The Crime of Human Virtue

Sometimes it really is as simple as good vs. evil. This is one of those times. Human virtue is our great crime against the fascist project; it's also our great weapon against it.

To be a Republican in 2025 represents a clear public confession that you either don't know the difference between good and evil and you're so morally empty that you can't be bothered to begin to try, or that you do know the difference, and you prefer evil enough to commit mass murder for it, or at least let others commit it on your behalf and to your benefit. It's been that way for a while. I'll let people with more time on their hands than me argue about when it started being that way.

I don't know of a starker way to put it—which I can say authoritatively, since I am trying my best to find the starkest possible way. I think there's value to saying things plainly, particularly when there's so much bullshit, nonsense, and outright lies flooding the zone. Truth exposes lies, and the simpler and starker the truth, the better it exposes the lie.

Texas has invaded Illinois with its military at the behest of the Trump dictatorship. In cities that have been identified as too compassionate toward undesirables like poor people and foreign people, masked unidentified goons are brutalizing and terrorizing and kidnapping and disappearing our friends and neighbors to enslavement gulags, and rounding up entire apartment buildings, and zip-tying children, and brutalizing people for the crime of questioning them. By waging war in our cities, the Republican regime has turned those cities quite literally into war zones, which is something Republicans insisted the cities already were, even though it is something those cities never have been before.

And saying any of this is now potentially enough to get you labeled a terrorist and an enemy of the state, and receive any of the punishment and violence that comes with that. And I'm going to say it anyway, because fuck them.

The Nazi president—because a Nazi is what he is—gathered his Nazi cabinet together for an "antifa roundtable" recently in order to brag that he "took away the first amendment," and proclaim his intention to treat "antifa" as a terrorist organization, as part of a larger directive known as NSPM-7, which treats as terrorist violence the expression of a lot of very common beliefs among tens of millions of people opposed to fascism. Just to make sure it was perfectly clear what they meant by "antifa" and what their allegiance is, the Republicans brought out the Nazi influencer and organizer Jack Posobiec to proclaim that antifa was an organized movement (false) with real historical roots in groups that had set themselves in opposition to Nazis in Germany in 1930 (true). Just to repeat, the Trump regime has decided that a group that opposed Adolf Hitler and Nazis are terrorists—which is framing you'd expect a Nazi influencer to deliver to a Nazi president and his Nazi cabinet, so if you want a reason why I would call Trump and his Cabinet Nazis, well, there's one. (There are hundreds of other reasons—thousands, perhaps—dealing with their Nazi methods and their Nazi intentions and their Nazi tactics and their Nazi language and Nazi imagery and Nazi propaganda. Do I have to make the case yet again here in late 2025? Read up if you're not aware. You can start in my archives if you like. If you're unconvinced so long after it became inescapable I'd dare say you're unconvincable.)

The Trump definition for being a terrorist includes things such as "anti-capitalist" talk and "anti-Christian" talk. However, "anti-Christian" certainly leaves fascist stormtroopers enough wiggle-room to shoot a Christian paster (David Black of the First Presbyterian Church) who was shot in the head with a pepper ball by an officer outside an ICE processing facility. You can watch the video; there was no provocation other than the pastor's opposition to the lawless kidnapping and enslavement that the Republican fascist regime is carrying out right now. This is the sort of stance you might expect to see from people who follow the example of Jesus Christ—is in fact is the stance you see from many Christians—but Christianity isn't what these Nazis mean to defend when they say they want to defend Christianity. And "anti-capitalist" certainly leaves them room to attack with targeted threats of retaliation any corporation that doesn't behave according to the cruel standards of the fascist project, perhaps most notably in recent days when they pressured ABC in a nearly successful attempt to cancel a stand up comic with a talk show for talking shit about Dear Leader. No, the christianity they defend is the popular supremacist nationalist myth of white supremacist purification that makes up the majority of American christianity today, and the capitalism they defend is not commerce or industry, but the cancerous corruption that capitalism inevitably produces.

I'm not making any of this up, by the way. This is all happening. You can go find the videos, the stories. You can go listen to Republicans talk—you can listen to them brag. This is real.

To be a Republican in 2025 is to be somebody who takes the side of the bully, the liar, the corrupt, is to be someone in favor of mass immiseration and mass murder done on your behalf in order to satisfy some need of identity or fortune or power or position, someone willing (to paraphrase Thomas Pynchon) to build as much labyrinth of justification and ignorance as is needed to place between yourself and the inconvenience of caring. If you're a Republican, that's what you support, and here is what you are as long as you willfully choose to be: A Confederate of the failed war to preserve and expand slavery. A supremacist in the tradition of the KKK. A segregationist in the tradition of Jim Crow. An American Nazi. It is what it is. It isn't anything else. Sometimes it really is as simple as good and evil, particularly when you have set yourself against all that is good.

Observing clear truths in this way apparently qualifies me as a terrorist in the eyes of American Nazis, and that makes observing such truths seem very dangerous, because American Nazis have at their disposal the most intrusive surveillance apparatus and the most powerful military in the world. So be it. This is partially because (again) fuck them, but also I think it's a lot more dangerous to keep quiet than to speak plainly, even—perhaps especially—in a time when speaking truth has been made criminal. They fascist project comes for you eventually no matter what. Even joining it won't save you; it's a beast that eats itself when nothing else remains to consume, and frequently even before that.

It's an extraordinary thing, though, to claim that a person is an extremist for telling the truth about extremists. That someone who is simply observing a war already being waged against American citizens is the one declaring war. That by simply observing the campaign of terror being waged against our friends and neighbors one becomes a terrorist. That noting the constant drumbeat of bigoted instigations to mass violence against oppressed minorities means that you are instigating violence against those carrying it out. That pointing out truths about extremists makes you a liar and an extremist. But this is what you can expect when you're anti-fascist and fascists have the reins of power, because fascists hate truth, for truth harms them.

It's undeniable that the project this Republican political movement is involved in is the destruction of humanity—literally the removal of human virtue from human imagination and human society, and the removal of whatever humans it deems unfit—and that intends to prosecute this project to the full extent of its power, and to crush any opposition by "unleashing," as Pete Hegseth recently put it, "overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy."

This is why you're seeing human virtue criminalized. Truth is only one of many human virtues that has been targeted for such treatment. You can tell the fascists fear truth by the way they attack it. And so too with all other human virtue: kindness, empathy, fairness, justice, and so on.

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I can already hear the centrist response: Don't you see, that's just what they say about us? It's true, fascists do make similar claims. In his speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial/fascist rally, for example, prominent Trump advisor and pallid Nazi ghoul Stephen Miller said this as an open threat to everyone else in the world that isn't a white christianist American:

What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. ...To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.

Fun stuff! And I suppose I would say this to the centrist: It's true that Republicans also frame our current conflict as a matter of good versus evil, so it might be necessary to actually look at reality to adjudicate who might be making the true claim and who might be making the false one. It might be necessary to observe this world that Miller claims whiteness built all by itself, and notice that the claim is a baldfaced lie, and thereby notice that what it is his own regime is actually contributing is very observably nothing but punishment and violence and corruption and bigotry—notice, perhaps, that Stephen Miller's words echoed those of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, or that he made these claims not as a call to build more beauty and bring more light, or to build anything, but as as a justification for bringing even more violent punishment into the world against those already suffering accelerating violent punishment at their hands. It might be necessary to go beyond stated claims and apply a little bit of moral clarity and notice who is and who isn't murdering civilian fishermen and zip-tying children. (And if you can't do that, centrist, I'd be a little bit more thoughtful about how freely you use that "us," because we can all see where you stand.)

What is it that makes you an enemy of this Republican project? They'll tell you, if you listen. It's human virtue of any kind.

That's the final proof of what we are up against. Human virtue is what most threatens those who wish to eradicate us—and by us I mean humanity.

It almost seems redundant to recapitulate everything that's been done by fascists this year. The way they gutted programs of science and health research and sustainable energy, the way they disintegrated our foreign aid leaving stranded and dying those most helpless from the ravages of global capitalism, the way health care has been slashed, the way ... look, if it's good it's either been destroyed or it's being destroyed. The headlines come every day, like waves bringing bodies to shore after a naval war.

Why do this? I'd argue it's because human progress exposes the truth, which is that when you open up the ledger and start the historical audit, that supremacists, fascists, Nazis, Republicans—whatever you want to call them—actually have contributed nothing of value. The best they can claim is that they enslaved those who built it for them as they watched, and now possess the booty that they stole from somebody else's safe. Certainly it's true of these modern fascists. Contra Miller, they build nothing except concentration camps of enslavement and other engines of punishment and oppression and false narratives of self-justification and premeditated violence. What has been built of value has been built from human virtue, and human virtue, like human progress, exposes the Republican project like it exposes any supremacist project, as a project void of virtue, opposed to human progress, and even to humanity, and even to humans.

This is why fascists have come after all programs of diversity and equity and inclusion—because human diversity creates strength and a generative value from which progress arises, and equity and inclusion make that generative strength all the strong, which means that diversity and equity and inclusion expose the lie of the fascist project.

That's why fascists come after empathy, even declaring empathy toxic, because empathy respects shared humanity, and humanity exposes fascism.

That's why fascists criminalize compassion, and solidarity, and justice. And we've already observed how the fascists are waging war against truth, and I think the way that truth exposes lies is obvious enough.

There's a picture from the early days of the Trump regime that has lived with me ever since: A man at FBI headquarters painting over words on a wall. Each word is a human virtue. The man is covering them all with a large paint roller; overwriting fairness and compassion, leadership, diversity, integrity, respect, responsibility, leaving nothing but a blank plane of grey. The man could be anyone. He's not extraordinary. They told him to paint over human virtue and he did it, as if human virtue can be eradicated with a bit of paint. There can be no better picture of the fascist project.

To be a Republican in 2025 is to be in favor of this. You can stop anytime, and yet you don't. It is what it is. You are what you are. We can all see it.

If it's a human virtue, Republicans intend to punish it. If it is a part of our shared humanity, Republicans are working to make it a crime. Fascists punish humans for their humanity, because humanity exposes the fascist project for what it is.

What to do? Well, if humanity is what exposes and threatens the fascist project, then humanity is what defeats fascists. That's why human virtue is being criminalized and punished.

So let's be criminals, by which I mean let's be humans. They will try to paint us all over, but they can't get us all.

There are certain virtues in particular that seem to harm the fascist project.

I'd like to list them now.

(c) The New York Times

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About a year ago I said that there are things that fascists can't do, and so we should do those things. I think it's possible to express this sentiment by saying that we should embody human virtues. I should be cautious here because fascists do point toward human virtues in order to make rationales for their anti-human ends—which is why I say we must embody those virtues, which is something fascists cannot do. I also should be cautious to be clear what I mean when I say that fascists cannot embody these virtues. Fascists are human, after all; it's not that they can't embody human virtues by dint of their humanity—they can and often do, and in fact this is what makes fascism all the more horrifying and insidious. It's that a fascist can't embody those virtues by dint of their fascism, because when you choose to support a project that has the demolition of humanity as its aim, you cease embodying those virtues and instead wear them as one might a poorly-fitting suit. Eventually, when confronted by virtue, you will be exposed.

And some virtues a fascist will find difficult to embody whatsoever, particularly the more committed they become to the fascist project. Here are a few:

Wisdom. I would define this virtue as "understanding what is more important and what is less important." I choose this definition because it allows us to understand a great many things as important while recognizing the need to prioritize. For example, it's wisdom that lets one understand when to follow the law and when to maliciously comply and when to break it in protest against an unjust and inhumane practice, without devaluing the law—in fact, valuing the law by properly positioning it and recognizing that it exists for the protection and flourishing of humans, not the other way around. It's wisdom that lets you know when it is appropriate to confront a fascist in your midst to provide them a glimpse at how to return to the humanity they've abandoned, and when to lie to their face in order to keep someone else safe. It's wisdom that allows you to understand that human beings are more important than profits, that the call of justice is more important than unjust order, that the sustainability that comes from universal solidarity is more important than the temporary safety that the force of violence offers. It's how we understand what our principles are, and how we know that those principles hold a worth beyond riches, which lends us the clarity to stand on that foundation even when the cost is made artificially high. And it exposes the ways that adherents to the fascist project are required to always put less important things before more important things, to destroy what is good, and to defend what is malicious.

Normalcy. I should be cautious again, because fascists are also everyday people. But there is a great strength in opposing the fascist project just as normal old you. Often we believe that an opponent of these great and powerful forces must be a person of great power and skill and consequence, but I suspect the opposite is true. The greatest proponent of fascism in this era aren't strange ghouls and empty souls like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Donald Trump; rather they are the sweet-smiling old ladies with cotton ball haircuts and church dresses holding MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and suburban moms in yoga gear insisting that high school bathrooms be segregated to satisfy their bigoted fears. They lend their normalcy to fascism's abnormal cruelty, and make it seem normal by their participation. In the same way, I don't think there's much that exposes the abnormality of the fascist project for what it is than the sight of a happy family with gay parents living their lives, or a parent loving their trans child for who they are, or people of all colors and creeds and ages linking arms to face down a masked horde of masked militarized cowards. What's powerful about normalcy is not naming a specific way of being human as normal and pushing that way to the exclusion of all others, but by embracing the great wisdom that all humans, in their vast array of diverse expression, are all normal already, simply by belonging to the human family, and that the true abnormality is insisting on your own way of being as the exclusive right one that must be enforced at the point of punishment.

This means that the most powerful thing you can bring to this struggle is yourself. Just nice little old you. Bring yourself; your self is what's needed, and it will be enough.

Silliness. You've seen the frogs, right? All the forest creatures and sprites. Silliness is one thing that fascists cannot abide, because they insist on being the only normal ones, is the idea that they are silly—which is particularly ironic given how ridiculous many of them are. Donald Trump resembles a handbag crafted of scrotum leather painted, for example. But silliness is a great human virtue, because just as each of us is normal, each of us is also very silly, if we're wise and normal enough to accept it. Let's expose the great fascist silliness by meeting it with our own silliness. Let's expose their fascist military costume as the ridiculous anti-human pose it is. Make them zip-tie an inflatable unicorn.

Joy. This can be a hard one, especially as fascists respond to human virtues with punishment and violence and even kidnapping and murder. But have you ever noticed that Republicans have gotten everything they ever wanted, and it hasn't made them a bit happier? Have you ever noticed that joy is further than ever from them? And what is sillier than a guy who looks like Dennis Reynolds-meets-Gollum screaming we have beauty! we have light! we have goodness! It will ever be thus; the more that they get the anti-humanity world they insist on, the less joy will be available. The more we can find our joy in our humanity, the more exposed the fascist lack of joy will become. Dance in the face of their sprays and gas. Laugh and joke and eat and drink and sing together. Make a human space to demonstrate to fascists what it is they have chosen to separate themselves from, and to show them what they need to abandon if they hope to reclaim it.

Bravery. All of this antifascism is clearly going to take a lot of bravery, because cowards have been given a whole lot of permission these days to bully and harass and harm and kill. But they haven't been given all the permission, and you can easily tell. They wouldn't be wearing masks and hiding their badges and points of identification otherwise. They know that crimes against humanity requires cowardice, which is why they strut and preen and brag so much as they try to claim the mantle of protector, and to claim the position of the oppressed. To face these poisonous crybabies down armed with nothing but your normal self, wise in what is important, silly as you are, as close as you are to the shared human experience of joy, demonstrates a bravery that exposes fascist cowardice. The youngest child knows it takes more courage to risk taking a pepper ball to the head than it takes to shoot somebody in the head with a pepper ball. Shame these fascist fucks from the day they meet you until the day they meet their eventual but eternal and inescapable ends, an end they share with the humanity they deny.

Hope. I've written about hope before. This is the awareness that things should be better than they are, which leads to the conviction that they can get better, which leads the public persistent insistence that they will get better, which leads to the rugged determination to pay the price necessary to make things better. It's the thing that doesn't care if the scoreboard shows us behind and fights for points as long as there's a second left on the clock. It's a great human virtue, drawing from our wisdom, our normalcy, our silliness, feeding our joy and our bravery, and it's completely inaccessible to those who want to make things worse, and fight to make things worse. It's completely inaccessible to those who have set themselves violently against humanity, and fully exposes those who seek to criminalize every human virtue.

There are protests next Saturday. Humanity will be there. The fascists are saying it will be a terrorist gathering, a criminal conspiracy, a violent uprising.

So let's be criminals, by which I mean let's be antifascists, by which I mean let's be humans. Let's be wise and normal and silly and joyous and brave and hopeful.

Let's all wave hello to each other.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He'll tip his hat to the new Constitution.