Divide & Conquer: Part 1.

Divide and conquer has long been a favorite tactic of the aspiring tyrant. And how better to divide, than to destabilize the power structure, stoke paranoia on all sides, appeal to one faction's cherished bias, and get it to self-identify with your own movement's drive for power? Then, foster in your supporters suspicion of all movements that call for the solidarity of the oppressed of any stripe. Get your supporters to damn those who rally in favor of civil liberties and human rights as subversives.

Bitter irony, in a nation founded so strongly on the primacy of the fundamental, inalienable human rights of the individual that the simple, self-evident truths of those founding principles, embodied in the Bill of Rights, have dragged us kicking and screaming feet-first from our founding, steeped in patriarchal slaveholding aristocracy, through and out of mire after mire of religious, racial, and sexual bigotry. To fail now? To fall here?

Not if I have anything to fucking say about it.

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