Tread, Baby, Tread. Just Not On Me.

There was an MMA fighter a few years back who gave away the bad-faith Don’t Tread On Me game.

It was a few days after Russia launched its unprovoked land war against the Ukrainian people that this mixed martial arts bro, a guy named Bryce Mitchell, rambled on and on during a post-fight press conference in what was pitched as some kind of anti-war message from a man who gets his head beaten in for a living. At one point in his painfully uninformed tirade, Mitchell said he doesn’t “know what’s going on,” and that “nobody knows what’s going on” in one of the most black-and-white war scenarios of the postwar era. 

Subscribe to Bad Faith Times for free or become a supporter and join the BFT discord community!

The Mitchell clip went viral because it was shared by right-wing influencers who predictably did not want the US to get involved with the war on Ukraine – because, see, they are all well compensated by the Russian regime to parrot their talking points and undermine civil discourse in the western world. These right wingers with enormous online followings were simply being good employees by sharing this MMA fighter’s message, which went something like this: Unless a war is brought directly to my doorstep, I have nothing to do with the conflict and no moral responsibility to help those being hurt and killed by the aggressors. 

“I’m not going nowhere to fight for these politicians,” he said before becoming spitting mad about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I’m staying at home and when the war comes to Arkansas, I will dig my boots in the ground and I will die for everything I love and I will not retreat.” 

I would ask you to feign shock at Mitchell’s January 2025 comments praising Adolf Hitler for his dedication to his hometown. “I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy based on my own research. He fought for his country and wanted to purify it by kicking out all the greedy Jews," said Mitchell, who faced exactly zero repercussions for his nazi adoration. MMA President Dana White, a Trump confidant, dismissed the whole affair as “free speech,” another W for the civil libertarian interpretation of the First Amendment. 

In his half-baked push for the US to stay out of Russia’s annihilation of Ukraine, Mitchell – deemed by White to be the dumbest man alive in one of the funniest press conferences you’ll ever see – was giving away the game of the mostly braindead Don’t Tread On Me folks. He was saying, in effect, that society does not exist. A human community doesn’t exist either in Mitchell’s telling. There is no connection between people and nations, and we were all born to fearfully defend our little lots of land (if you can get one) until we are dead. That bleak little story is the story of those who wave the Don’t Tread On Me flag.

And here’s how you know those who warn against treading upon them apply the warning to themselves and absolutely no one else: The U.S. government is sending heavily armed, masked agents into people’s homes, dragging them into unmarked vans, and sending them to faraway gulags run by third-world dictators. These egregious violations of basic constitutional rights are happening here,  happening now, and the Don’t Tread On Me Americans do not give a single shit about it. I’ve seen the question posed online: Where are the libertarians who have for generations said they would openly revolt against a tyrannical federal government, that they would use any means necessary to stop an out-of-control ruling class? The answer is that they’re here, observing it all with indifference or glee because they have always wanted the government to deploy its power against those they hate. Because their hatreds and grievances and prejudices have always – always – outweighed whatever principles they might think they have. 

In fact, they like what’s happening today. They support the government running roughshod over other people’s rights and they want more of it. They go online every day, primarily on the fascism machine known as the X platform, and they cheer on these anonymous government thugs as they round up migrants and legal U.S. citizens alike and put them in chains and shave their heads and take away their dignity and personhood and ship them to a place where they have no legal recourse, where they will be tormented and perhaps tortured and maybe killed, all for the sin of seeking a better life in the United States. 

These principled libertarians log on every day and they cheerlead the White House’s explicitly fascist X account as it delights in the pain and despair of migrants who have fled violence and poverty only to end up under a government run by openly white supremacy policy makers like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan. The Don’t Tread On Me people say, well, this is what happens when you break the law. You lose all your rights. Your liberty is eviscerated. You become a non-person. I say this because I have never read a book, have no understanding of constitutional law, and am an enormous dumbass. I know nothing and I don’t know I know nothing. 

A population full of these fools is a nice little formula for an authoritarian takeover. 

Listen to Bryce Mitchell’s words and consider what he’s saying. It’s unclear if he would defend himself against tyranny even if it comes to his home country, which sadly happens to be the US. It's unclear if he would act if his neighbors were under assault. It’s only clear that he would mount some sort of defense against government intrusion if it came directly to his home. This is the thought process of an infant. No offense to infants. 

To think one can pick and choose who gets protection from government abuse is the ultimate in back-breaking ignorance. The same way Trump voters thought they could empower a petty tyrant to visit pain and suffering upon certain people and certain groups – to handpick individuals to persecute while everyone else carries on with their happy lives – the Don’t Tread On Me crowd believes, stupidly, that hyper-individualized defense against government overreach is an effective way for people to be free and remain free. That they won't say this means they are operating in bad faith.

As long as those masked, armed, jackbooted federal thugs aren’t breaking the hinges of my front door and forcibly removing me and my loved ones from our home or workplace, things are OK, the thinking goes. Their plea, in the end, is as narrow as possible: Do not tread on me, and only me. You may tread on whoever the fuck else you want to tread upon. In fact, do that. That is the quiet part of the libertarian ethos: Tread, baby, tread, just not on me. 

The Last Girl And The Real Don’t Tread On Me Ethos

If the Don’t Tread On Me crowd was sincerely interested in the defense of liberty – and again, they are not and never have been – they would get behind the so-called Last Girl approach to securing and maintaining rights and protection. A Last Girl system, based on Gandi’s teachings about public policy centered on the most vulnerable people in a society, throws out the individualistic nonsense of the Don’t Tread On Me folks and instead focuses on protecting those who are subject to intersectional discrimination and domination. The Last Girl approach acknowledges that all humans are vulnerable in some way, but some are more vulnerable and should be at the center of lawmaking and the establishment of civil society norms. 

Anyone with a good-faith interest in defending individual rights would be all in on the Last Girl approach because it strategically helps everyone in a society, starting with those who are most likely to get the brunt of a society’s power structures. 

The Leopards Are Getting Fat

It’s fun to pretend elected leaders in charge of a nation of 350 million people can handpick who suffers and who does not.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

“If we began with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged and with restructuring and remaking the world where necessary, then others who are singularly disadvantaged would also benefit,” wrote Kimberle Crenshaw, a civil rights scholar. “Placing those who are currently marginalized in the center is the most effective way to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action.” 

Whereas the civil libertarian’s Don’t Tread On Me ethos is based on the preservation of power and privilege, the Last Girl philosophy is meant to ensure all people, no matter their station in life, no matter their politics or income or location, can live freely. The Last Girl approach is the true Don’t Tread On Me – a phrase that can be used by all people for all people if the marginalized are first protected. Without that, you have nothing. 

There is no unity in the Don’t Tread On Me thinking though. There is the opposite: Those who buy into this self-centered approach to life are saying they do not care about anyone but themselves. It’s not even clear that they care about their family and friends, if they have any. I would say these folks have reduced themselves to animals, but that wouldn’t be quite true, for animals take care of other animals as a necessity for survival. Animals understand that to stand alone means to make their entire species vulnerable to mass death, to extinction. If only the Don’t Tread On Me folks had an animal’s sense of community and survival. 

The character played by Nick Offerman in The Last of Us episode called Long, Long Time, is the embodiment of the tragedy of the Don’t Tread On Me mindset (spoiler alert for those who plan on watching the show). Offerman, playing post-apocalypse Ron Swanson, is a deranged survivalist who has prepared for the downfall of civilization in his mother’s basement. He has dozens of weapons and food and water to last months. He has laid extravagant boobytraps around his mother’s home designed to drive away invaders or kill them with fire. He is a deeply sick man, one perfect for the apocalypse. 

We watch Offerman’s character delight in the solitude of life after people. He later admits that he was happy – for a time – to see the world end, for human civilization to be swept into that nasty, crowded dustbin of history. This isolated man, deprived of all human contact for years, believes he his happy. He had not been tread upon by the government nor the mushroom-headed zombies spreading their infection. In that way he had achieved his life’s goal. There was nothing else to be done. 

It’s not until he falls in love with a man who stumbles upon the End Times compound that Offerman’s character (Bill) realizes what he had missed and the connection he had so craved both before and after the world went to shit. Over years and years – a long, long time – Offerman’s character loves and is loved. He becomes a full person after half a lifetime of denying his humanity and lying to himself with the toxic idea that men were meant to survive alone, to protect themselves and only themselves, and to let others fend for themselves. If they couldn’t hack it, so be it. They weren’t fit for this cruel world.

I like to think Bill, after experiencing the love and connection that makes us human, would be open to the Last Girl philosophy. That his fences and provisions and guns and boobytraps kept him alive for so long meant nothing until another human forced him to feel and be open and vulnerable. I like to think Bill, by the end of his life, would have said Don’t Tread On Anyone. There is no me, there is only us. 

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.