On FAFO for Dummies

There seems to be a misunderstanding.

A few conservatives and centrists find it positively bewildering that people believe in left-wing political ideals and are willing to risk legal trouble to act on those beliefs. You see, leftists express their politics with a certain fanaticism that leads otherwise decent (read: white) people to break laws and suffer consequences that will affect their lives forever. They could have worked hard and been productive members of society had they not cared as much about these trendy left-wing causes. This is as much a warning as an admonishment.

You may think all this “fighting the man” stuff is cool now, but when you’re crying in handcuffs, you won’t think it’s so fun.

What we have here is a more fleshed out version of the FAFO mantra that has become very popular among the exuberant right, including many in the current administration. “Fuck Around and Find Out” is, of course, derived from AAVE and is a poetic/memetic way of describing the schadenfreude adjacent feeling that comes from observing someone suffering the consequences of actions that you knew were stupid to begin with. It’s since come to be applied to everything from computer programming to parenting.

Personally, I’ve always been more partial to its cousin, “Play Stupid Games and Win Stupid Prizes,” which captures a similar sentiment but seems less outwardly threatening. Because FAFO is also often used as a direct warning. As in, fuck around with me and find out what happens to you. In fact, the far-right likes FAFO precisely because it can be used as a threat. Unlike with parenting or programming, where it’s meant to imply learning by experiencing the natural consequences of bad decisions, FAFO, when conservatives use it, means that they have power and they will use it against anyone who dares to fuck with them.

FAFO may be just a little too distasteful for the centrist, moderate, or (ahem) classical liberal to use the phrase directly. They like the idea of FAFO when applied to the left because, as we all know, the left is always at fault. But the language is just a bit too coarse, too performative. So instead of just saying FAFO, they write a lot of words to express a patronizing faux concern for people facing serious consequences for the actions they’ve committed in the service of leftist causes.

The conservative is perfectly happy with just saying Fuck Around and Find Out. Either way, the sentiment is the same. What these writers and opinion-havers want you to understand is that believing in things they disagree with is dumb and bad, and it makes people do stupid things.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children

Hysteretic is a Substack written by Liz Fedak, who is a “Cycle-breaker trying her best to fight the overwhelming dominance of shame culture.” Recently, she’s decided the best way to fight the overwhelming dominance of shame culture is to shame teachers who would radicalize students and incite them to violence against law enforcement and citizen journalists attempting to document their ridiculous “protests”.

In her piece An Entire Generation Will Have to Be Deprogrammed, she recounts an incident at a high school in Washington State where two students were arrested for assault during a confrontation with counter-protesters at a student-led walkout to protest the actions of ICE. She uses a photo of a distraught teenage girl being led away by police in handcuffs.

To Fedak’s credit, she notes several instances in which the original version of her article contained a few details that were wrong. She originally assumed that the girl was arrested by ICE, not the local police, and she had assumed the incident occurred when teachers at her school led students into a direct confrontation with ICE agents, instead of what was mostly a peaceful student-led walkout.

Well, it was peaceful until the students erupted in violence against a citizen journalist.

But even with all her corrections, Fedak still left out some important details in her reporting on the incident. She characterizes the student’s arrest as such:

“The confused, terrified girl, who moments before had been fully convinced by a mob of her peers that she was righteously fighting the evil forces of fascism, was lead away crying for her mommy.”

And after providing a video from a Twitter account called the Right Angle News Network showing this arrest (which has since been taken down), Fedak ponders the following questions:

“(W)hat this girl is doing there, what she thought would happen, what she thinks she was doing, and, above all, what led to this.”

Fedak goes on to speculate that a culture of socially enforced doctrinaire leftism is being inflicted on still-developing young minds and robbing these kids of the chance to form their own independent thoughts. Surely an independent mind would come to some other conclusion than the idea that one must “righteously fight the evil forces of fascism”.

She believes that these students “don’t know what words mean.” Her evidence for this is the assertion that they have been told that all opposition to DEI is racist.

She says that these kids have not had the “fundamental experience of discovering what it means to truly know something.” Her evidence for this is a tweet by a homeschooling advocate that purports to be comparing a nature textbook from the 1920s to a modern textbook. The 1920’s textbook seems to explain the life cycle of frogs in a narrative, with fictional children discovering frog eggs and tadpoles on their own, whereas the modern textbook presents facts to the kids in an authoritative manner.

The author of the tweet that Fedak is referencing does provide the title of the 1920s textbook, which is helpful because, if you search for the book, you can find pages that seem to straddle the line between authoritative delivery of facts and narrative storytelling.

The name of the modern textbook is not given, so we don’t know whether it also includes narrative-based learning alongside dry fact presentation. As a parent myself, I know several modern children’s book series, like Zoe and Sassafras and The Magic Tree House, that use engaging narratives to teach kids about the scientific process and history respectively. Also, we don’t really know which age each book is intended for.

However, both Fedak and the author of the tweet she cites have a point; modern public education does have an over-reliance on what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire called the “banking” concept of education, where authority figures seek only to install certain decontextualized facts in the minds of children without letting them engage with material as active participants. And if you want to learn more about this concept, you can read about it in Freire’s seminal book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed... wait a minute...

MY GAWD, IS THAT CRITICAL RACE THEORY’S MUSIC!?!?!

I digress. Fedak also identifies social pressure toward “groupthink” and an underdeveloped set of analytical tools as reasons why youth seem prone to getting themselves into fraught situations over certain left-coded political stances. Of all the reasons that she conjures to explain why that student ended up crying and in handcuffs, she never seems to consider the possibility that she watched multiple videos of ICE agents murdering two people in cold blood or listened to residents of cities experiencing ICE surges describing the horrific impacts on their communities and decided it was worth speaking out against.

And for all Fedak’s concern for the youth’s lack of analytical tools, her confusion over what led this poor student to her ignominious confrontation with police could have been cleared up by clicking the link she herself provided to a news report about the incident:

‘The vast majority of the event was nonviolent, with the students shouting “No justice, no peace,” “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” and, perhaps most enthusiastically, “F*** ICE.”

But that ended when a non-local individual who identified himself as a “gonzo journalist” proceeded to enter a crowd of students and stood on a concrete block, filming and talking to the group. The scene was chaotic, and as the students yelled at him, the man yelled back something like “President Trump is the greatest president.”

Eventually the man stepped down (and) started to blow an emergency whistle. However it did not appear he made any attempt to exit the group.

The man began getting closer to a student, who appeared to yell “Back the f*** up,” according to Courier-Herald footage; the man continued to blow the whistle in the students’ face until, about a second later, the student swung at the man, knocking off his glasses and making him drop his phone.”

A further update on that news story notes that the “gonzo journalist” later pushed another student to the ground as he walked away. And I’m sure Fedak has similar criticisms for grown men and authority figures who go looking to provoke violent reactions from kids at otherwise peaceful protests, but she probably just missed that extra bit of context in this story.

So let’s put on our “thinking googles” and try to answer Liz Fedak’s questions.

What is this girl doing there? - She was attending a walkout led by fellow classmates to protest the violent actions of ICE.

What did she think would happen? - She thought she would attend a protest and later go home.

What did she think she was doing? - She thought she was making her individual voice heard in concert with others who believed that what ICE is doing is wrong. She thought she was participating in the bedrock foundation of American democracy, the right to free speech against the government.

And, above all, what led to this? - If we’re talking about the protest itself, then the answer is the actions and rhetoric of ICE and DHS, who have been inflicting violence on communities while indulging in fascist dogwhistling. If we’re talking about the incident that led to her arrest, then the answer is a right-wing provocateur showing up to incite violence at a peaceful protest and generate propaganda against the left. Propaganda that Liz Fedak promptly fell for.

Glad we could clear that all up.

The Causes. Oh, and The Groups.

While Liz Fedak represents the more moderate/classical liberal version of respectable FAFO, Jack Cashill provides us with the more nakedly partisan version. His creatively titled Jack’s Substack purports to be “A deeply researched, highly reliable, occasionally amusing guide to American culture and politics.”

We don’t need to really play coy here. Cashill is a right-wing reactionary crank. He’s written 16 books over the course of his career, each one containing varying degrees of unhinged conspiratorial hatred toward his conception of “the left”. He seems particularly obsessed with the sins of Barack Obama, having written three books about the former president, including 2011’s Deconstructing Obama, which claimed that former left-wing revolutionary turned normal college professor Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father.

And that’s probably the mildest conspiracy that Cashill indulges in.

We don’t need to spend much time looking at his recent piece, “What Happens When You’ve Wrecked Your Life For Last Month’s Cause.” It’s bad. Jack is a bad writer. We are Jack’s rage at the written word. Jack’s prose is an effective argument for generative A.I. to replace conservative writers. Here’s a taste:

The “Nazi” and “fascism” slurs had less application for the nation’s leading champion of free enterprise and free speech than for any living American. And if Musk were “president,” what power was left to Trump that would soon elevate him to “king.”

Jack is the type of conservative who will just actually write “He f***ed around, and he found out.”, except he won’t actually type the word “fuck” because he’s a fucking coward.

Really, the only part of Jack’s article here that is of interest to us is the title. The subject of ire is Owen McIntire, a 20-year-old trans college student who is set to stand trial for allegedly firebombing a Tesla dealership and destroying two Cyber Trucks. As the title indicates, Jack is smugly bemused at the fact that this young person is facing serious federal charges for a cause that the left has already forgotten about.

You see, Owen prevented the world from experiencing two more Cyber Trucks at at time when the left was all wound up over Elon Musk’s DOGE effort, which was cutting federal spending haphazardly and potentially with deadly consequences. But then, all of a sudden, the left started doing “No Kings” protests and forgot about Elon. In fact, Jack found a random old lady at one such protest, and when he asked her how she thought Trump was violating the Constitution, “she stumbled unable to think of one, and then rallied to recall the president’s dispatch of National Guard troops to Chicago. That outrage was quickly forgotten.”

Then, of course, those wacky implacable leftists moved on to Gaza. And all the while, Jack couldn’t help but ponder over how “irrelevant” Owen must feel since the left no longer cares about Elon or DOGE. Such is the fickle nature of left-wing causes, according to Jack. The left is all emotion, no reason, and just mindlessly jumps from “cause” to “cause” depending on what is popular at the moment.

We are Jack’s extremely crude interpretation of a reactionary rhetorical tactic meant to delegitimize leftist political expression without having to make an argument.

The left doesn’t have political or moral values. The left has “causes”. Those “causes” are pushed by “groups” who don’t have anything better to do than make an unseemly commotion over trendy but ultimately insignificant and manufactured “issues”. And this is at the heart of the tragedy for these young people, as Jack and Liz Fedak see it. These are young (white) people who had their lives ahead of them until they fell in with the wrong crowd and started messing around with leftism.

But Jack is such a terrible writer and such a deeply unserious thinker that he completely gives the game away. Yes, the left moved on from protesting DOGE, because DOGE was taken out back and shot, presumably by Kristi Noem. It didn’t reduce the debt, but it did fuck with a lot of people’s lives and caused a lot of harm to people relying on federal aid to survive. Also, DOGE was violating the Constitution by cutting congressionally approved spending without congressional approval. So if Jack was looking for ways that Trump has circumvented the Constitution, he could have just pointed to that. Or he could have just listened to that old lady because no less than the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s dispatching of the National Guard to Chicago over illegal immigration concerns was unconstitutional, and the administration backed down.

However you feel about the anti-genocide protests, I think we all know that those protests started under Biden and have sustained for the last three years. In fact, anger over the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza genocide and Kamala’s refusal to change course contributed significantly to the Democrats’ 2024 presidential loss. People didn’t abandon No Kings to jump on the Gaza bandwagon. In fact, the issue of Gaza was well represented at the No Kings protests that I’ve personally attended.

The thing is, while Jack is a hack and crank and not worth a fraction of the words we’ve spent on him here, his argument is identical to Liz Fedak’s more centrist free-thinker version. For both writers, the spectacle of law-breaking, norm-flouting, and the use of provocative rhetoric render a deeper inquiry into the animating politics unnecessary. We can focus on examples of people incurring the ire of the state and reverse-engineer a purely individualistic psychoanalytical cause, eschewing any and all discussion of political reality. For Liz, it’s a misguided modern pedagogy and screen-addled culture that has pushed teens toward irrational political thought and subsequent violence. Not the ICE murders, or right-wing agitators invading their personal space.

At the end of the day, Liz and Jack do not agree with the general leftist position on ICE, Trump’s fascism, Elon Musk being a narcissistic charlatan, or Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. They don’t really want to bother with making that case, though, because that’s hard. It’s much easier to argue that breaking the law is bad and dumb, and that you shouldn’t do it.

The Real FAFO

A few weeks ago, students at Moe & Gene Johnson High School in Buda, Texas, staged a walkout in protest of ICE. A grown man driving by decided to stop and get out of his truck to confront the students. According to witnesses, he ended up striking a young girl, and in response, her classmates promptly beat his ass.

On video.

In the end, the man was met by police at his home (where he had hastily given himself a haircut), and he was arrested for assault.

To recap, a 45-year-old man thought it would be a good idea to go out of his way to assault a teenage girl over a political disagreement. He was then soundly beaten by a group of children and later arrested while in the middle of clumsily trying to change his appearance in hopes of escaping punishment. Or, in other words, He fucked around and found out.

Or did he? Texas Governor Greg Abbot has a different perspective:

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This tweet is weird, right? Especially since it’s in reference to a separate incident at a different high school. An incident that nevertheless conflicts with Abbott’s tweet, since the link clearly states that the arrests were unrelated to the protest. What does “schools and staff…should not be immune for criminal behavior” mean? And maybe you’re thinking that I’m being dishonest when showing you this tweet as if it were Abbott’s response to the incident in Buda, but it actually was his response to the incident in Buda. When reporters from CBS Austin reached out to Abbott following the arrest of the man who assaulted the Moe & Gene Johnson student, his media team directed them to this tweet.

A grown man assaults a high school student (fucking around), and then discovers that many tiny hands make light work (finding out), and the response from the governor is to call for the criminalization of free speech. Seems like an entire generation does need to be deprogrammed, but it’s not the one that Liz Fedak thinks it is.

Yes, hypocrisy is dead, but it really is notable that Liz does not mention the Buda incident at all in her piece, given how similar it was to the incident in Washington State. The only difference was that the female student struck first. Given that a female student was assaulted just ten days earlier in a story that went moderately viral, it’s very possible that the student in Washington State was less preoccupied with fighting an erroneous idea of fascism and more concerned with her personal safety.

But we know why Buda doesn’t come up in Fedak’s piece. Her argument isn’t against extremism in the service of political beliefs; it’s against specific political beliefs. She’s not arguing against the politics of the MAGA hat-wearing child puncher in Texas, so he doesn’t need to be mentioned. Especially since his actions complicate her narrative. This is a problem, though, because by laundering her political disagreements through a somber warning of the consequences that come with breaking the rules in service to left-wing “causes”, she’s also laundering the consequences that come to those who aren’t breaking the rules.

Remember this tweet? It was the first link in this piece.

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It’s just one of several examples of how this administration has explicitly embraced FAFO as a rallying cry against its political opposition. The thing is, the “violent activist” in this picture was actually a group of protesters who were legally protesting an ICE facility in a designated zone when they were tackled and handcuffed by agents, essentially to be posed for a Kristi Noem photo-op and the above tweet. They were lined up on that guardrail for 40 minutes, then transported to a holding facility where they were released without charges at the end of the day.

This kind of naked dishonesty is just what our government does now. For all this supposed leftist violence that has been directed toward ICE agents, this deranged extremist fervor that drove Renee Good and Alex Pretti to their untimely deaths, federal prosecutors are having a really hard time sending anyone to jail for it. It’s pretty evident that the “fucking around” this government is most concerned with punishing is any and all resistance to their political project, whether that be crimes against the ugliest truck ever assembled or just writing an op-ed that the administration doesn’t like.

Nominally moderate writers like Liz and unhinged cranks like Jack don’t consider the other side of the equation. The left is never afforded the benefit of reaction. The right can break the social contract with reckless abandon and lie about it, but the real problem, as they see it, is that teenagers believe in things. Or, to be more accurate, these teenagers believe the wrong things, and they must serve as an example of what happens to people with the wrong politics.

But most people aren’t this ideologically blinded. They can tell the difference between kids walking out of school to participate in the political process and heavily armed storm troopers with masks terrorizing communities in the name of racial purity. They can tell the difference between “Fuck ICE” as a slogan and DHS openly using Nazi imagery and references to white supremacist texts. No, people probably shouldn’t firebomb Telsas in protest. Mostly because those cars are perfectly capable of immolating themselves just fine. But the people who did that are facing consequences, which is a lot more than can be said of the agents and administrators who are flat out lying to justify illegal detentions, physical abuse, and murder.

These are fascist trial balloons. The administration is looking to see what it can get away with in terms of crushing dissent. They are in fact…fucking around.

And sooner or later, they and the centrist moderates running cover for their project are probably going to find out.

Solidarity Forever.