Our Black Asses Are Pressing Play

Everything comes back to the HBIC

Feb 24, 2025

This week, we want to paraphrase the great Tiffany New York HBIC Pollard in acknowledging that our asses been on pause but we finna press play in a millisecond.

l. The Conversation

The Tangerine Tyrant is launching a full assault on human rights, from immigration to healthcare to gender equity and LGBTQ+ rights. There are dozens of cases and more daily as organizations try to challenge these attacks in court. These calculated, orchestrated assaults are intended to unravel the progress many have worked for since this country’s inception and intended to discombobulate us. This Administration has very clear intentions to make us feel overwhelmed and directionless. It’s psychological warfare 101.

Psychological warfare refers to actions intended to reduce an opponent's morale. Simply, the act of f*cking with a person or a people’s sense of reality. Tactics include but are not limited to misinformation, narrative control, fear and psychological destabilization, and information overload.
And the U.S. government is not new to this, it’s true to this:
- Take COINTELPRO (1956 - 1971), a covert FBI program aimed at “neutralizing” Black civil rights leaders. FBI misinformation sowed distrust, assassinated leaders’ characters in the media, and relentlessly surveilled, blackmailed, and entrapped people to destabilize both their personal and professional lives. It was cartoonishly maniacal and villainous:
  - The FBI actually sent letters spreading false rumors to leaders of the Black Panther Party, leading to internal strife and conflict that significantly weakened the organization.
  - The FBI sent an anonymous letter encouraging Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to take his own life.
  - The FBI placed paid informants in civil rights organizations to incite members to violence and even the murder of other activists.
- Besides psychologically torturing individual civil rights leaders through fear and misinformation, the U.S. government was and is especially competent in using media narratives in their attempt to break Black people’s spirit:
  - For example, government-backed narratives in media reinforced racist stereotypes, from Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric criminalizing Black activism to the 1980s “welfare queen” trope that eroded support for social programs.
  - The War on Drugs, a mass incarceration voter suppression effort also included a psychological operation that used fear-based narrative control to vilify Black people by framing drugs as an overwhelmingly Black crisis, despite widespread drug addiction across racial lines.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black[s], but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities … we could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” - John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s Domestic Policy Chief

While we'll have to wait a few decades until information is declassified to really know the depth of what is happening in this current moment, what we do know is that we are in a space of intense cognitive and information overload.
We are being flooded with excessive, conflicting, and emotionally charged information; we are being overwhelmed with data, crises, and constant media spin.

This is an orchestrated effort to make it harder for us to think critically, organize effectively, and resist. We are barely a month in, and many have already exhausted their ability to process and respond. They want us like this!

Information overload is a brilliant and salient tactic because history shows that it works. The Soviets used Dezinformatsiya, a massive information overload campaign meant to confuse and demoralize; the CIA had Operation Mockingbird, a plan to infiltrate America’s top news organization; and the Nazis, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, flooded Germans with relentless propaganda through radio, newspapers, posters, and films, overwhelming critical thinking with conflicting, emotional messaging.

Frequent exposure to negative or urgent information depletes our mental resilience, desensitizes us, leads to emotional paralysis, and misdirects our attention. It’s intended to keep us frozen.

What can my Black ass do?

Organizing can take many shapes. Let’s use the Black Panthers as an example. Their Ten-Point Program addressed housing, employment, capitalism, labor, education, incarceration and the legal system overall, and access to basic human resources.
- Panthers hosted Free Medical Clinics, addressing the immediate health needs of Black communities having to rely on medical services from poorly funded facilities. Services also included crucial testing, including a sickle cell screening program, among other public health interventions.
- Panthers also encouraged reading with recommended lists and trained up young people with Liberation School.
- Finally, they also famously fed children with a free breakfast before school program that pressured political leaders to follow suit.
PRESS PLAY: However you can engage, we encourage you to do so. Again, the goal of these ghouls is to freeze us into inaction and steer us away from understanding how we can join together and be good to ourselves and our neighbors. You can:
- Donate to a mutual aid.
- Help your neighbors with issues such as tenant disputes.
- Go shopping for a family in your community that needs help.
- Learn how to be a trusted, safe adult for trans and nonbinary young people.
- Learn first aid for opioid overdoses.
- Educate yourself by reading political literature.
- Use this model to protect your undocumented neighbors.
- Support your local independent bookstores. My (Jumoke) local store is off all social media and needs business. Come through!
- Stay in community. It is so easy to isolate right now. Resist by building connections through social groups in your area, like book clubs or bowling leagues (shout out Tobi).
- We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. We get through by living. Rest. Plant a garden. Cook. Call a loved one. Go outside. Eat a chocolate cake.
- Remember: Friends, you have the power to find and share care, support, and even joy. Especially joy.