Lost cause

Editor’s note: I wrote but never published this in late January 2021, just a few weeks after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and about two years into going low contact with my parents and no contact with my sister. It has taken three years, but I finally feel ready to share it. — Lindsey

Editor’s note: I revised and updated a few things in this post on Sept. 15, 2025.

On Jan. 6, I was in a video conference call for work when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. I couldn’t take my eyes off Twitter: Reporters were posting horrifying video clips of the crowd overrunning the police and breaking through windows. My first instinct was to hold my panic because those videos weren’t in context. Surely I couldn’t see the full story. Surely this thing I’d feared wasn’t happening.

But then I saw the images of the man parading the Confederate flag through the rotunda.

It felt like a nightmare. It is a nightmare.

That guy could have been any one of the hundreds of neo-Confederate shit-kickers I grew up around — low-information bubbas who are pissed off about everything and they don’t have any idea why. My whole life they’d been saying “The South will rise again” and they meant it, they always meant it, and here was proof that they weren’t just talking shit. They want a white Christian ethnostate, even if some of them don’t think of what they desire using those words. That flag took its place in the rotunda among the other flags of tribalistic, fascistic hatred — Nazi flags, Trump flags, the “don’t tread on me” flag that is brandished almost exclusively by assholes.

I pored over every image and video coming out of the Capitol, looking for familiar faces.

I had to chuckle a little bit. In my heart I knew my dad wouldn’t be part of the crowd because he’s too afraid of Black people and planes to ever travel to D.C.

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When my son was mere days old, his head still producing that intoxicating newborn smell, my family came to meet him. My father wore a Confederate officer’s hat, a complement to his antebellum-inspired bushy gray beard. He produced a Confederate flag blanket, draped it over Holden in his crib, and began taking photos. I was uncomfortable but figured I should, as I had done so many times before, indulge my father this moment to revel in his weird obsession. He beamed looking at his new grandson, a fresh foot soldier in the war against “political correctness.”

Heritage not hate was the official line, but there wasn’t a day that went by where my father couldn’t find an opportunity to be racist or xenophobic in some way. Exasperation at phone operator menus requiring him to select English vs. Spanish, annoyance if he encountered someone with an even vaguely foreign accent, anger when he would see products with instructions in other languages, revulsion toward rap music and Black pop culture, an immovable belief that Barack Obama was both foreign-born and the literal antichrist, horror and anger when my cousin got engaged to a Black man.

Mixed-race marriages were doomed and selfish, he said. Just think of the children produced by such a marriage! They will grow up to be scorned, to be seen as less than by society. It’s just not right to bring “mixed” children into the world, he said.

I’d grown weary over the years of arguing about these things. Even if I could back him into a rhetorical corner, he’d say to me: It’s my opinion. It can’t be racist because it’s my opinion. It was like he was trying to pull the conversational equivalent of playing rock, paper, scissors and then pulling out God, who beats all three.

Holden’s dad was upset that I let my father take those Confederate blanket photos. At the time, I thought it was easier to just let it happen than to make a big deal about it. I was worried about hurting my dad’s feelings. Now I think about that moment all the time, and I cannot believe I just stood by while it happened. I feel humiliated, small, angry, ashamed.

I could have just said no.

Why didn’t I just say no?

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I haven’t blogged a lot about politics or anything else much since Holden was born. Your time gets siphoned off in unexpected ways when you become a parent. I used to set my keyboard ablaze during the George W. Bush years, chronicling every outrage I could muster and spitting epithets at politicians enabling and accelerating the rot.

The Trump years have been brutal. I’m not sure I could have kept up with writing about the outrages, honestly. They came quickly and constantly: The Muslim ban, the child separation policy and the cages, the corruption, the grifting, the stupid blank-paper props, the judges, the judges, the judges, the constant campaigning, the violence, the paid-off porn stars, the gutting of regulations and unspooling of protective policies meant for the benefit of future generations. The obvious invocation and protection of white supremacy at all costs through policy and both coded and explicit language. The lies, so many goddamned lies, just tiny cuts to the flesh of our daily lives, slice after slice after slice, compromising the structural integrity of our shared reality. Then there was the obvious fascism-sickness in this man, this utterly small man who’d lived his entire life as a malignant cancer, mutating and degrading everything he touched. He played footsie with dictators and obviously wanted that life for himself: A life where there could only be adoring fans and those punished if they did not adore him enough. A life above all accountability and consequence.

It’s hard for me to imagine of someone more broken inside, someone more bereft of basic empathy and decency than Donald Trump. He is the antithesis of Christlike, or at least the Christ I was taught about in Vacation Bible School. But the evangelical and casual Christians adore this big creepy bully, a braggart and coward who whinges about the smallest perceived slights imaginable. [Pause for dramatic effect.] They love how he turns the spotlight away from all those half-humans and back to them, the rightful owner of the eternal struggle narrative. He tells them they are the prettiest pretty flowers in the garden, these strong white lilies that have been cultivated from superior stock that has survived the invasion of other less worthy flowers. The white lilies are the only flowers worth protecting and I’ll fight for them, wink wink nudge nudge. Praise white Jesus!

American Christian churches are hemorrhaging congregants in part because their members’ hypocrisy has been laid bare by this man, who is honestly so close to the biblical description of the antichrist that it shakes my firm belief in zero gods a little bit, I am not going to lie. Aside from that pretty big detail, I would think Trump’s own admitted indifference to God would be a dealbreaker for Christians. He has been open about never having asked God for forgiveness and he does not pray to the Lord for guidance, wisdom, mercy, or absolution. He is what I was told a godless Yankee heathen looked like, but I am getting word from the control booth here in Hell that, actually, the Christians have decided he is God’s chosen warrior now!

Rural white America bought into the city slicker’s shtick a little too enthusiastically. After all, they had endured eight years of enduring a Black man as president — the ultimate insult to a huh-WYAHT MAN, god’s chosen steward of this earth, you know — and what better way to extract liberal tears than through the blunt force trauma of a pro wrestling carnival barker-cum-authoritarian who would delight in nothing more than pandering to a bunch of hicks through constant racism (a shared hobby of Trump, hicks, and white folks of every income bracket in between!) to use their bulletproof support as armor to parade around like a god-king and demolish institutions and critical social and administrative state infrastructure to auction the pieces off to whichever rich fuck could offer up the sloppiest kiss for the ring. What a way to give the finger back to the rich, intellectual, politically connected elite that has always mocked him for being a complete joke of a person.

I wasn’t surprised when my parents boarded the Trump train. They’ve reliably voted Republican since the Clinton sex scandals in the 1990s. They came away from that era hating Hillary more than Bill, of course, because Eve ate the apple and turned all women into stupid bitches. (Source: Bible, The)

By the time Tennessee’s own Al Gore went up against Dubya in 2000, my dad — a union man, someone who’d spent two decades working 12- and 16-hour shifts in a hot, loud, caustic pulp mill — was close to going out on disability retirement. He’d spent years trying to work his way up the union leadership ladder, but always seemed to get stymied by interpersonal conflicts. He was always beefing with someone, either another shift worker mucking up his good time or some clueless middle manager who had it out for him.

Getting approved for disability retirement was a big relief, and my dad exited the mill still feeling sour about corporate management and how, in his view, he’d been insufficiently rewarded for destroying his body making cardboard in the middle of the goddamned night for the Packaging Corporation of America. He filled much of his newly available time by watching the then-still-new FOX News, which eagerly welcome a character named George W. Bush onto the airwaves and into our homes for eight deeply stupid years.

Dubya was a skilled enough cosplay cowboy to pass my family’s smell test, plus Toby Keith was enthusiastically on board, and the Toby Keith endorsement carried a lot of weight. For those eight years, my family was aggressively “patriotic,” flying the U.S. flag and the American flag together. (American on top, if that helps you envision it.) I was in college for the first of Dubya’s two terms and came home every other weekend with a car covered in anti-Bush stickers, ready to spar with my dad about whatever dumb anti-Muslim thing he’d heard on FOX that day.

I was working for a newspaper in 2005 when Katrina hit and I watched the federal response under Bush come across the AP wire in photo after horrifying photo. I began to see for myself the way the world moved and the way different media outlets would shape that movement and launder it to provoke a reaction. I would visit my parents and try to convince them to grant Black people basic humanity, or at least to grant them the grace and mercy they had always claimed was the hallmark of Christlike behavior. But they were sick of “welfare queens” and all the handouts these undeserving people got. His disability check always hit the account on time, though.

Bush’s presidency ended in a violently shrinking economy and housing market collapse, but you’ve not seen white people be upset until you’ve seen a Black man elected to the office of United States president. Barack Obama’s rise to political fame and then power sent my family into the stratosphere, where they stayed stuck on stupid for eight years. During that time, they accused Obama of being secretly born in Africa, being a secret Muslim, hating America, being a secret Militant Black Panther, being the literal antichrist, and more.

The only HOPE Obama ever brought my dad was the hope that he’d get to see a Black president lynched. He gleefully warned me as often as he could that any day now Obama would get his brains blown out, so many people were gunning for him. Meanwhile, Obama was, of course, being a mild-mannered lib authorizing the same drone strikes in the Levant (something they had loved to see under a Republican president) and not closing down Gitmo like he promised. He was not exactly Che Guevara.

As Obama’s second term wound down, Donald Trump — who had aggressively stoked the birther movement my family was entirely bought into — popped onto the political stage and started talking that same shit about Obama — and others aligned with him — into the big microphone. The aggressively bland Republicans next to Trump during the primaries were an instant afterthought once Trump ramped up his heel schtick. Finally, someone was saying the vile shit they had been yelling at the television all these years, and they were saying it in a way that made them feel really good inside.

Suddenly the narrative became Trump: The Righteous Choice, the rough-around-the-edges battering ram to clear a path forward illuminated by a God working in ever confounding ways, including violence, cruelty, and mockery. Why had they considered Obama — a churchgoing do-gooder married to his longtime sweetheart — the literal antichrist and not the gold-obsessed bloviating bully who also sexually abuses people (possibly including children) for fun?

Not only was he not the antichrist, he was “dynamic and interesting,” according to a tweet my mother wrote with her actual head and hands. He’s not like all those other politicians who reek of artifice! Her social media posts got more radical. Trump was fighting literal demons in the Democratic party, she said. Literal demons.

My parents and I had never been able to comfortably talk about politics or anything adjacent (which is everything really) but it became impossible once they were fully on the Trump train.

I don’t know if they knew they were pipelined into QAnon but my dad believed whole-heartedly that Hillary Clinton personally oversaw a child sex ring and maybe even ate children. I wasn’t able to dissuade him from any of the lies or grifts, big or small. The bullshit firehose was flowing, and both my parents were gulping as fast as they could. My sister took the bait too. My thirtysomething brother, still living with my parents, took the path of least resistance.

I lost them.

Or, more accurately, they were lost.

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I paused while writing this post to confess to my husband that I am ready to be done with them, to cut off all future possibility of reconciliation because they cannot be saved and our relationship cannot be salvaged. And because they don’t seem interested in having a relationship with me. The best my dad can do, apparently, is send the occasional rambling text message accusing me of tearing the family apart and telling me my mother is ready to die.

Richard, always pragmatic and thoughtful, cautions against the nuclear option. He spent many years not interacting with his own father very much, and he has regrets about that. But he said he understood and would support whatever decision I made about that.

“Putting time and energy into having a relationship with you is the best thing I’ve ever done with my life,” he said. “I think other people should take that time and energy too, because you’re wonderful.”

I take this small gift from him and I hold it close to me so that I can believe it too.

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I was raised on a diet of lies. My formative education was of course a mess of Eurocentric, jingoistic, whitewashed propaganda. The education I got at home and in my community was almost entirely populated by Lost Cause mythology. We went to Civil War battlefields and museums on vacation. My dad had a period-appropriate brass horn he’d use to call us downstairs in the morning. He enjoyed traveling the Southeast to LARP as a re-enactor and I went and watched him in “battle” a few times. My parents renewed their vows in full Confederate regalia. Those things were sort of kooky — novelties I could roll my eyes at but ultimately abide, because family, amirite?!

Our house was decked out with artwork depicting Civil War scenes — giant paintings chronicling epic battles and heroic depictions of the generals and soldiers who fought so bravely against Northern aggression. The rebel flag was on everything — pillows, throws, magnets, commemorative plates, burlap sacks draped over rusted milk urns with cotton sprigs sticking out (yes, really). It was ugly to my eyes and I would rather die than be in a photo with a Confederate flag, so I tried to only get photos from angles where you couldn’t see all that mess.

Underneath the kooky performative stuff was a real undercurrent of racist propaganda. My dad fancied himself a scholar of Civil War history and preached until his face was red that the war had been fought over the concept of states’ rights, as if that concept exists in a vacuum, disconnected from the context: States’ rights to uphold an economic system dependent on chattel slavery of Africans. He railed that Abraham Lincoln was the worst president of all time and talked about how a lot of enslaved people were happy and had benevolent masters who took care of them as if they were family.

He told us that Black soldiers took up arms against the Northern army — a true testament to how the South had been unfairly maligned for how it treated enslaved Africans, who he said had it better over here than back in Africa. He taught us that those who fought for the South were noble folk doing what was right for their communities, for their families. He was ecstatic when he came into possession of a tin portrait of our familial link to the Confederate Army. A man named John Green (J.G.) Cullipher, a distant cousin or something, had taken up arms for Dixie.

My dad was adamant that he loved America and considered himself a real patriot, unlike immigrants, Mexicans, Black people, queer folks of any flavor, welfare moms, ungodly secular humanists, and ungrateful feminist daughters. He stockpiled guns and ammo because some day we’d be in another war — you know the one. The South would rise again and he’d be ready.

In high school I learned how to use Geocities to build webpages. I was so proud of this new skill that somehow I ended up making a website for my father’s chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I can’t remember if I offered or he asked, but I did it. That led to me message boards where people were debating the Confederate flag and the legacy of the Confederacy. I saw people talk about the harms and felt like people were attacking my father, who I believed to be rough around the edges but well meaning. I wanted to stand up for him, for our legacy as oft-persecuted and mocked Southerners, so I’d get in there and do battle. The internet was new and my dad couldn’t type for shit, so I felt like I was helping.

It’s about heritage not hate, I typed again and again. I insisted that people who interpreted the flag as anything other than a historical relic commemorating Southern folks’ ancestors were deliberately trying to find something to be offended about. I said just because people felt hurt by it didn’t make it a hurtful thing on its face. I had no concept of how I was centering white people exclusively in my definition of “Southern people.” I completely overlooked how talking about “Southern heritage” in terms of the Confederate flag erased the experience of Black Southerners who’d grown up in the shadow of that flag, subject to state-sanctioned brutality while being told that the Constitution covered all Americans.

I felt very smug about my rhetorical prowess on those message boards, holding my own against what I assumed were much older people, as the internet was still pretty new. I was parroting the bullshit I had been taught out of some misguided sense of seeking justice, and it made my dad proud to see me doing battle on behalf of his beloved Southland. I was maybe 16 years old and my parents’ pride was my chief currency.

I have a lot of unresolved shame today about these things. That shame is what I see as fuel to do better, to break cycles that need to be broken.

Every now and again I see a headline about another Confederate statue coming down and I wonder if to my dad it seems that the entire world is ending. It’s petty but I smile.

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It’s been two years since I set foot in my parents’ home, where I lived from about age 10 until I went away to college at 18. It is the house that contains my baby book and mementos, childhood videos and photo albums, old clothes and toys. My cats are there (assuming they are still alive*). Sometimes I think about all the pieces of me I left in that house that I will never get back, and I feel deeply sad and tired.

The last day I saw my father in person, he got into an altercation with my husband (which I have written about on this blog) but he also ranted and raved — apropos of absolutely nothing — about Black women and how disgusting they are. How that’s why Black men prefer white women, the implication being that even Black men (who are lesser humans by definition, in his opinion) won’t settle for Black women.

It’s my opinion. It can’t be racist because it’s my opinion.

I pushed back, however impotently one can push back against a brick wall.

When we left that day I wondered if I’d ever be back.

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I don’t know what’s going to happen this week or beyond regarding the insurrectionists who staged a putsch at the Capitol. This was always the plan and Trump has laid the groundwork for it through words and actions since day one. If you were paying attention, you knew it was coming. He’s said all along he would never trust an election he lost. And now he has gone all in on the big lie and people are dead, which is tragic enough, but people are still pissed off and ready to fight for this lie for the foreseeable future. The cult seems ready to overthrow the democratically elected government for him.

This is fascism. It’s propped up and accelerated by a coalition of cynical and power-hungry Republicans, Christian nationalists, Nazis and neo-Confederates, QAnon nutbars, and everyday Meemaws and Papaws who have been radicalized by a steady diet of disinformation and garbage online and on Fox News and Newsmax.

I peeked at my mom’s Twitter feed today and it confirmed my worst fears: That she’s fully in the cult. My mother, the sweet and smart retired RN who taught me to love wordplay, is posting memes about how social distancing mandates are akin to Hitler’s activities. At 2 a.m. a few days after the insurrection, she tweeted: “NEW PARTY FORMING! We must disassociate ourselves with Godless Democrats and spineless turncoat RINOs. If you love God, family, and country, you qualify.”

I have been mourning the growing chasm between me and my family for years but seeing my mother slip into the disinformation abyss like this is painful. I think constantly about what more I could have done to help any of them stay connected to reality.

Sometimes I remember things like the time they came to Holden’s first birthday party right before the 2012 election and stole the Obama sign out of my yard. I think about all the times my father has decried my education and told me (in not these exact words, but close) that going to college made me into some bleeding heart idiot who would wake up a Republican some day once I came to my senses. I think about how he texted me out of the blue back in August that the things I posted on social media were condemning my soul to Hell, and how he’d be contacting legislators about bills to “defund colleges that teach socialism” (the implication being that my mass comm degree from MTSU somehow radicalized me rather than, say, exposed me to diverse viewpoints that helped me contextualize a complicated world and armed me with skills that have kept me employed and out of their hair for my entire adult life). How my sister talked to me like absolute garbage when she learned I had gotten an abortion several years ago. How on my wedding day my dad tried to talk to me about giving my life to Jesus and when I told him I didn’t have time for that talk — that I had to go and set up my own wedding — he gave me the silent treatment for the entire day. Even up to the moment when he walked me down the aisle, which was a ritual I had only included in the wedding because I knew it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t give him that honor. I spent time at my wedding in the bathroom crying because my dad was giving me the cold shoulder.

I think about how my family told me all the time, starting when I was very little, that I was too much of a pushover. “You let people run all over you, Lindsey” was the familiar refrain. I was too sensitive, too in my head, too soft and easily wounded.

They were right. After all, I had been letting them run all over me my whole life.

But my sensitivity was never a weakness. My softness was never a shortcoming.

These things are important parts of who I am. They are what make me a good observer, someone who notices details and patterns. When I was younger, these things kept me safe. My sensitivity helped me anticipate the volatile moods around me so I could shrink into the shadows or come into the light accordingly. My softness helped my heart and mind stay open to wonder and new experiences, new wisdom.

But most importantly, these parts of me help me see through artifice and connect the dots between love and justice, even when it’s painful. Especially when it’s painful.

And I’m not ashamed of that. I’m grateful for who I am, even if it doesn’t align with how the people who have known me longest but know me least see me.

* Jack and Sally have now both passed away. RIP Gingerballs and Freckleface.