Mental Health Is Not the Explanation: Intimate Partner Violence, Technofascism, and the Crisis of American Democracy

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), LeftieProf, Frances, Jolie, Barbara Shields, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.The World Is on Fire and They Want You to Smile Through ItI’m going to be honest with y’all. I struggled to even show up today. Not because I didn’t have something to say — I always got something to say — but because the weight of what’s happening around us right now is stacking up in a way that makes it hard to breathe, hard to focus, hard to even figure out what the hell to lead with. And I know I ain’t the only one. Feel me?Every day, every hour, every minute of the hour, we’re getting hit with political, social, economic news — domestic, international — that impacts our livelihood, that puts stress on our bodies, that creates anxiety we ain’t even had time to process before the next thing drops. And there are people out here who want to make you feel like something’s wrong with you for acknowledging that reality. They want to move in what I call cruel optimism — a term the late theorist Lauren Berlant gave us — this idea that people can be cruelly optimistic in the face of a system that is actively destroying them, holding onto the promise that the system will eventually work in their favor even when every piece of evidence says otherwise.That ain’t it though. I don’t think cruel optimism is going to get us anywhere. I don’t think it helps us regulate our emotions. And I damn sure don’t think it helps us take the temperature of what’s actually happening in this country.Say Her Name: Cerina Fairfax and the Structural Reality of Patriarchal ViolenceLet me start with what’s been sitting heaviest on my spirit. This past week we learned that former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax — a Democrat, a Duke University graduate, once considered a rising political star — shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, inside their Annandale, Virginia home before turning the gun on himself. Their two teenage children were in the house. One of them called 911.Let that sit.Cerina Fairfax was a dentist. She was a community-oriented professional, a mother, a woman who was in the process of leaving. Court records show she had filed for divorce in July 2025. She had testified in court that Justin drank daily. She had installed cameras throughout the house during the divorce proceedings. A judge had ordered Justin Fairfax to vacate the home by the end of April 2026. Cerina Fairfax was doing everything the system tells women to do — she was using the legal process, she was documenting, she was preparing to build a life on the other side of a dangerous situation. And she was still killed.Now here’s where I need y’all to lock in with me, because this is the part that too many people — especially men — are getting wrong.The immediate media framing centered Justin Fairfax’s mental health. Court documents noted his emotional decline following his failed 2013 attorney general campaign and the 2019 sexual assault allegations that ended his political career. His heavy drinking. His withdrawal from family life. And while I am not dismissing mental health — I live with ADHD and bipolar disorder myself, and I take that seriously — I need us to be intellectually honest about what’s actually happening here.Women have mental health challenges too. Women experience ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, PTSD — often at higher rates than men because they are navigating a world that is structurally violent toward them. And I don’t see a pattern of women killing their partners. That ain’t the pattern. The pattern runs the other direction, and it has for centuries.The #SayHerName hashtag was created precisely because women — and specifically Black women — get erased or marginalized in how we talk about violence. Their bodies magnetize conflict, death, and violence, and then the conversation gets redirected to the psychology of the man who killed them. We center the perpetrator and background the victim. Every. Single. Time.Here’s the historical context that matters: intimate partner violence is not a series of isolated mental health events. It is a structural phenomenon rooted in patriarchal systems of ownership and control that predate this nation. English common law’s doctrine of coverture — the legal framework that literally dissolved a woman’s legal identity into her husband’s upon marriage — was imported directly into American law. William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) that husband and wife were one person in law, and that one person was the husband. The “rule of thumb” wasn’t just a phrase — there is historical debate about whether it literally codified the acceptable thickness of a stick a man could use to beat his wife. Whether apocryphal or not, the spirit of that permission was absolutely embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence for centuries. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Let that marinate.So when we try to explain away what Justin Fairfax did to Cerina Fairfax as a “mental health crisis,” we are doing exactly what we criticize when a 19-year-old white man leaves a white supremacist manifesto and shoots up a church or a grocery store, and the media wants to talk about his mental health instead of the structural climate of white supremacy that radicalized him. We know that framing is a dodge. We know it avoids the elephant in the room. So why do we accept the same dodge when it comes to gender violence?There is a climate in this country that says it is okay and rational to wage violence against women — even if that woman is your partner. That is the structural analysis. That is what patriarchy produces. And you got to name it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Palantir’s Manifesto: When the Surveillance State Writes Its Own Mission StatementNow let me pivot to something that might seem unrelated on the surface but is deeply connected when you understand how power operates. While we were grieving Cerina Fairfax, Palantir Technologies — the data analytics and surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel with early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm — published a 22-point manifesto on social media drawn from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic.This wasn’t a corporate mission statement. This was an ideological declaration. Among its claims: Silicon Valley has a “moral obligation” to participate in national defense. National service should be universal. AI weapons should be built without what Karp called “theatrical debates” about their morality. The “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan was an “overcorrection.” And certain cultures are “harmful” and “regressive.”Read that last part again. A company that holds billions of dollars in government contracts for surveillance, immigration enforcement, and military operations — a company that built ImmigrationOS, the AI platform that tracks deportations for ICE — is telling us which cultures are worthy and which are not.Critics across the political spectrum have called this what it is. Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh labeled it “technofascism.” Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said Palantir had signaled a willingness to add “the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence” to the nuclear one. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins noted that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in space — they are the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.For the folks in the back: Palantir isn’t some startup playing around with code. This is a company embedded in the architecture of the American surveillance state. Their Gotham platform has been used by police departments to aggregate civilian data — names, addresses, social media activity, license plates, personal relationships — to predict the likelihood of people committing crimes. If you’re Black, if you’re Brown, if you’re an immigrant, if you’re poor, you already know what “predictive policing” means in practice. It means you’re the one being predicted on. It means the algorithm was trained on data sets that reflect centuries of racialized policing. It means the bias is baked in, just like it’s baked into every other system we’ve been discussing.This connects directly to the genealogy of American surveillance. From the Slave Patrols of the 18th century — which were the first organized policing bodies in the American South — to the FBI’s COINTELPRO program that surveilled, infiltrated, and destroyed Black liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s, to the NSA’s post-9/11 mass surveillance apparatus, to ICE’s current deportation infrastructure powered by Palantir’s AI: surveillance in America has always been about controlling populations that the state deems threatening to the existing order. Palantir didn’t invent this. They digitized it. They scaled it. And now they’ve written a manifesto telling you it’s their moral right to do so.Democracy Was Always Defined in a Particular WayHere’s where I’m going to challenge some of y’all, and I need you to sit with this even if it’s uncomfortable.I’m past romanticized ideas of democracy.The world we’re living in right now is a direct byproduct of the material reality of democracy — not the ideal, not the rhetoric, not the civics textbook version. The actual, historical, material reality. From the very beginning, democracy was defined in a particular way: to be about land-owning men, to subjugate women and slaves. If you go to the beginning, if you study the genealogy of democracy, the exclusion of foreigners, enslaved people, and women cannot be stripped away from who remains marginalized to this day. That’s not a bug. That’s a core feature. That’s baked in.Athenian democracy — the supposed origin point of Western democratic thought — explicitly excluded women, enslaved people, and foreigners (metics) from citizenship and political participation. The Athenian economy ran on enslaved labor. The democratic polis was built on the backs of people who had no access to its freedoms. When the American founders drew on Greek and Roman models, they weren’t accidentally replicating those exclusions. They were deliberately selecting a framework that concentrated power among propertied white men. The Three-Fifths Compromise didn’t break democracy. It was democracy. The Electoral College didn’t corrupt the system. It was the system — designed specifically to give slaveholding states disproportionate power.And here’s what a lot of America is grappling with right now: the way y’all are experiencing this country under the current political crisis is a lot of ways that Black folks and Indigenous folks have been experiencing this country for a long, long, long time. What feels like collapse to some has been the status quo for others. Fannie Lou Hamer said it best: sick and tired of being sick and tired.I’ve been hearing people say, “We need to defend democracy.” And I get it — I understand the impulse. But I also need us to ask: are we defending the ideal, or are we defending the status quo? Because the past status quo that everybody wants to fight so hard to return to is the very thing that brought us to this moment. Different flavors of fascism have been running through this country for a very long time. The powers that be just made it easy for some of us to find a digestible flavor. And then somebody came along who wasn’t digestible, and now we’re all supposed to act like this is new.It ain’t new. What’s new is who’s finally feeling it.The Patriarchal Paradox and the Co-optation of Identity PoliticsLet me connect another thread here, because these things are not separate conversations. They are one conversation about how power conceals itself.The paradox of patriarchy says that men can act out of emotion — anger, resentment, revenge — and still be seen as rational actors, while women are told they cannot lead because they’re “too emotional.” That’s a paradox. And it’s one of the built-in contradictions of American democracy. Countries that the United States does not consider “leaders of democracy” have already had multiple women heads of state. But in America, we operate under the implicit assumption that capitalism and democracy require male leadership — specifically white male leadership — to function properly.This is the same structural logic that co-opted identity politics. When the Combahee River Collective coined the term “identity politics” in 1977, it was a radical framework developed by Black feminist socialist women to articulate how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersected in their oppression and their liberation. It was weaponized against the system. But then the system got smart. It recognized it could incorporate all the representation people demanded while keeping the ideology and the mission intact. You can diversify the faces without diversifying the power structure. You can have a Black president who expands drone warfare. You can have a woman candidate who doesn’t fundamentally challenge the imperial apparatus. All skin folk ain’t kin folk — and all representation ain’t liberation.The system figured out how to commodify even resistance to itself. You can say “f**k the system,” and that very moniker gets co-opted, becomes merchandise, becomes a way to still justify the thing you were resisting. Because hey — look, democracy lets you say “f**k democracy.” That’s why it’s good, right?The Education Implication: What We Don’t Teach Is What We ReproduceHere’s the education piece, and this is where I need educators especially to lock in.None of what I’ve laid out is taught in standard K-12 curricula. Not the genealogy of democracy that includes its exclusions. Not the history of coverture and the legal architecture of gender violence. Not the lineage from slave patrols to predictive policing to Palantir. Not the Combahee River Collective and the original meaning of identity politics. Not Fannie Lou Hamer’s structural critique of the Democratic Party. Not the distinction between representation and liberation.What gets taught instead is a sanitized, decontextualized version of American history that trains students to be consumers of democracy rather than critical analysts of it. The banking model of education that Paulo Freire described — where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled with the dominant narrative — is alive and well. And it’s not accidental. The same political forces that are pushing book bans, dismantling DEI programs, defunding ethnic studies, and criminalizing critical race theory in classrooms are the same forces that benefit from a population that cannot structurally analyze the systems they live inside of.If you don’t teach students the history of patriarchal violence as a structural phenomenon, they grow up believing intimate partner violence is a series of individual tragedies. If you don’t teach the history of American surveillance, they accept Palantir’s manifesto as innovation rather than recognizing it as the digital continuation of COINTELPRO. If you don’t teach the material history of democracy — including who it was designed to exclude — they spend their whole lives defending an ideal that was never meant to include them.Education is elevation. But miseducation is a cage. And right now, the cage is being reinforced from every direction.The Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price?Let me break down the material impacts because this isn’t abstract. This is about bodies. This is about livelihoods. This is about who eats and who doesn’t.On gender violence: According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. That’s more than 10 million people per year. Women ages 18-34 are most commonly abused. Black women experience intimate partner violence at rates 35% higher than white women. And homicide is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant and postpartum women. These numbers exist within a context where domestic violence shelters are consistently underfunded, where legal aid for survivors is scarce, and where the very court systems women are told to use for protection are themselves embedded in patriarchal logic.On surveillance and immigration: Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform doesn’t just track people — it constructs risk profiles using aggregated data that includes medical records, social media activity, employment history, and family connections. The material impact is that immigrant communities — disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from the Global South — live under a constant state of algorithmic surveillance that criminalizes their very existence. Meanwhile, ICE operations disrupt local economies, separate families, and create a chilling effect on everything from healthcare access to school enrollment.On economic precarity: The political chaos isn’t separate from the economic reality. Tariff policies are impacting the global economy. The cost of living continues to rise. Independent creators, educators, and journalists — people like me who are trying to do this work without corporate backing — are caught in the squeeze between declining ad revenue, platform instability, and an audience that is itself financially stretched. I’ve been traveling more because I’ve been broke, and I’ve been broke because of everything that’s going on in this world. And I know I ain’t the only one.These aren’t separate crises. They are the intersecting outputs of a system that produces violence, surveillance, and scarcity as features, not failures.What Do We Do With All of This?I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I’m processing this in real time, just like you. But here’s what I do know:We have to stop explaining structural violence through individual psychology. Mental health matters — deeply — but it cannot be the analytical endpoint when the patterns are systemic.We have to stop romanticizing democracy without interrogating its material history. Fighting for an ideal is noble. Fighting to return to a status quo that produced the current crisis is not.We have to name patriarchy when patriarchy is the engine. We have to name surveillance when surveillance is the tool. We have to name capitalism when capitalism is the logic. And we have to do all of this while also acknowledging that we are tired, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and battling burnout from a news cycle that doesn’t give us time to process one catastrophe before the next one hits.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What you just read — the connection between Cerina Fairfax’s murder and Palantir’s manifesto, between Athenian exclusion and American surveillance, between the Combahee River Collective and the co-optation of identity politics — that analysis doesn’t come from a newsroom. It comes from one person doing the research, making the connections, and putting it out for free while trying to keep the lights on. If this work matters to you, if it helps you make sense of a world that is deliberately designed to be confusing, become a paid subscriber. That’s how we build something that can sustain this level of analysis. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.Let that marinate.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Intimate partner violence is a structural phenomenon, not an individual mental health failure. The framing of Justin Fairfax’s murder of Cerina Fairfax as primarily a mental health crisis obscures centuries of patriarchal legal architecture — from coverture to the delayed criminalization of marital rape — that normalizes male violence against women. The same analytical error occurs when mass shootings by white supremacists are reduced to mental illness rather than examined as products of a structural climate.* Palantir’s 22-point manifesto is not corporate philosophy — it is the public ideology of the surveillance state. A company built with CIA venture capital, embedded in military and immigration enforcement infrastructure, and holding billions in government contracts has declared its belief in mandatory national service, AI weapons development, cultural hierarchy, and the moral obligation of tech companies to wage war. This is the digital evolution of COINTELPRO, and it requires the same level of public scrutiny and resistance.* Democracy’s exclusions are features, not bugs. From Athenian exclusion of women, enslaved people, and foreigners to the American Three-Fifths Compromise and Electoral College, democratic systems have always been designed around the concentration of power among propertied men. The current political crisis is not a departure from democracy — it is a continuation of its material history. Fighting to return to a previous status quo without interrogating what that status quo produced is a recipe for repetition.* Identity politics has been co-opted by the systems it was designed to challenge. The Combahee River Collective’s original framework was a radical tool of Black feminist liberation. The system learned to absorb representation demands while keeping its ideological mission intact — producing a politics where diverse faces can occupy powerful positions without fundamentally altering the structures of oppression those positions enforce.* The deliberate erosion of education is connected to every other crisis discussed here. Book bans, DEI dismantlement, ethnic studies defunding, and the criminalization of critical frameworks in classrooms are not culture war distractions — they are strategic moves to ensure populations cannot structurally analyze the systems of violence, surveillance, and economic extraction they live inside. What we don’t teach, we reproduce.BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.* Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765.* Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.* Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1990.* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. Reprinted in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1963.* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe