Years ago, I worked with a man whose twitter handle was something like “The Conservative Kid” (he was in his 30s).

He was also deeply stupid — and not just because of his politics… though certainly as it related to them. I’m not a particularly effective debater, but he couldn’t address even the most basic of his worldview’s implications:

• On interstate regulation: What should Louisiana residents do if Tennessee legalized dumping lethal chemicals into the Mississippi?

• On privatizing public safety: Do you think that letting poor people’s houses burn will not affect rich people’s houses?

• On the bathroom thing: Which bathroom should [this jacked, bearded trans-man] use, why, who should enforce that, and how will that make anyone even feel safer?

I genuinely disagreed with him about everything we ever discussed… with a single exception, and when he said “A-ha! We agree on something!” I knew it wasn’t him being a Broken Clock. It was me being wrong.

But I didn’t understand why capital punishment could never be right, and it’s hard to let go of bad opinions if you don’t understand why they’re bad.

Now in practice, obviously it’s bad because people are falsely convicted with horrifying frequency, and there’s a 0% chance that no innocents have been executed. The only way to stop that is to stop it.

But, this was around the time that a kid walked into a Black church and opened fire, killing nine people. And he seemed like precisely the type of person not worth spending tax dollars to keep alive and possibly worth spending tax dollars to kill. “We might convict the wrong person in some scenarios” wasn’t a good enough argument for me when they were unquestionably convicting the right person here.

I knew I was wrong, but it took activist Bryan Stevenson appearing on some podcast I probably stopped listening to a decade ago to make me understand that the moral argument against the death penalty is not about the crimes America stopped but the ones it didn’t. The United States lost its right to condemn someone to death the first time it abided a lynching… and it abided a whole lot of lynchings.

And that was it, the thing that flipped the switch. As journalist Seymour Hersh says at the end of Cover-Up, the latest project from Citizenfour’s Laura Poitras (alongside Mark Obenhaus), “We are a country of enormous violence… You can’t have a country that does that and looks the other way.”

These sorta-debates ended when my colleague openly admitted that his feelings didn’t care about facts. That his “principles” were paramount and that he fully rejected anything that didn’t align with them: A wild thing to say, though clearly he was too dumb to understand the implications.

I was never interested in him, so I never looked to see where he went. I kinda assumed he started doing state-sponsored terrorism once the ICE billboards went up — seemed perfect for a racist gym-rat like him. And maybe he is and is hiding it, but he’s advertising himself as an “AI Prompt Specialist.” So that’s… better?

Renee Nicole Good is someone whose name I wish I never learned. It’s bitterly ironic that the life of a woman whose prize-winning poem was titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” is now under the uniquely vicious microscope of the right-wing propaganda machine.

From the moment she was murdered by a state-sponsored terrorist — shot three times in the face at point-blank range — Good became uniquely dangerous to their project. Where the victims of these sorts of crimes are typically immigrants or at least non-white, she was a natural blonde: a 37-year-old white suburban mother driving a car full of stuffed animals. The videos are horrible; the photos are somehow worse.

She’s precisely the type of person who these racist policies and practices are ostensibly keeping safe… yet they killed her. With no criminal record to hide behind, they complained about the pronouns in her bio, about her being a lesbian — and a divorced one at that. They pointed to footage from the one angle that maybe maybe makes it look like she’s driving towards the terrorist who shot her… which would be irrelevant even if it were true (which every other angle makes very clear it was not), because it would still be in direct violation of their guidelines about the use of lethal force.

Not that the terrorist cared. Nor the government officials, news anchors, or influencers: everyone went on the attack. Because this woman has to be antifa or woke or whatever because they cannot allow the fact that their supremacist society excludes 37-year-old white mothers just as it does undocumented immigrants.

We are a country of enormous violence, and I feel less safe than I did a week ago.

And I wonder about the end of all this — if there ever will be one. At a bare minimum, every single person who made this happen (and ideally many of the people who allowed it to) would be rounded up and put on trial. But what would that really do?

Jacob Geller’s recent video essay Fantasies of Nuremberg looks at what really happened at — and after — those famous trials. And it turns out that answer is not very much. The Nazis who weren’t executed were eventually set free, because that’s what happens with people in power.

If America were a just society, the members of its high court would be given the kind of fair trial that they collectively don’t believe the citizens deserve. But they won’t be, and instead they will be the final arbiters and continue to do the bidding of the fascists.

So if there won’t be trials, what then? What can be done? I joke about bringing back the guillotines as much as anybody, and for a while maybe that is what I wanted, but it really isn’t anymore.

We are a country of enormous violence, and I can’t want more of it. I don’t want the members of the supreme court who made the president a king to die; I don’t want the cabinet to die; I don’t even want the terrorist to die.

But

I want their influence to be gone. I want their power gone. Having rung in the new year with V for Vendetta, I’m thinking a lot about symbols. V donned a mask to become an idea that would live on well after his death.

(The state-sponsored terrorists hide their faces too, but not for an idea. They do it because they’re afraid of the fact that we know who killed Renee Nicole Good. Feels like a “Men are afraid of being falsely accused of rape. Do you know what women are afraid of?” sort of thing.)

It’s likely the case that Charlie Kirk’s death was a net positive for society: the president lost an extremely effective propagandist. But that’s not the only way that could have happened. A thorough deplatforming would have served the purpose even better — an utter diminishment of his ideas, because now he’s a martyr whose name lives on.

In his absence, we have to hear his widow complain about poor parenting in response to a question about her president’s violent rhetoric on CBS News, an institution with a penchant for burying stories about prison conditions that make the US government look bad.

(The spiking of “Inside CECOT” was embarrassing and enraging, but two decades prior they tried to bury the story of torture at Abu Graib at the request of that administration. As documented in Cover-Up, Seymour Hersh told 60 Minutes they could do their own story or they would become a part of his. The aired broadcast opens with an admission that it’s being done under duress. Also embarrassing. Also enraging.)

I don’t want to know the guy’s widow. I don’t want to hear her or her weird ideas. I don’t want to see any of these people’s faces or hear their voices or even read their names.

In my wildest fantasies, the headquarters of Fox News isn’t a cemetery but a public library. I don’t know how we get there… or really believe we can.

But to wish for the cemetery, to fantasize about their deaths, means believing in some part of their political project. And the more I’ve seen the ramifications of that project, the more names I know that I wish I didn’t, the less I can stand that idea. We should want our country to be better than what it is and always has been.

There’s no reason to mourn the loss of the terrorists and the fascists like we mourn their victims, but let’s not work for their deaths.

Let’s work for their irrelevance.