent a year meticulously removing sod and planting what turned into a gorgeous riot of colorful flowers and plants that have supported a busy city of bees and butterflies this year. But then new owners moved in–keeping the place as a second home and only rarely visiting–and despite offers to help manage and maintain the garden by various neighbors, they promptly decided they wanted to return to the sterile “neatness” of sod. 

I went out to grab some seed heads from the plants before they were all chopped out and tossed aside, hoping to save a few for replanting elsewhere. And I started to think about why I was so upset, and if it was all just about the garden. Of course it’s not. Of course I am, like most of us, walking around daily with the overwhelming awareness of all the hard shit happening in the world. Hard shit we’re mostly expected to push down or aside and keep on with our little tasks.

I’m tired of pushing it down and aside, though. Frankly, given the direct threats on my and my community’s lives and freedoms now coming at a daily clip, I don’t really have the option to check out. The trick, as always, is to pay attention and show up without getting burned out.  

After my total social media break last month, I’ve been trying to maintain overall better discipline when it comes to how much time I spend online. Being laid up, firmly attached to a heating pad, made it all too tempting to revert to doomscrolling the news, though. 

On the one hand, we have the entirely predictable but still incredibly unsettling, froth-mouthed bellowing from people on the right who are all too happy to have the Kirk incident to use as further fuel for their political and social aims. The extremists are always going to make hay out of anything and everything they can twist to their advantage, even when that means, as it so frequently does, placing blame on entire groups of people who had nothing to do with the thing in question, or soaking in absolutely mind-blowing levels of hypocrisy. And no amount of appeasement (coughcough like these assholes cough) or even pointing out their hypocrisy will somehow stop them from pursuing their agendas. 

Anything and anyone that doesn’t support their white Christian nationalist agenda is a target, whether we like it or not.

Which brings us to the other hand, where too many ostensible liberals and Democrats are bending over backwards to whitewash and praise Kirk’s legacy as some kind of free speech hero. It’s telling that in all of these bizarre epitaphs, the authors almost never directly quote Kirk himself. To do so would be to put the immediate lie to their praise, because Kirk spent his brief life preaching nothing but violence and hate. 

In case you’re not already familiar (and who could blame you if you aren’t - Kirk wasn’t exactly a mainstream name), here's a Greatest Hits list: Kirk was virulently anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, anti-people of color, anti-immigrant, and a misogynist to boot.

Kirk routinely used anti-trans slurs and spoke vehemently against transgender rights, going so far as to suggest that there should be lynch mobs to come after trans people and medical professionals who provide gender-affirming care. 

I could go on, but it’s not hard to dig up exhaustive lists of everyone Kirk hated and advocated for political, social, and physical violence against. So when prominent “liberal” voices like Ezra Klein write about how Kirk was “doing politics the right way,” I want to bang my head against a wall.

What are we doing here? Whose interests does it serve to whitewash the legacy of someone who dedicated himself to making life worse for everyone who wasn’t a white, straight, cis, Christian man like himself? You don’t need to condone his murder to point out that his legacy is one of stochastic terrorism and fascist ideology. Two things can be true at the same time (something Kirk himself couldn’t seem to grasp): A person’s words and actions can be reprehensible and necessary to call out as such and hold them accountable for, and that person still shouldn’t be murdered.

But the reaction to Kirk’s death has and continues to be deeply telling about the society we currently live in. Whose deaths are deemed worthy of outrage and calls for vengeance, or even basic accountability? Certainly not the thousands of murdered civilians in the US-backed genocide in Gaza. Not George Floyd, who Kirk called a “scumbag.” Not even Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, murdered by a rightwing extremist in their own home in Minnesota earlier this year, who Trump didn’t bother to give a primetime speech about or order flags flown at half-staff.

And woe be to those who do dare to speak honestly about Kirk’s career. Matthew Dowd, a political commentator for MSNBC, was fired after noting that “hateful words lead to hateful actions.” That’s hardly a controversial take, but it didn’t take long for the network to cave to rightwing pressure to remove Dowd and apologize. A reporter in Florida was also fired after daring to ask a Republican lawmaker a question about gun control in the wake of the shooting. The Washington Post’s last Black (award-winning) opinion columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired simply for reposting Kirk’s own words. Heck, even straight white guys aren’t safe: Late night host Jimmy Kimmel just had his show yanked from the air over threats from Trump’s FCC for relatively mild jokes made about Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death. The list is only growing, with a startling number of people losing their jobs for daring not to fall in line to praise Kirk.

(Meanwhile, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade called for killing homeless people live on the air during a recent segment to absolutely no repercussions.)

Ah yes, there’s that iron-clad commitment to free speech!

For ourselves, the most important question to ask in moments like these is whether or not we allow ourselves to sink to the same depths as those whose worldview we oppose. I won’t lie and say that I’m particularly sad Kirk isn’t out there spreading his brand of hate anymore, but I do wish it wasn’t because he’d been murdered. 

What I do mourn, however, is the fact of living in a society that has long shrugged its shoulders and accepted both the kind of violence enacted against Kirk, and the kind of violence he himself advocated for under the guise of “debate.” Because, while instances of political violence certainly seem to be booming at the moment, this is not new. America was founded on political violence. It’s just that much of it has been directed at the people who didn’t get to write the official histories–the same kinds of people Kirk and Trump and their like would rather see subjugated.

That doesn’t mean we have to continue to accept this as the status quo, though, nor that we shouldn’t be rightfully horrified at the uptick in these types of targeted killings. I’m just arguing that we hold onto some perspective about it.

Because I would like to keep my focus on and fight for a world that meaningfully values all life. I believe that means holding tight to our humanity even and especially in the face of viciousness from others. I believe that doesn’t require passivity, either, but rather consistent and firm action to counter the systems of death that underlie fascist ideologies: extractive capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. We keep speaking up. We take care of us, no matter what.

I deeply appreciate Garrett Buck’s thoughtful and incredibly humane words about this moment: “Life, in this world, is not yet precious. And so we keep killing each other. But there is no law that makes that inevitable. Human beings built these systems of death. And so too can we build webs of life.” The whole thing is well worth a read.

My neighbor planted a pollinator garden that was its own small web of life. Someone else came in and nuked it. But other neighbors saw the beauty and benefit of that small garden and began to plant their own and to advocate for more such projects in the neighborhood. We gathered seeds to spread in new places, to ensure the lineage of connectedness and growth.

I can see it as a sort of metaphor for social change, in miniature. We fight and make some progress and then someone who’s disconnected from the community comes along and imposes their will, sometimes undoing much of that progress in one fell swoop. We rightfully mourn the losses. But the seeds have been planted and we carry on the work, despite the setbacks. 

Related Resources:

“Make Ready: Safeguarding our movements against repression” (guide on how to respond to Trump’s threats from CrimethInc.)

“How to Report ICE” (free printable zine with specific sections for different geographic areas)

Now read this.

“Charlie Kirk said, ‘I can’t stand empathy’” [W. Kamau Bell]

We can argue about how culpable Charlie Kirk was in provoking his own death, but we have to agree that without America’s (and Charlie’s) callous acceptance of gun violence that it's less likely that he would have died this way. Describing his shooting as an act of "political violence" obscures the facts. Saying, “Charlie Kirk died from political violence.” is used to ennoble his death. He was not a noble figure. I’m not giving him that much, unless those same people who call Charlie Kirk’s death “political violence” are also willing to give that description to George Floyd’s death. Charlie Kirk certainly never gave George Floyd that grace… or any grace at all.

“Ever-expanding AI continues to invade higher education” [Neil Kraus for Tone]

…in the UW System, we don’t serve students. Like the Trump administration, we serve corporations. And today, tech corporations—and their conduit in the White House—run the show. 

“The moral injury of genocide” [Jasper Nathaniel]

Helpful (and gutting) round-up of news related to the genocide in Gaza.

“I can’t tell you what’s coming” [Margaret Killjoy]

I’m not afraid of the fallout of last week’s news because everything bad that might come out of it was already being planned.

“She Survived 141 Days in ICE Custody Thanks to a ‘Beautiful Sisterhood.’ Now She’s Fighting for Those Still Inside” [Sam Judy for The Barbed Wire]

22-year-old Ward Sakeik, a Palestinian woman who has lived in Texas since she was 9, says her experience in federal detainment could only be identified as “human trafficking.” And she’s not staying quiet about the women she was forced to leave behind.

In Person.

The band is getting back together! I’ll be performing with LINE again on Friday, October 3 at the Harmony Bar & Grill in Madison, WI, alongside another great local band, Seasaw.

This is a brief homecoming for our lead singer/songwriter, Maddie, who recently moved east to pursue their music in NYC and has been touring ever since. It’s gonna be a real good, emotional time, and I hope you come on by if you’re in the area. Tickets are available in advance here.

For those of you in Tennessee and/or Illinois, you can find the rest of Maddie’s tour dates below. Go say hi!

On Wednesday, November 12, I’ll be doing another book talk at A Room of One’s Own - this time with author and stand-up comic Max Delsohn about his new book of short stories, Crawl: Stories (Graywolf 2025). It follows an array for trans masculine characters coming up and out in Seattle in the 2010s.  The talk is at 6 p.m. and, as always, is free.

Final Frame.

I recently got to work a prescribed burn in central Wisconsin that was a really interesting experience. Late season burns are less common but sometimes the exact right thing for a specific habitat. In this case, we were burning off slash (i.e. the leftover debris of a timber harvest) so that native seeds can be planted alongside new jack pine trees to create habitat for an endangered species of warbler that relies on them for nesting grounds. Burning at this time of year ensured none of the fire would escape the areas of slash, thanks to everything nearby being pretty green and moist. Those beautiful goldenrod and asters in the foreground of this photo weren't touched by flame, for instance, and we needed to use almost no water to contain the burn--a first in my experience!

‘Til Next Time.

Free Palestine. Trans rights are human rights. Speak up now, we need you.