“Confederate chronicles events leading to the Third American Civil War. It takes place in an alternate timeline, where the Southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.”
Critics preemptively attacked the series as “slavery fan fiction.” HBO publicly stood by the show, but two years later, Confederate had never materialized and its creators departed for Netflix (where they created Three Body Problem and other shows).
I recall thinking in 2017 that Confederate would never air because it just wasn’t needed. We already lived in the Confederate States of America.
Neo NAZIS and disenfranchising Black people
Neo NAZIS and other white supremacists had just rallied in Charlottesville, VA. The electoral college, a vestige of a system built to reconcile the power of free and slave states, had selected the loser of the popular vote to be our president. That president was a vile bigot who put migrants in concentration camps and kidnapped their children (many of whom still haven’t been reunited with their parents). Florida wrongly purged Black voters in 2000, giving that presidency to George W. Bush.
One of the lawyers who helped prepare Bush’s legal argument in Bush v. Gore was John Roberts, who Bush later appointed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts later declared racism to be a thing of the past in the South when he and the rest of the corrupt Republican justices eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Immediately, red states that had been subject to pre-clearance under the VRA implemented concerted plans to purge Black voters and suppress the votes of those they couldn’t purge.
Half the nation systematically prevented Black people from voting, from the moment the Black Codes ended Reconstruction in the 19th Century, until the moment LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. A society that denies the vote to an entire segment of its population is not a democracy. The United States of America was an anti-democratic tyranny from its founding, until 1965 when it finally gave everyone the vote.
But then it ceased to be a democracy in the year 2000, when Florida said “not so fast.” Immediately after that, gerrymandering and then the 2014 Supreme Court decision gave the Republican Party’s voter suppression strategy the green light. The USA, the supposed paragon of democracies, was only a democracy for 35 short years.
The slave patrol police forces, the justice system, and the slavery that never ended
Our police forces evolved from the Confederacy’s slave patrols, and still operate as if one of their core mandates is to control Black bodies – to make as many of them as possible available to the privileged classes who can exploit them for their labor and for their sadistic pleasure. It’s been their mandate since the adoption of the 13th Amendment at the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment permitted involuntary servitude slavery to continue, but only as a punishment for crime.
It’s not a coincidence that America imprisons more of its population than any other nation. More than 2.2 million Americans are rotting in prison precisely because the state, which operates public prisons, and the corporations, who own private prisons, have a financial incentive to make that happen.
One of the main functions of state and federal legislatures is ensuring a steady supply of criminals to feed the system. Between the end of chattel slavery and now, our lawmakers have enacted thousands of measures making much of what we do illegal. There are over 5,000 Federal statutes and over 300,000 Federal laws and regulations (who knows how many state and local ones exist) that litter the law code like land mines. Some, like assault and theft, are obvious crimes.
But most are obscure. You’ve probably unwittingly committed half a dozen crimes this week alone. For instance, in some locales, if you catch an under-sized fish in a lake and take it home, the Feds can slap you with a large fine. But if you figure out too late that the fish was undersized and you throw the dead fish away so you won’t get in trouble, that’s obstructing a Federal investigation. That crime could land you in prison. Once there, your jailers masters could rent you out to flip burgers at Arby’s for a few years.
A kinder, gentler slavery
The difference between this and chattel slavery is, children of modern-day inmates slaves are not destined to share their parents’ fate. But they are more likely to, and the system knows this. Research shows that children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to wind up in prison themselves.
The prison industry forces prisoners to work in the prison, and it also rents them out on “work release” to clients. We already have the “modern institution” the TV show Confederate was trying to imagine. From Mission Investors Exchange:
“Prison labor in the U.S. started with convict leasing during slavery and has ballooned into a billion dollar industry that is rooted in the racially-skewed nature of excessive incarceration. The abundance and use of prison labor, rather than being challenged by legislators, has been monetized through the sale of cheap labor to companies and state-funded entities, thereby supporting the expense of expanded incarceration and providing a hidden slave labor force.
“While a small percentage of prison labor lies within one specific federally-regulated program, the vast majority exists in state, federal, and private prisons that have no centralized regulatory body. Prison labor is pervasive in the United States penal system, but the extent to which that labor is used to supply American corporations with goods and services is shrouded in secrecy.”
The modern-day plantations are ecstatic
Trump’s first term was just an appetizer for the private prison industry, which scrambled to benefit from his “zero tolerance policy” that turned refugees into inmates. Just days after Trump’s 2024 victory, private prison companies are practically orgasmic over the fortune awaiting them. From the Huffington Post:
“Private prison executives imagined tracking “millions” of people electronically, transporting hundreds of thousands by plane, and expanding detention centers. On earnings calls Thursday, private prison groups expressed a nearly unrestrained glee over what one called the “unprecedented opportunity” that a second Trump administration brings.
“Trump made mass deportation of undocumented immigrants ― and even some immigrants who are here legally ― a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, building on years of racist and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, speaking affectionately for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mass deportation program, and even invoking an 18th-century law that would give him broad powers to pursue deportations…
“Key Trump advisors have also openly discussed building mass deportation camps along the border capable of detaining tens of thousands of people at a time as judges process their deportation orders, attached to ‘constantly’ operating runways with deportation flights around the world. While Democratic presidents have also massively expanded the immigration incarceration and deportation system in recent years, Trump is proposing his own generational escalation.
“That sort of thing is music to the ears of private prison operators ― whose stock prices soared upon the projections of Trump’s second term in the White House. (On Wednesday, GEO Group was ‘the single biggest winner in the U.S. stock market — among companies of any size,’ according to the investment news site Sherwood News, which is owned by Robinhood.)”
The millions of legal and illegal immigrants (and probably Dreamers) who stand to be corralled into Trump’s concentration camps stands to increase the involuntary labor slave population in this country by an order of magnitude.
Aristotle is a Republican rock star
Aristotle was so keen on the institution of slavery that, next to Jesus and the Bible, Aristotle and his works were the most popular and influential “influencers” in the Antebellum South.
Guess who keeps talking about Aristotle these days. One guess.
MAGA is quite fond of the goofy old philosopher. As their predecessors did in the Antebellum South, MAGA refers back to that ignoramus-savant’s f***ed-up worldview to justify the caste system they mentally rope Americans into. We’ve all got a role to play in the society they envision, and it’s dictated by our innate natures. Some of us are genetically, inherently criminal. Some of us are breeding-stock.
Obviously, the straight white male’s role is to lead or to otherwise protect the sanctity of the caste system by any means necessary. Anything they do to protect that system is not only justified, it’s virtuous. Miseducating our youth, spreading misinformation via social media, or the churches, or Prager U videos, or via a right wing media ecosystem they created, is all just part of their duty. Violence, wrongful incarceration, gerrymandering, stealing Supreme Court seats, stealing Florida in 2000… all of it is in service of an Aristotelian worldview.
Most MAGA fans have probably never read Aristotle. But they’re all influenced by those who have, and by generations of thinking handed down from ancestors who were steeped in it.
The 2024 election was America America-ing
Today’s electorate is still steeped in it. MAGA has successfully persuaded much of America that preventing white kids from feeling guilt or shame (or more likely, any sense of empathy that might cause them to see the caste system as illegitimate) is more important than white kids learning lessons from accurate history. They’ve spent two decades now mocking “social justice warriors” and “wokeness.” They’ve banned books that might generate empathy among their children, who might then stray from their roles as Aristotelian guardians of the social order.
That crowd has spent decades infesting every level of power from the White House to the courts to state offices, all the way down to local school boards and HOAs. White people – including white women – have voted overwhelmingly (three times, now) for the worst and most venal career criminal to ever inhabit the White House. Many of them probably can’t put their finger on why. But they just know they’re doing the right thing.
Befriending Jaws by feeding it chum
And now a growing percentage of minorities has decided they can’t beat them, so they might as well join them.
There’s a term Gen Z uses for people like that: “Pick-me.” A pick-me does what they can to show that they’re not like the rest of their group, in the hope that the dominant caste will embrace them. They hope that by pledging their allegiance to the worldview of the dominant class, that class will recognize their value and their utility, and reward them. They imagine that will earn them the same benefits the members of that dominant caste inherit.
Africans who sold other Africans into slavery were Pick-me’s. Black soldiers who fought for the colonies rather than Britain even after Britain vowed to free them, were pick-me’s. The scores of Mexican citizens and free Blacks who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, were all Pick-Me’s, who sought to prove they deserved a higher social status in whatever society a successful Confederacy might build. Our society’s 400-year-long history is lousy with individuals from historically marginalized groups who chose to align themselves with the white supremacist movement that’s infested and shaped our society since 1619.
Their latching onto it does not turn that movement into a benevolent, multicultural one. It turns those individuals into ramora fish who think sucking on the body of the Great White Shark will provide protection from that shark, and allow them to enjoy everything the shark enjoys. They imagine that in some way, by latching on and assuming the contours of that shark, they’ve basically become sharks themselves. If they imagine hard enough, they can forget that if they ever annoy that shark, it can shake them off and devour them.
Moving on already?
On that cheerful note, I’ll leave you with today’s Candorville:
I use to want to be Billy Ocean.
I remember that day like it was 28 years ago. My medium-size, rusty yellow school bus barreled down Laurel Canyon Blvd, taking the hairpin curves at full speed. The driver’s boom box blared “Carrot You Quit” (it was a few years before I realized the song actually said “Caribbean Queen.”) I sat in the back, above the right tire, so I’d be tossed a foot or so into the air whenever the bus hit a bump. It was always the high-point of my day.
But not that day. That was the day when the entire fourth grade discovered that “Bell” rhymes with “smell.”
That night I plotted revenge. I listed all my classmates’ last names, got out my mom’s thesaurus, shut myself in my room, turned on my desk lamp, and promptly lost interest when my brother told me Robotech was on. Then one thing led to another. I watched He-Man. Then G.I. Joe. Then GoBots. Then Transformers. I meant to get back to my revenge after dinner, but by the time I finished my vegetables I was late for my appointment in the construction site across the street, where I was to pretend I was Luke Skywalker bravely fighting Tusken Raiders (the neighbor kid). After that, I had to watch an episode of Star Trek. The next thing I knew, my mom was tucking me in and everything was fading to black.
It was five o’clock the next morning. I don’t recall why, but my brother didn’t go to school that day. It was just me. It was still dark out, and I waited by a barren stone wall on Valley Boulevard for my bus. I was about to have two hours on the road to consider how I’d failed. I was totally unprepared. The bus creaked to a stop and the door slid open. “Caribbean Queen” again. It was as if the driver had it on a loop.
It was just the driver and me on the bus. It was just us on the road. The city was still asleep. I remember hearing and feeling the rumble of the engines. I remember them cutting out every so often when the driver, bouncing in his seat, stomped on the clutch and shook the three foot long gear shift. The engine-less silence was interrupted by the sound of grinding metal, and then the engine would roar back to life and we’d take off. I could see the back of his afro, and in the rear view mirror I could see his glasses and his mustache. I remember seeing him close his eyes when he started bopping his head to the music. I wondered, if he were about to crash, could I survive a jump from my window if I tucked and rolled?
That’s when he started singing along with Billy Ocean. He wasn’t just singing, though; he was harmonizing. I liked it. It was calming. Before I knew it, I was singing along too. In my head, at least: “Carrot you quit… now we’re sharing the dame beam… At a parts, they beat as one… Norman love on the run…” (it was a few years before I could Google the real lyrics). He stopped a few blocks from the next pickup, ran off the bus into a liquor store, and came back out with a six pack of Pepsi. He gave one to me along with a smile. The sun broke over Chavez Ravine, and the bus rolled on, picking up over forty other kids.
None of them got a Pepsi.
By the time the bus pulled into Wonderland Elementary, I’d decided revenge wasn’t important. Life was bigger than a fourth grade Day From Hell. Besides, I was going to change my name to “Billy Ocean.” As far as I could figure it, nothing bad rhymed with Ocean.
The other day, I awoke to find an email from the publisher, letting me know my copies of 
