Of Masks and American Sovereignty

There are rules, new rules for a new era of human exchange. Like, say that you can’t open an email enclosure or click on an embedded link unless you’re 100% sure you know who sent it and why.

You can’t make a phone call without texting first to make sure it’s ok, which still strikes me as kind of a significant step backwards. I mean, I used to call people to see if it would be ok if I came over to talk, but now we need to text people to see if it’s ok to call them to see if it would be ok if we came over to talk.

And no matter what, you should never, ever read the comments. Comments are the place where our shared humanity goes to die.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Back in the naive first few years of internet culture, the idea was that the comments section was a new and exciting place for human discourse, a place where we’d dialogue about issues and concepts and come to a new and enlightened understanding of one another.

It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so sad.

I used to have a comments section on this little blog, for example. For a while, it was a place where I actually talked to people. Then the trolls came, those souls who were just there to yell and cast aspersions. I never actually knew who they were, because there was no way to know who they were. There’d never be evidence of an actual “person” there, just a picture of a Rottweiler or a wolf or a hawk, or some other strong wild animal that let the troll imagine they were powerful and not simply cruel and inhuman.

All of that toxicity comes from one place: anonymity. 

If we allow ourselves to hide away ourselves from another, it does something strange to the human soul. It frees us from a sense of connection, from a sense of engagement and relationship. By not being ourselves with another person, we are given permission to not act as if that relationship matters.

Hiding our personhood is dehumanizing.  It's why I was so very grateful to finally unmask when the pandemic ended, so blessed to finally see the faces in my little community, one on one, real and human and there. 

Which is why the rise of masked and militarized secret police in the United States is so remarkably dangerous.  There are rationalizations made to justify this, involving safety and protecting identity, but those rationalizations for masking are the same ones made by the violent masked Black Block on the far left.  The far left is and has always been a disjointed, inchoate, fractious rabble.  The far right is fascist and authoritarian, and has the full coercive power of the state behind it.  Both want to hide who they are, but one is far more effective at projecting force to suppress liberty.  When an authoritarian state masks up, things are going very, very wrong indeed.

But there are other forms of power that have masked up, too.

Just as dangerous are the rising voices of masked propagandists, as clandestine organizations spend millions upon millions to manipulate public opinion, while at the same time doing everything in their power to hide their identity.

Take, for example, the organization "American Sovereignty," which ran pro-ICE ads prior to and during the last Superbowl.  Look them up, and you find a website.  But what does that website look like?  It's one page of boilerplate right-wing language about "safety" and "security" and a contact form.  No one responds to that email address.

No human beings are in evidence, no staff, no funders, no faces, nothing at all to tell you who they actually are.  This is intentional.

Even tiny little churches with thirty members all over the age of seventy have more detailed websites.  A family run restaurant has a more sophisticated online presence.  This, for an organization that has the money to produce and drop a Superbowl Ad, which y'all know ain't cheap.  If you're making a political statement in our republic, but your identity is a mystery, Ты лжец, товарищ.

Journalists dug deep, into Federal Communications Commission filings, and found just one name associated with American Sovereignty. He was a Republican operative, located in Arizona.  He wouldn't, of course, return any calls.

Reading this, you know who I am.  I make my case, and argue for that case, as a citizen in our frayed but precious republic.  Meaning, I don't pretend I'm anyone else, or prevent you from knowing me.  

Sure, on occasion I've written things pseudonymously.  Like my last novel, written in the name of the narrator.  Or a sharp-tongued work of theopolitical satire, written in the name of the Devil Himself.  But there, I've gone out of my way to be sure a reader can trace the text back to me, the real live human person who made it.  One quick Google, and I'm revealed.  That, and I've said: this is made by me, and this is why.

That's what you do, when you have integrity.

We're going to be seeing more and more masks and secrets, as our political system is flooded with money from corporations and billionaires eager to do everything they can to hold as much power as they possibly can.  

We'll see more propaganda, more lies masquerading as truth, as this year progresses and the hundreds of millions in dark money sitting in political war chests is tapped.  

How much of it will be from groups that operate behind the veil?