I Was Blind, But Now I See

Decent Americans wonder why Trump’s MAGA morons seem to love cruelty so much.

Thom Hartmann recently reminded readers that Robert E. Lee killed more Americans than Hitler, Khrushchev, King George III, Ho Chi Minh, or Kim Il Sung. In fact, Lee killed more Americans than we’ve lost in every war combined since the American Revolution. (Though maybe not the one currently brewing as America is asked to save genocidal Israel’s stinking, genocidal ass.)

Lee was, as Hartmann wrote, the largest mass murderer of Americans in our nation’s history. His cruelty was not theoretical or symbolic. It was personal, intimate, and deliberate.

This horrific asshole was married to Mary Anna Randolph Custis, who was the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, which gave Lee social cachet in the antebellum South and helped reinforce the mythic connection between the Confederacy and America’s founding fuckheads—yet another layer of propagandistic Lost Cause bullshit that deserves to be burned down, catalogued, footnoted to death, and dumped in the same trash heap as all those Confederate statues banished from American town squares earlier this century.

In the March 26, 1866, edition of the New York Daily Tribune, Hartmann reports, escaped enslaved man Wesley Norris recounted how Lee had him, his sister, and their cousin whipped and then had their backs washed in brine—while Lee stood by encouraging the overseer to “lay it on well.” Lee wasn’t just a general. He was a sadist, a traitor, and a white supremacist oligarch who raised an army to stop democracy before it took root in the South.

And yet today decent Americans wonder why Donald Trump’s MAGA morons seem to love cruelty so much—it’s thoroughly baked into their cultural genetics.

Fearing President Abraham Lincoln might end slavery, Lee committed treason so complete it surpassed Benedict Arnold’s fantasies. He led a war that killed nearly three-quarters of a million Americans. And when he lost, the federal government didn’t execute him, it merely seized his plantation and turned it into Arlington National Cemetery. That soil—the same soil now honored with wreaths and speeches—was fertilized with the bodies of those killed by the oligarchic, pseudo-aristocratic Lee’s shameful rebellion.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that today’s most prolific American liar and modern-day authoritarian, Trump, recently bragged to a group of soldiers that he would rename a military base after Robert E. Lee. Hartmann’s comparison is apt: Trump is following in the footsteps of the worst traitor in U.S. history. He panders to the same violent, racialized grievance that Lee spent his life defending—one he continued to symbolize long after the battlefield, even as his white privilege allowed him to serve as a college president and quietly oppose postwar reconciliation efforts that threatened white dominance. They should have fucking killed him.

Only this time, the enemy wears a golf shirt and sells “White Privilege Cards” next to MAGA hats on a U.S. Army base. And yes, these cards are real. During Trump’s June 10, 2025, appearance at Fort Liberty, a vendor—carefully vetted for optics by Trump’s handlers—openly sold this racist shit alongside other shitty Trump campaign merchandise. While Trump didn’t personally manufacture them, his campaign’s orchestration of the event made sure they were available for purchase in a military setting, in full view of the troops. The despicable White Privilege Cards, emblazoned with the phrase “Trumps Everything,” weren’t satire. They were branding. And they were met not with discipline, but with quiet acceptance.

During the bloodiest war in American history, the forces under Lee’s command contributed to the deaths of more U.S. soldiers than any other war America has fought, by a staggering margin. And they did it in service of a nation explicitly founded on the eternal exploitation of enslaved human beings. As historian Ty Seidule puts it: “Racism is the virus in the American dirt, infecting everything and everyone.” Lee wasn’t some noble tactician reluctantly serving Virginia. He was a virulent racist with a streak of cruelty whose military brilliance only makes his moral bankruptcy more devastating.

Lee is the original infected wound. Everything that came after—the Redeemer backlash, the Jim Crow order, the Christian academies, the modern GOP—is blood seeping from the cut he helped slice open. When statues of Lee came down, what spilled wasn’t just bronze and concrete. It was the myth that racism had ever been regional, historical, or buried.

The cultural and ideological residue of slavery-era Southern racism didn’t vanish after the Civil War. It metastasized. It bled out of the Confederacy and seeped into every crack of the American hallway, like a gallon of gasoline spilled across a linoleum floor. Watered down? Maybe. Less obvious? Sometimes. But it's the same poison.

The end of the Civil War didn't bring peace. It brought retaliation. The North may have won militarily, but the South eventually won the peace by exporting its grievance politics. The so-called "Redeemer" governments ensured that black codes and Jim Crow laws didn't just survive. They evolved, adapted, and reemerged under new guises in Northern industrial cities and western states.

As millions of black Americans fled the terror of the Jim Crow South, their arrival in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles prompted swift and violent responses: redlining, sundown towns, discriminatory labor unions, segregated schools. Racism wasn't a Southern relic. It had gone national, built into zoning boards, real estate policy, and urban planning.

One of the most virulent mutations came after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When federal desegregation orders threatened white-only public schools, many Southern whites fled into the bowels of hastily founded private Christian academies—tax-sheltered fortresses for institutionalized segregation. This wasn't just about education. It was about preserving a way of life and indoctrinating future generations with sanitized, Confederate-approved mythology. And it worked. These schools became ideological greenhouses, cultivating a potent blend of racial grievance, white arrogance, religious dogma, and anti-government paranoia that would soon migrate far beyond the South.

Today, many of these schools remain overwhelmingly white and ideologically rigid. A number of high-profile figures in government, especially in Republican politics, are alumni of these segregation-rooted institutions or their spiritual descendants. While no comprehensive list exists, patterns are visible. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for example, spent time at institutions closely tied to this lineage. Liberty Christian Academy—founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. to dodge integration—has long served as a feeder into right-wing political and evangelical networks. These schools function less like educational institutions and more like ideological breeding grounds for the next generation of asshole Christian nationalist politicians.

Southern religious-political ideology, steeped in Christian supremacy and patriarchal authoritarianism, found fertile ground beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Starting in the 1970s with the rise of the Moral Majority, white Southern political theology started to inform and define national conservatism, not just regional politics. Much of this was rooted in the same defiance that built the segregation academies.

As Kevin Phillips wrote in American Theocracy, the unholy fusion of radical religion and political power became central to the Republican Party’s identity. Evangelicalism didn’t just preach personal salvation. It offered a theological cover story for structural racism. It sanctified the hierarchy, cast suffering as divine order, and weaponized Jesus as a border guard and classroom monitor. The same revival tent that welcomed the lost sheep also pushed poor Southern white Christians to vote their twisted values.

At the core of this ideology lies a particularly insidious form of white Christian Manichaeism—a worldview that divides humanity into absolute good and evil, saved and damned, righteous and criminal. It flattens all nuance, discourages empathy, and trains its believers to fear the Other. In the context of race, this mentality justifies the brutal suppression of perceived threats as holy defense. The Southern private Christian school movement didn’t just preserve segregation. It hardened it into theological destiny. Students weren’t just taught an incomplete version of American history; they were taught a cosmic war map in which white America was the last line of God’s order against the imagined darkness of creeping moral chaos. Pure, evil bullshit.

And slavery never ended. It mutated. The 13th Amendment carved out an exception for criminal punishment, and America’s policing, prosecution, and incarceration systems seized on that clause with all the enthusiasm of Confederate cavalry at full gallop. From chain gangs to for-profit prisons, from the War on Drugs to stop-and-frisk policies, the logic of racial subjugation found new uniforms and new cover stories.

Modern anti-immigrant sentiment follows the same patterns as postbellum anti-black paranoia: a fear of the “invasion” corrupting white American identity. Laws against migrants, Muslims, or Central Americans borrow the same ideological toolkit once used to justify slavery: dehumanization, othering, criminalization. And voter ID laws, purges, and gerrymandering? Echoes of literacy tests and poll taxes.

Hollywood has played a role, too. From glorifying the Lost Cause to casting black and brown characters as criminals, mass media has done the work of the Southern propagandist. Racism didn’t have to march anymore. It could be streamed.

In August 1925, over 30,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in full regalia. They were not hiding in shadows or skulking in backwoods. They were marching in broad daylight, in the capital of the United States, protected by permits and emboldened by power. They waved American flags, held up crosses, and declared themselves defenders of true Americanism. The crowd lining the streets didn't riot. Many applauded. This shameful shitshow was not some fringe phenomenon, and it is dwarfed by racist bullshit on the Web today.

Many Americans, particularly those raised in moderately liberal or polite regions, have woefully underestimated the durability of white supremacy’s grip on our national identity. Trump didn’t create 77 million racists. He revealed them. His candidacy acted like a light switch in a crummy motel room: flick it on, and the ideological cockroaches scatter helter-skelter.

For people in places like small-town Iowa or Southern Arizona, racism often wore khakis and smiled politely at the grocery store. That’s why some Americans—especially those reared in quiet neighborhoods or far from racial flashpoints—recall the 1950s and 60s as not so bad. That isn’t delusion. It’s insulation. Racism in America often doesn’t look like a riot. It looks like a closed school, a missing neighbor, a local paper that never runs the real story. Just like you can live on a sparsely populated arm of a spiral galaxy and never sense the violent black hole spinning at the center, millions lived through civil unrest without ever seeing its full fury. But that absence of contact doesn’t mean absence of injustice. It means the system worked, exactly as designed.

Racism in America isn’t just a moral failure. It’s a business model. Capitalism didn’t tolerate racism. It monetized it. Segregation meant duplicate services and institutions. Redlining made white neighborhoods more profitable. Private Christian academies generated a tuition-oriented economy from white fear, giving rise to a movement to drain public subsidies from our nation’s universities. And media? Media learned that minimizing racism sold more ad space to a white audience that didn’t want to be reminded.

Even black progress came with a price tag. Affirmative action created consultants. Diversity hires made for corporate PR boosts. Woke capitalism became a marketing tool, not a moral compass. The machinery of race in America wasn’t dismantled. It was rebranded, outsourced, or sold in bulk.

This is the great irony: racism’s dilution wasn’t due to enlightenment. It was due to efficiency. If hatred could be thinned and managed without losing its power to divide, distract, and extract capital, so much the better. The Civil War ended the plantation economy, but it didn’t end plantation logic. It just stuffed it into a pinstripe suit and handed it a real estate portfolio.

Yes, black Americans today are not living in the lynching fields of the 1920s South. There is real, tangible progress: legal equality, expanded access to higher education, rising black middle-class wealth, broader media representation, and a slowly diversifying political establishment. But that progress, however insufficient, didn’t come from the generosity of the dominant culture. It was extracted, often painfully, through activism, federal enforcement, and cultural defiance.

We owe it to the tireless civil rights organizers, labor leaders, legal strategists, and everyday resisters—from W. E. B. Du Bois to Fannie Lou Hamer to the unheralded teachers and church elders who taught generations to read and resist. The 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts weren’t miracles. They were concessions ripped from a reluctant state under massive pressure.

These gains were enforced by federal courts, by federal troops when necessary, and by sustained organizing at the grassroots. Progress came from outside the Southern white Christian worldview, not from within it.

To draw today's attenuated racism out of the body politic, we must reverse-engineer those same tactics: education that teaches real history, journalism that calls out dog whistles as screaming sirens, policies that dismantle structural inequity, and relentless grassroots coalition-building. The fight is no longer about crossing a bridge in Selma. It’s about calling out racism when it wears a flag pin, a priest’s collar, or a school choice voucher.

Progress happened not because racism died, but because it was pushed back. And it will be pushed back again, if we stop pretending it’s now somewhat inconsequential and instead recognize when it’s peeing on our goddamn leg.

The free market has played its part, not in solving racism, but in reshaping it for mass distribution. Yes, it smoothed the sharpest edges for PR reasons and sold sanitized stories of progress. But capitalism has never been in the business of justice. It profits from division, labor stratification, surveillance, and privatized punishment. Racism isn’t just a flaw in the system. It is the system. And systems don’t dismantle themselves, people.

To truly root out racism from the American mind, we must take a scalpel to the cultural nervous system:

Track the evolution because racism is a shapeshifter. Learn its mutations—legal, linguistic, economic—and don’t chase the ghost of burning crosses while ignoring today’s algorithmic sorting at lightspeed.

Kill the lie of market morality. Stop waiting for capitalism to do the work of human conscience. Force it to do so--through law, protest, and mass awareness. Make racism a liability, not a subtle profit center.

Retrain American perception. Racism is taught on multiple levels, so unteach it. Inject real history into every classroom, boardroom, newsroom. Replace the myth of white innocence with the sad fact of collective inheritance.

Erase the default of whiteness. Stop designing systems in which white norms are the unspoken standard. That’s not neutrality. That’s supremacy in khakis.

Expose plantation logic wherever it hides. Whether in the parole office, the school lottery, or the Sunday sermon, root it out. Racism is not a feeling. It’s a function.

Above all right now, we must use the stinking, condescending racist mess that is Donald Trump and his MAGA morons and GOP running dogs in Congress as a springboard to reinvigorate the drive to crush racism and its lesser evil cousin, class oppression, in America.

Earlier this week, as Trump was fucking around with the working-class guys installing his dumbshit flagpoles on the White House lawn, our worst president ever joked about some of the workers maybe being undocumented. That’s just another form, though milder, of the racism and pseudo-aristocratic bullshit that has plagued our nation for centuries, even before Robert E. Lee pompously and cruelly tortured his slaves with utter impunity.

Wouldn’t it have been great if one of those workingmen had made the world a little better place and punched Trump in his fat, fucking face? Don’t you wish you could do it right goddamn now?

Me, too. And we need to sustain that strategic rage.

But while the fantasy of eliminating oligarchs, pseudo-aristocrats, ideological assholes, and cultural terrorists by force may be intoxicating, the true win isn’t revenge. It’s replacement: removing the oppressors’ grip on the machinery of American governance and finance in order to create a more perfect union.

We The People can do this, and twice on Sundays, if we just focus.