The Return of Clap Backs & Commentary

Pride Month Edition

It’s been about a year since I did one of these. I always worried they were a bit cringe, but people on Facebook fucking love them and I’m an attention whore so here we are.

On June 1, I posted this photo, the front door of my house, on Facebook. I included this comment: “Happy Pride! I am sorry if you didn’t get the love and acceptance you needed from your own family; please know you will always be accepted by my family.”

There were 2,900 comments on the post, may of them very angry. It’s the post I mentioned In my piece from last week “When Is Straight Pride Month?” The majority I just blocked from the page. Certainly, many were bots, which are becoming a serious problem at Facebook, as are the ai generated hate and disinformation pages. On that note, if you came to this link from Facebook and don’t yet have a free subscription here, please get one, because that place is fucking dying. I’ll keep using it so long as my awesome community still exists there, but many big pages have been unpublished for no discernible reason, and just two days ago my entire feed disappeared for over a day. I worry one day the whole thing will go poof.

Anyway, I blocked most of them, but occasionally made an example. Because fuck those bigots. Let the games begin.

Uncle Tom? The fuck? A lot of other people said dafuq as well. I knew what he meant, but it was my friend Steven Specht (follow his Substack), a former military linguist, who gave this apt description of what Luke meant:

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe with a protagonist who was whipped to death for refusing to reveal the whereabout of escaped slaves. Additionally, Tom's "Christian grace" in the book allowed him to ingratiate himself and even befriend his white oppressors prior to his bloody demise.

Later minstrel show culture ignored the sacrifice of his death and highlighted only a parody of the obsequious collaborator who benefits from a close relationship with oppressors at the expense of fellow African Americans. So, by the end of the 1930s, "Uncle Tom" entered African American vernacular as a pejorative to anyone perceived as selling out to white culture at the expense of black solidarity. It is still used today in the hip hop community to criticize people like Kanye West for his relationship with the MAGA movement.

However, over the last few decades, conservative pundits have been adopting black liberation rhetoric to cast poor, white, Christian men, as being oppressed. (See for example Rush Limbaugh quoting Martin Luther King on numerous occasions.) Because poor white Christian men almost never do the required reading, any white man like James who embraces any sort of progressive tolerance is accused of selling out to the imagined oppressor.

So while it's nonsensical to the rest of us, it makes sense to Luke.

Some were so angry they posted hateful meme after hateful meme. This is what it looks like when you block them.

Joseph must have some serious issues to comment so much hate about a simple Pride Month post.

Some took issue with the “Poster Based in Canada” part of my page

. There were over a million views of that burn on Shane, so while these things may be cringe, they are popular, so let’s enjoy the cringe together. Some of the commenters appreciated the reference to "Our Bodies, Ourselves.” For those who don’t know it, it’s the book that boomers gave to their GenX girls instead of doing the sex talk. I got the gender-neutral companion Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, and to be honest I much preferred the book to any awkward talk with Mom or Dad. I learned a lot from that book.

A lot of people don’t understand that white pride = white supremacy, because pride isn’t supposed to be about things like skin color or sexual orientation. Rather, it’s about surviving in the face of systemic and chronic adversity and bigotry because of those things. As my friend Steve said, white Christian men so badly want to feel oppressed so they can adopt “white pride” to convey their “struggle,” but it’s really about being angry at progressive movements slowly chipping away at white supremacy, which is what America was built on.

A Trojan could have prevented that Troy.

Also, I do wonder how many of the hateful commenters are closeted.

.And then there is the originality of this “joke” that I haven’t heard several thousand times:

No one could decipher what Uncle Pa meant by that string of emojis.

I also made some posts about ICE, regarding how they can all go fuck themselves because it’s sure no one else will, and that also wasn’t popular with some folks:

Finally, apropos of nothing, it seems you can get away with mansplaining if you make the sarcasm heavy enough. People got the joke and no one wanted to murder me.

Get both copies of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.