Fight Fire with Fire — Dr. Stacey Patton Lights It Up
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
Note #1
The power of story is in some ways unmatched.
So there is a great need to get powerful world-changing stories going!
Republicans rely on story, imaginative story, more than Democrats do because they have more need to lie, and stories can be warped to that malign purpose. Bad as Democrat policies are, Republican policies are worse. So they need to create potent narratives to mask and distract from their god-tier level of deceit. They need the malleable power of story — badly, in every way — to defeat the good — good things, good people, good story.
Consequently, Democrats need the power of story too. They need to fight fire with fire. They need to create the fire of protective and brilliant illuminating stories to counter the destructive fire of fake and brutal stories.
Doing so is beyond the capacity and interest of establishment Democrats because they are deeply invested in the destructive fire of the fake and brutal stories of the plutocracy that result in endless carnage, though somewhat less so than Republicans.
Therefore only progressive and revolutionary stories, libertarian socialist stories — which happen to be popular stories, policy by policy, per polling — can effectively fight the fire of Republican and establishment Democrat stories.
This has long been known and needs to be put increasingly into action. There’s a great need to get these revolutionary stories going, that is, to create the new protective and life-giving stories of the people.
Ira Chernus, “Presidential Fiction: The Story Behind the Debates” (2004):
For most of human history, most people have lived in abject poverty. They survived, in part, on stories. They told stories to interpret their suffering or to distract themselves from their suffering, to participate vicariously in magnificent events and give meaning to an existence that might otherwise seem meaningless. In most cultures, the truly powerful stories — myths, legends, or sacred narratives — were religious ones. In the United States, where we have no religious myths that we all share, the history of the nation has become our most powerful shared myth. Like all religious stories, the most popular versions of American history are a mixture of fact, fantasy, and wish-fulfillment. Judging from the first debate, it’s not clear that Kerry and his campaign strategists understand the power of this potent brew. The Bush campaign understands it all too well.
Note #2
Most violence is right wing, both at the retail individual level and at the wholesale state level. It’s right there in the statistics that the right wing constantly tries to cover up or distort.
And in fact capitalism, in practice, is a right wing top-down tyrannical ideology, the rule of big money in the hands of a few. Capitalism is right wing. Most violence is right wing, today and for many, many decades now.
Live by the bullet, die by the bullet. The Intercept shows that “Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Is Part of a Trend: Spiking Gun Violence in Red States.”
The political spectrum runs from left to right, that is, from freedom and peace to tyranny and war. And it plays out over and over again, all the while the right wing claims the opposite. Disinformation is their specialty as much as war.
The People are rising, like they did in the sixties and seventies in America, and so right wing violence is rising in reaction against the people. An old story.
The right wing scapegoats the left, the better to attack them. It’s quite a story.
Note #3
Meanwhile the genocidal violence of the capitalist plutocrat empire is livestreamed like never before. Juan Cole: “Gaza and the Death of Conscience”:
Western governments supply the bombs while speaking of peace. The United Nations counts the dead while doing nothing to stop the dying. Media outlets repeat official lines while children are buried under rubble.
As Talal Asad reminds us, secular modernity has perfected this art: to kill massively while convincing itself it remains moral. To dress violence in legality, to turn blood into statistics, to make atrocity look like policy. Gaza has become the stage where this moral corruption plays out openly.
Note #4
Universal goods are needed to literally heal the people of the country, and world — universal health care, basic income, free college, living wages, free child care, weeks paid vacation, affordable housing, healthy food and environment, and on and on, and this only comes from the left wing, not from liberals and conservatives who fight against the people on behalf of the plutocracy nonstop.
Michelle H. Davis, writing at Lone Star Left, “The 2026 Path Runs Through Populism”:
Last week, buried among the noise of the Republicans’ battle cries for “civil war,” Texas Congressman and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar published an article on Data for Progress that showed that progressive, populist Democratic platforms beat Republicans by +15, opposed to +6 for a generic Democratic platform. Voters want someone who will lower costs, fight corruption, and make the rich play by the rules.
Note # 5
You shouldn’t kill people. Ask the Palestinians being obliterated in the ongoing genocide against them in Gaza and surrounds.
You shouldn’t kill people, and you should be truthful about any killing.
The mass economic and socio-political assault against the populace in America, and elsewhere, has been the reality not for mere decades but for a century, and all history, depending upon the demographics attacked.
Charlie Kirk is more deposed king than martyr, though perspectives will vary wildly. And casualty of civil war, which is actually the plutocrats’ war. You shouldn’t kill people. Orders of magnitude more Palestinians in Gaza were killed than rich white Christian nationalists in America like Kirk not only on the day Kirk was killed but every day for years preceding and every foreseeable day thereafter.
Kirk functioned as a major leader of the violent plutocracy in America, which means globally. Malcolm X famously described what that can lead to, and so it has again.
Only a progressive populism with a revolutionary bent against the bloody tyranny of money can heal the endlessly brutalized and exploited society, the smashed and warped lives of the people and the planet.
Whether or not Charlie Kirk was killed as part of a right-wing civil war, part of the case for Christian nationalist Republican operative Charlie Kirk as more deposed king than persecuted martyr can be found in the commentary of Dr. Stacey Patton. Perspectives vary widely and wildly, some far more truthful than others:
I am on Charlie Kirk’s hit list.
His so-called “Professor Watchlist,” run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful. And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared…
Dr. Patton adds at “The Fantasy of a White MLK: Why Charlie Kirk’s Death Sent Right-Wing America into Delusion”:
America has always rewritten its racists into patriots. We’re watching it happen in real time.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, just look at the Confederate generals turned into marble saints, or the segregationists recast as “men of their time.”
So when you see them baptizing Charlie Kirk in MLK’s legacy, don’t mistake it for respect. It’s desperation. It’s the sound of a fragile order screaming for legitimacy as the ground shifts beneath it. They don’t just mourn Charlie Kirk. They mourn the fantasy of invulnerable whiteness. And the rest of us are not obliged to play along with their delusion.
But let’s call a thing a thing, Y’all: the fantasy of a white MLK. A racist recast as a saint. A grifter painted as a prophet. All of stitched together in Canva with funeral fonts and Photoshop halos. Because when reality won’t cooperate, whiteness invents its own messiah. And in doing so, it adds yet another chapter to America’s long tradition of rewriting racists into redeemers. It’s a fragile order gasping for a hero it never had, and proof that the struggle for honest memory is far from over.
I wanted to know what I was really looking at. So I reached out to a couple of psychologist friends to help me put words to the spectacle we’re witnessing. What they told me confirmed what my gut already knew: this isn’t just politics and grief. It’s pathology.
Now, the DSM-5 doesn’t list “whiteness” as a disorder, but what we’re witnessing might as well be pulled straight from the manual.
It’s textbook narcissism, which is the grandiosity of comparing Kirk to King, the entitlement of demanding everyone “mourn properly,” the paper-thin ego that shatters at the faintest mention of his racism. Any critique about Kirk is treated as an attack on the tribe, and so his canonization a way to defend their sense of superiority.
It’s delusional thinking, clinging to the fantasy that he was “just like MLK” even as the evidence piles up to prove otherwise.
It’s cognitive dissonance on full display, knowing his record, but soothing the discomfort with glowing halos, redemptive captions, and sepia tones.
And underneath it all, you see the defense mechanisms stacking up, projection, denial, idealization, like a psychological house of cards, built to keep the truth at bay. Put it all together and whiteness in this moment looks like a collective personality disorder: fragile, delusional, desperate for validation.
But this ain’t nothing new, Y’all. We’ve seen this behavior before. America has always rewritten its racists into patriots.
Note #6
And then Dr. Stacey Patton really goes to church on the Tyler Robinson murder of Charlie Kirk — well worth the extended excerpt here but go read the full piece at her site, “The Devil Didn’t Come From Baltimore or Another Country — He Was Baptized in White-Ass Utah”:
The bullet that showed up at that MAGA rally didn’t come stamped fragile from somewhere else. It came straight from inside the house. That was your boy, Governor. Your homegrown, God-fearing, raised in your pews, fed on your casseroles, baptized in your guns and your whiteness son of Utah.
And the Bible already told us about this in Galatians 6:7. “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” You sowed the gospel of guns, and now you are reaping the gospel of bullets. Isaiah 59:6 says: “Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works: their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands.”
Don’t act brand new, governor. Don’t stand at that podium with crocodile prayers, pretending you don’t recognize your own harvest. For as the prophet in Hosea 8:7 declared, “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” And church, let me tell you, that whirlwind didn’t blow in from Baltimore, or Chicago, or some immigrant caravan. That whirlwind came swirling right outta white-ass Utah.
Amen!
What we heard from the governor was not prayer. That was scapegoating in tongues. That was whiteness trying to slip a lie past the ears of the people of God.
But how many of y’all know the devil goes to church too? How many of y’all know the devil knows scripture too?
But the Bible says in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” And saints, that’s exactly what the governor did. He called denial prayer, he called scapegoating intercession, he called a lie the truth.
The governor of Utah wanted the devil outsourced. He wanted the devil imported. He wanted the devil to come stamped with brown skin, a hijab, a Spanish accent, a rainbow flag, anything that screamed “not us.” But the scripture says in Luke 12:2: “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.” And what got revealed in Utah is that the face of violence in America looks just like the governor.
And yet he prayed, “Not one of us.” That’s the exoneration. That’s the innocence myth. That’s whiteness doing what whiteness always does by laundering itself clean while looking for a scapegoat.
For centuries, whiteness has written itself into the story of goodness and written everybody else into the story of evil. Whiteness gets to be the innocent farmer, the loving father, the good kid, the wholesome patriot, the faithful Christian. And everybody else is the boogeyman, the criminal, the terrorist, the threat.
But John 8:44 tells us: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” So those who claim righteousness while casting others as evil are exposed as children of violence and lies.
This is why after every mass shooting, every school shooting, every grocery store massacre, whiteness looks to pin it on somebody else. “Must be gangs. Must be Chicago. Must be Islam. Must be mental illness. Must be video games.” It is always anything but itself.
But family, Matthew 7:16 tells us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
And the fruits of white conservative Christian America are right there in the body count. The fruits are Sandy Hook, Charleston, Buffalo, Uvalde, Nashville, and now Utah. The fruits are the AR-15s polished like idols. The fruits are children doing active shooter drills while politicians send out thoughts and prayers.
So what the governor did in that moment wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. It was whiteness exonerating itself in public. It was whiteness saying: “We are not like that” when the evidence, the receipts, the statistics, the blood on the ground all say otherwise.
Galatians 6:7: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
You sow gun worship, you reap gun death. You sow white supremacy, you reap white shooters. You sow violent masculinity in the name of Jesus, you reap bullets in your own sanctuary. The whirlwind is here, and it doesn’t care about your skin tone, your politics, or your prayers.
Now here’s the deeper truth, Saints . . . People of color have always known this. We’ve always known that whiteness will burn the house down and then say the smoke came from somewhere else. We’ve always known that when violence erupts, whiteness looks for a brown body to blame, a Black face to criminalize, a foreign accent to fear. And for once, the mask slipped. The governor said the quiet part out loud. He admitted it. He gave voice to the lie we’ve been living under for 400 years.
And that tells you something about whiteness. Whiteness is not just about skin. It’s about absolution. It’s about making sure the mirror never points back at itself. It’s about taking centuries of blood, whether it is Indigenous genocide, slave patrols, lynch mobs, police shootings, January 6, and still saying with a straight face, “We are not like that.”
Oh, but once again Isaiah 5:20 warns us: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” Woe unto them that build a culture of violence and then claim innocence. Woe unto them that anoint their hands with blood and then lift them up in worship as if they are clean.
Saints, here’s what I need you to see. The governor’s prayer was not just about one shooter. It was a parable of how whiteness works. Whiteness demands innocence. Whiteness demands the benefit of the doubt. Whiteness demands that when bullets fly, the blame be laid at someone else’s feet.
So what do we do with this, church? We name it. We don’t let it slide. We don’t let them tell us “we are not like that” when the whole history of this country says otherwise. We refuse the absolution. We snatch away the innocence. We hold up the mirror and say, “Look in the mirror. This is you. These are your fruits. This is your whirlwind.”
Turn to your neighbor and say in your Shug Avery voice and say, “You sho’ is ugly!”
Because at the end of the day, beloved, the governor’s words were less a prayer and more a confession. He confessed that whiteness depends on scapegoats. He confessed that whiteness cannot face itself. He confessed what people of color have been shouting from the margins for centuries: you are like that. You’ve always been like that. And until you repent, you will keep reaping the whirlwind you sow.
So let us leave today with the words of John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” But freedom doesn’t come from pretending. It doesn’t come from scapegoating. It comes from facing the truth that whiteness has always tried to bury.
And the truth is this: America’s violence is not imported. It is homegrown. It is baptized. It is sitting in the governor’s pews.
And until that truth is faced, no prayer in Utah, no scripture on a bumper sticker, no “we are not like that” will save them.
Note #7
Victor Hugo, writing in William Shakespeare (1864):
Cases of rabidness—that is to say, the works of genius—are to be feared. Hygienic prescriptions are renewed. The public high-road is evidently badly watched. It appears that there are some poets wandering about. The prefect of police, a negligent man, allows some spirits to rove about. What is Authority thinking of? Let us take care. Intellects can be bitten; there is danger. It is certain, evident.
Note #8
For creators and participant readers and observers, what is the full role of story today and days gone by and days ahead? A bit more from V. L. Parrington in a forthcoming post, but to put his contribution in context, Bernard Smith notes in Forces in Literary Criticism (1939):
The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today…. Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature… (330-331).
The “economic interpretation of literary movements” has become power politics, stories in and against Empire. Great stories of protection against Empire and liberation from it are immanently needed and directly wanted.
Note #9
Meanwhile the Gaza Freedom Flotilla pushes across the Mediterranean Sea like some cinematic seafaring David versus Goliath story — see Ron Dee at PsyOpticon Now: Tales of two Genocides:
This entire event reminds me of Apocalypse Now and the journey to the heart of darkness. In Coppola’s masterpiece, Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a war veteran tasked with assassinating a former US Colonel named Kurtz who has gone insane and is now the ruler of a jungle tribe that he slaughters and enslaves at will. The 37 ships comprising the Gaza flotilla, consisting of unarmed citizens from 44 countries – are also on a mission to overcome a psychopathic ruler, Netanyahu. This real life monster is every bit as insane and cruel as Kurtz, only Netanyahu has committed butchery on a much greater scale. The unarmed crews of the Gaza flotilla will confront the red-hot hatred of the IDF with ready-to-eat meals and baby formula for starving Palestinians.
Note #10
Might be time for another interview with that damned Deist god who claims to have created Earth and then walked away. There are some things that need to be answered for.
Imagine yourself a god free floating in the sky looking down at the little Freedom Flotilla on the Mediterranean Sea desperately trying to make it all the way to the Gaza ports blockaded by the almighty powers of Israel and its creator and protector America.
The flotilla of humanity trying once again, for a decade and a half, to bring food, medicine, shelter, and other resources to the Palestinians in Gaza being livestream starved, bombed, and otherwise genocided by Israel and America, and by much of the rest of the official powers of the world.
Imagine you are that god looking down, and you claim to have created this? Maybe go hide, god, while the people battle for their lives.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 