You hear a lot of talk, usually from right-wing trolls and ‘bot farms and influence operations, about how terrible left-wing authoritarianism is. Constantly the screams of “socialism” and “communism” are used as boogey-men to startle the easily manipulated away from their own best interest.
It’s important to understand that all authoritarianism is not the same.
The real left has been in “dad vibe mode” for a long time. Part of your job as a dad is the hard, hard task of letting your kids learn their own lessons. You gotta watch ’em try things you know won’t work and might even sting a little, because they’re not going to believe you TELLING them what’s gonna happen, no matter what you do.
And then sometimes you’ve got say okay, this has gone on long enough, time to step in.
There’s a very current-day Undertaker vibe to it, if you’re a wrestling fan. Like “okay, we’ve had our fun, but it’s time to set some things straight now because this has got out of hand. Watching the campfire is cool. Roasting marshmallows is cool. Playing with matches isn’t, and you won’t put ’em down, so now I’m gonna have to bark at you and startle you and scare you a little so you do, because you have to put them down, for your own good and everyone else’s.”
It is the inclination of the left to be hands off. Real anti-authoritarianism (as opposed to performative flexing, the people who can scream along with the lyrics of every Rage Against The Machine song but don’t understand a single word) has always been a leftist inclination. The same values and attitudes that make us leftists make us very disinterested in telling anyone else what they should do or trying to enforce social compliance with authoritarian tactics.
But…once in a while, the alternative choices start getting slim.
That’s how you can tell the difference between genuine leftist movements and right-wing propaganda campaigns pretending to be leftist, like so-called “communist Russia.” Genuine leftist movements abhor and avoid tactics of force and intimidation and coercion whenever possible.
The back side of that is when someone like me tells you, this is how it’s got to be, that’s not because “I say so.” It seems like those of you who tend to think in those terms have a really hard time grasping that not everyone does. Very, very little of *anything* I’ve said in the last thirty years, even before I started getting off the drugs and detoxifying my thinking around 25 years ago, has been said simply as a matter of throwing my opinion around. My opinion isn’t any more meaningful or powerful or authoritative than yours; anything I say that I think is “more authoritative” is so precisely because it’s not an opinion but a series of descriptions of observed facts.
That’s really important to remember, because there’s a difference between strong-arm tactics backed by abused power, and good advice, and part of the strategy of those who rely on strong-arm tactics to maintain their power is keeping you confused about which is which.
I’m not telling you that you have to reject bigotry and xenophobia and hate and oppression as behaviors and thought processes simply because I find those things distasteful and obnoxious. I don’t have to be around you, if that’s the case.
I’m telling you that because the consequences of not doing so are the existence of the species and the ongoing, right now, day to day quality of your very own life, which is itself oppressed often without you even realizing it, using exactly the same tools and values and attitudes that you’re using to oppress others, and until you figure that out, none of us is gonna get the boot off our necks so we can deal with the clowns at the top of the pyramid whose relatively tiny footprints are somehow holding all of us down under their weight.
I’m telling you that because I can see that the consequences of your behavior are making you miserable, even if you can’t see it.
(Yet. People like that usually catch on, and usually about five seconds after the acute and material costs of their behavior come due.)
That’s the difference between “authoritarianism” on the left and on the right. On the right, they live for that crap because they all believe that if they’re just big enough jerks and can sufficiently prove their heartlessness and ruthlessness to their owners then they’ll be allowed to become an owner one day.
On the left, we’re mostly pissed because you made us get off the couch, and we’re gonna want to get this over and done with quickly so we can get back to singing kumbaya and watching TV or tending our kale gardens or driving our lesbian friends around in a Subaru or whatever stereotype you want to throw around for a little cock-eyed giggle.
If you’ve been around enough people, you know. The folks who tend to the right are the ones who yell and threaten and hit and make a big production out of things and there’s all the theatrics and this is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you gaslighting.
The folks who tend to the left are the ones who snatch your ass up about two seconds before the consequences of your actions hurt you, which gives you a nice three seconds to let your life flash before your eyes and give you a real good scare before sitting you down, looking you dead in the eye, and saying “now don’t you feel a little dumb for doing that? How about you don’t do it again?” And we do it knowing you’re going to hate us for it, at least a little bit, but also knowing that if we don’t, you won’t be around to hate anyone.
And that’s the lesson you remember and learn from. You might remember getting hit. You might even believe it’s the right way to do things and do the same to your kids. But you’ll rarely remember any specific reason it happened, any specific action for which the violence was a consequence, any particular moral or ethical lesson you learned from it.
But you remember that feeling of having disappointed someone you respect and admire, for the rest of your life, and you try not to do it again.
Right wing authoritarianism is their default setting. Bullying and pushing people around and ordering compliance and throwing your weight around is part and parcel of what attracts people to right-wing ideology, it’s why they work so heavily on anger and fear and ego.
Left-wing authoritarianism is reluctant, always a last resort, and always executed in the hope of being a temporary expedience to solve an acute issue, and letting go of it when that issue is solved.
As the current situation worldwide shows us, sometimes, as reluctant as we are, we have to stand up and say :no more, or else.” That’s a form of authoritarianism, to be sure…but it’s the only one I can see having any ethical redemption or validation – reluctant leadership that wishes to stop leading the minute it’s possible to do so.
To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”
The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.
The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)
The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.
The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.
That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.
(NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)
It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.
There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.
The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.
Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.
(In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)
This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.
Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.
In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.
I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.
People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.
The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.
The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.
The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.
No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally
It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.
* In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”
The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.
If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.
By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.
(NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)
In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.
Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.
No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).
We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.
That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.
If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.
And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.
When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.
(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
Introduction
It must be said at the outset that the behaviors and tactics described below aren’t limited by any means to the social media sphere other than the raw mechanics of using social media as the delivery mechanism for disinformation. Nor are they limited to high-powered international politics, or even professionally organized information management firms.
These behaviors are fundamentally those engaged in by those who see life as competition and are set out to win even if it hurts someone else along the way. Whether it’s musicians and comedians competing for ticket sales, actors competing for roles, nations competing for resources, politicians competing for office, there is a moral calculus in every decision as to whether one human being or the next, making the decision for themselves hundreds of times every day, chooses to compete against their fellow human beings, or to work with them against the greater challenges facing the species as a whole.
Those who choose to put themselves above others are absolute master artisans with these behaviors. Even to the level of family dysfunction and relationship abuse patterns, it all shows up the same way in the end, and it’s all corrosive to our individual and collective well-being and health.
That’s why It is absolutely crucial to understand and teach yourself to identify and reject social media disinformation. The damage done just in the last few years by this problem includes millions of lives lost.
One classic tactic of disinformation campaigns is “counter-intelligence.” This phrase gets thrown around a great deal in online conversation these days, often by conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizen types and the like, but it very much is a thing, and you are very much being bombarded with it.
I recently ran into a good example of aggressive counter-intelligence with a high likelihood* of being a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign via a message posted by a page labeling itself with leftist, anti-capitalist terminology.
*One of the core problems with online disinformation campaigns is that you can often never hope to be 100% certain that your instincts are correct. That’s why it’s critical that you keep them razor-sharp.
I won’t link to the page or the displayed content, but I don’t have to hide the page’s name, either. The piece immediately caught my attention, not because oh a swastika or I care what some neofash has to say, they all say the same things anyway. What caught my attention is that this page is “calling out” the Biden administration, treating this ridiculous and obvious display as thought it were in any way meaningful to a thoughtful consideration of…well, anything.
I didn’t even pay attention to what page this appeared on until after I’d commented, and while I wasn’t ridiculously aggressive I also minced no words. What I said was, in short: this is absolute nonsense for a million reasons. I laid my case out firmly, clearly, and without flinching, but also without profanity or threats or aggression.
I did this deliberately, and I try to do it consistently, because the first response of the source nearly always tells you everything you need to know. We’ll get into that, and more details about all the specific disinformation tactics being employed here, why I have a high degree of confidence that this is deliberate behavior by willful neo-fascists, and how you can be better equipped to wade through the onion-layers of online disinformation without falling prey to it.
So the first question, obviously, is “how do you know? Let’s look at that on the next page.
How do I know?
How do I know this image is disinformation? How can I determine the intent of the poster, the writer, the man in the photo, in a brief interaction?
Obviously to fully answer this question you have to read the entire article; that’s why I wrote it, but in a nutshell, given all the factors at hand, there are only two conclusions to be drawn about this information as it is:
The person who posted it genuinely believes what they’re saying. Somewhere, they’ve managed to convinced themselves that what’s written in the text is true. If that is the case and their genuine goal is to work against capitalism, they are simply incompetent to do so. I don’t mean I disagree, I mean they are blatantly and directly working to propagate information that works directly against their publicly identified and self-stated intentions and interests.
They do this in the very act of attempting to advocate for those intentions. There simply can be no other word: they are not competent to do what they are doing, and if they genuinely want to advance their cause they would best do so by sitting down, shutting up, and letting someone competent do the talking. Have all the opinions you want, but don’t present yourself as some kind of expert when you clearly aren’t. It causes great harm – millions of deaths just in the last few years. When someone points it out to you, makes their case clearly, and you want to argue? That leads us to…
The other possibility, which is that the person is fully aware of what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. That makes them a deliberate and willful disinformation agent. In the case of this image, it makes them a deliberate and willful neo-fascists advancing a obviously constructed pro-Putin narrative with eyes wide open.
I repeat: there are no other reasonable explanations. It may very well be that the person really believes what they’re doing, but in refusing to stop doing it when they’re told what they’re doing they are actively advancing the agenda of autocracy and totalitarianism. In immediately jumping to a fevered and meaningless rationalizations of their behavior and attacking the messenger, they reveal their priorities to be other than truth, no matter what those priorities may be.
Exactly who is this person? Exactly what are their priorities? Exactly why did they choose to share this story and then stand by it? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. What matters is regardless of the answers to those questions, you know with a very high degree of certainty that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t worth dealing with and should be ignored. Why? Because as we’ve already outlined, either they’re incompetent or deliberately lying. We’ll discuss this more in a later section of this article.
But what makes the story nonsense? That’s important because if the story has reasonable merit then my response to it did not, so let’s talk about that next.
The Story Itself
Let’s start with the first thing that caught my eye about this story: the premise. In short: a known neo-Nazi “endorsed” the Biden administration and praised their decision to send arms to Ukraine. Therefore, asserts the post and poster, the Biden administration should be opposed in every way because clearly they are Nazis.
While it’s very difficult to find specific examples and citable scholarship in a casual search on the open web, this is a well-known and widely discussed tactic of manipulation that nearly any of us will recognize. The “bad” actor deliberately associates themselves with an enemy. In doing so, they deliberately create an opening for the suggestion this proves that the person they want to discredit surely must be a bad person.
(There’s a variant of this thinking that you see in abusive relationship patterns and gaslighting, which can be loosely rendered as “you must have something wrong with you, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be with me.“)
Fundamentally this relies on exploiting a logical fallacy called “association fallacy.” It has various types and synonyms – well-poisoning is a type of this fallacy, for instance. In the case of the piece we’re looking at today, the specific type of association fallacy is “guilt by association.”
There are a couple of reasons this logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The first is because Biden has no control whatsoever over who endorses him, nor what they give as their reasons; assuming there’s any responsibility for any of this on the part of the Biden administration is childishly silly in that aspect.
The second reason is the endorsement is obviously not made in good faith. This bad actor knows what he’s doing, so much so that he’s nearly winking at you as he does it – is winking at his ideological comrades. They know there’s no way to conclusively prove he’s deliberately lying for the overt purpose of associating the Biden administration with neo-Nazism, that would require mind-reading. So they lie with just the thinnest pretense of believing their own BS, knowing that calling them out on it directly would just end in inconclusive bickering.
Millions of abusers and tyrants and bullies and bigots throughout human history have manipulated association fallacy the same way, and we’ve all seen it in our lives many times if you give it some thought. Being able to recognize this level of manipulation and cunning is critical to protecting yourself against it on all levels.
The Premise
It’s also important to say out loud that part of what makes this effective is that you can make reasonable arguments for different dimensions of the argument – “People KNOW Biden is a fascist,” because it’s only a shade off the truth. You can build the argument quite easily. Certainly Joe Biden could be characterized as pro-Capitalist. I’ve said myself many times (and will probably have it on a shirt or something here in a minute), the win condition of capitalism is fascism. You can’t escape it when you play it out, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.
In the mean time, in the full context of the world and life and history and everything else that’s relevant, Biden is just not plausible as a marauding autocrat deliberately burning the world down to put money in his own pocket. Biden is not plausible as even deliberately evil most of the time. But if you get baited in to trying to argue with the idea that he has the approval of neo-Nazis and that makes him evil, you’ve already lost because you’ve validated the idea that this assertion is sufficiently credible to require counter-argument.
Truth is, in some ways Biden’s very progressive – one can hardly overlook how he forced the Obama administration’s hand on gay marriage, for instance. In other ways, he’ll likely never catch up completely. The ending of capitalism is one of those latter things. I think he’ll never stop believing that there is some way to engage in capitalism – not commerce, mind you, capitalism – without ending up breaking everything beyond repair. He has made decisions in the past that I believe had evil consequences. I believe that in particular some of the decisions he made, votes he cast, etc., early in his political career displayed much more of that tendency to make decisions that were hurtful to innocent people.
That also doesn’t make him “a fascist,” at least not in the intentional and deliberate sense intended by the writer.
Fascism requires deliberate, willful, hostile intent to establish or defend autocracy. Biden still believes the whole “American Dream” thing he grew up on. You work hard for a fair wage, you make enough to live on and enjoy a hobby, and if you care to and want to you can even go do something other than wage work to live on, you know the drill. He’s not ready to think post-capitalism. Neither is most of the rest of the world. That doesn’t make him a “fascist” in any but the most technical of senses, and most importantly that doesn’t make him an irredeemable soul like some of the great monsters of history, which is the narrative this whole mess is trying to sell.
The Propagator
Having reviewed the message, now let’s take a look at the messenger.
The first thing you notice is that it appears to be a radically left-wing page – the name “Capitalism Kills” is a giant dogwhistle of course, but they referred to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” and the other content on the page falls in to the same far-left tropes and symbolism.
“We attack both US political parties” isn’t a meaningful rebuttal in the least. Nor is the assertion “we’re marxist-leninsts here.” If anything they seem more like people out to make the general public think of “Marxism” and “Leninism” as these radically anti-American ideologies, foolish and extreme.
Not to say there is no -ism involved here, but if we credit the speaker for good faith belief in their own words the -ism is “egotism.” No reasonable person sweeps with this broad a brush; nobody who’s interested in real progress or discourse is going to spend all their time throwing around the idea of “condemning all US presidents past and present” as though it’s a meaningful and carefully considered position. It’s intellectually lazy and logically invalid, a position taken solely for the emotional satisfaction of the person taking it.
That’s if we credit the speaker with believing their own words, which I’m not entirely sure is a good idea. If I was going to create an identity to make leftists look ignorant, radical, aggressive, and unreasonable, I could hardly do better than this set of messages.
The assertions about “Biden and Obama helping the Nazis in Ukraine” is also, at very best, a radical misrepresentation of reality. While there has been aid from the US to Ukraine this has been consistently a matter of assisting their defense against ongoing Russian aggression into the territory. There is simply no reasoned basis to hold forth the notion that the Ukrainian government or any more significant portion of its people that could be found in any other country are “Nazis” or fascists of anything of the sort.
This is typically where the propagandist will start gloating little factoids and trivia bits. In the context of Ukraine, invoking the Azov Battalion is a constant go-to, as though the existence of an isolated group of right-wing extremists is evidence the entire country is corrupt. This is illogic on the level of pointing to the Westboro Baptist Church as evidence that the entire US are raging fundamentalist religious bigots.
In this case they went with a video showing a trident patch on a Ukranian military official’s uniform and then portraying this as evidence of Nazi control, in spite of the fact that the symbolism is at best ambiguous and focusing on it is ridiculous on the level of conspiracy theorism.
The point however isn’t that the symbolism is ambiguous or that the Azov group was like thirty people; the point is to get you talking about those things rather than the fact that Russia is conducting an entirely unjustified and illegal war against another sovereign nation. The point is to focus negative attention among the hard left in the west against their own leaders by building accusations of their allegiance to far right, fascist, and or Nazi ideology.
Then as a final nudge, we add a little social proof to validate ourselves by having another account – again, with the clear dogwhistle right in the name – come in and validate us without actually adding any substance or clarity to the conversation, or even trying to make an argument in support. Just say “nope, that one’s right” and get a little heart react and everybody’s warm and fuzzy while the person pointing out the propaganda is discredited and run off.
In Conclusion
This message was crafted to stoke anti-war sentiment and progressive distrust of the status quo Democrats into pro-Russian sentiment that also inflames internal opposition to Biden. The “left” in the US has never been particularly cohesive to begin with, and it’s quite easy to invoke anti-war noisemaking to create conflict among us. Start throwing around exaggerated and baseless but emotionally appealing claims and you’re certain to ensnare those whose egos far outpace their intellect.
This, assembled guests, is just one example from the millions and millions of social media messages sent out every day with deliberately manipultive and malicious intent. The Russian government does a great deal of it to garner support for Putin’s imperalist aspirations; the plutocracy does it to herd us back to work in a pandemic; various and sundry interest who profit from confusion and strife are filling us constantly with well-designed nonsense – usually based on appealing to our egos in some way because that’s where we’re weakest – in order to weaken the entire concept of “democracy” because they believe that, being ruthless and having some access to resources, they believe they will benefit from the fall of democracy just like the Nazis benefitted from the persecution of Jews in the sudden availability to “good Germans” of fully furnished homes and fully stocked stores that had been appropriated by that persecution.
Of course the great truth of hard-right ideology is that the monsters these people are feeding will be perfectly happy eating them for lunch when they run out of “others.” You can always create more “others,” just pick a new group to scapegoat – Jews, leftists, people of color, religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill – as long as you can maintain that us vs. them pretense and con enough people into believing they’ll always be an “us” and never a “them,” you’ll not lack for targets for persecution until there’s nobody left to persecute at all and we’re reduced to a state of social development that makes feudalism look like egregious liberty.
They always believe they’re driving the machine until it runs them over.
Those of us with the perception to understand this is a losing strategy for everyone must ensure we are well armed and with eyes wide open. A startling percentage of leftists have been sucked in by this narrative.
Now (writing in October 2023) we’re seeing a whole new set of social disruption and argument in the wake of the recently escalated conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people – an argument with no possible “clean” resolution that’s been going on in one form or another literally since pre-historic times. We’ll be encouraged to pick one point or another in the past when things were “right,” then blame the “other” for making a mess of it.
Of course the only solution there ever was is for people to learn how to live peacefully and cooperatively together, but instead we’ll be continuously baited into these pointless arguments, we’ll become ever more radicalized against each other, and in the end the real objective – creating further factiousness and dissent among the free nations of the world, particularly those on the left working toward every more refined and effective democracy – will be gained unless we start taking the problem of disinformation seriously, right now.
Hey there everyone, welcome to Wednesday and the morning message I’m your unflappably consistent and predictable host John Henry, let’s get right to it.
I want to talk a minute about this thing in Florida with Ron DeSantis ordering migrant refugees to be shipped around the country as political tokens to be used.
Look, it’s real simple: this is f**king disgusting. It is absolutely beyond the pale for anyone to use human beings like this, or even for us to allow it to happen.
I said back in September of last year when DeSantis sent Florida officials to San Antonio, Texas to round up immigrants to be then flown to Massachusetts, all in service of somehow “owning the libs,” that it sounded like kidnapping to me. Apparently the sheriff of Bexar County, Texas agrees as he filed a criminal complaint of “several” counts including both misdemeanor and felony charges of unlawful restraint. (The five felony charges related to the minors who were kidnapped and relocated by Ron DeSantis’ private schutzstaffel.)
The thinking – and I use that word very loosely – here is that since it’s the “libs” who are “inviting” “these people” to Our Great Nation, then the “libs” can take care of them, we’ll just drop ’em off where all the rich “libs” are! That’ll larn ’em hyuk hyuk. And it’s such a problem in Florida that they had to go to San Antonio, Texas to find some brown people to abuse.
Meanwhile they’ve done it again, this time shipping a bunch of people to Sacramento where California governor Gavin Newsom continues making empty, performative threats about it. Fascist lapdog and odious caricature of humanity Alecia Collins (communication director for the Florida Department of Emergency Management) was quoted as sneering, “From left-leaning mayors in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, the relocation of those illegally crossing the United States border is not new but suddenly when Florida sends illegal aliens to a sanctuary city it’s false imprisonment and kidnapping.” I could spend another twenty minutes deconstructing all the racist, fascist, classist, bigoted, stupid, malicious dogwhistles in just that sentence, but neither it nor the festering pustule who spewed it merits that level of validation.
We are being governed by five year olds. Ron DeSantis is fascist garbage, and the only two things stopping me from kicking him square in the ass are the law and the fact that I can’t afford to burn a perfectly good pair of shoes afterwards, bury them, then salt the earth to ensure his odious infection of stupidity and malice doesn’t spread.
It’s not just him, either. Trump, McConnell, Christie, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley. The entire Republican Party has gone 100% fascist. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. They don’t care if you know, because we’ve spent the last half-century shrugging our shoulders and pretending we don’t see it because we don’t want the holidays to be uncomfortable. Even my state rep is a galumphing, gelatinous assembly of empty hostilities and vague handwaving accusations with no substance and no attempt at it.
Meanwhile, humans are being used as political props for sick, malicious pigs like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. All they do is lie through their teeth, say a bunch of angry words and point their marks in a direction, and ride it straight to the bank.
We must stop being afraid to call a fascist a fascist. We have to stop allowing ourselves to be conned into cutting corners and making compromises and “reaching across the aisle” just to shove our hands in a meat grinder.
Enough. The entire Republican presidential field is a sick joke and it can’t possibly be anything but. I don’t see trying to beat Biden from the left as a winning strategy in ’24 – people like stability too much and he’s bringing that – but certainly we can beat fascism from the left, right now.
We start doing that by admitting out loud that’s what we have to do.
Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…
Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.
Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.
Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?
Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.
Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.
Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.
I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:
The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.
They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.
They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.
We refuse.
Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.
Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.
Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.
Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.
Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.
When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.
That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.
I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.
What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.
And we…aren’t.
Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.
That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.
NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.
Those are your “American Values.”
When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.
Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.
In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.
As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.
Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)
Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.
So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.
BREAKING: Nazi Texas Governor Greg Abbot Orders State Agency To Kidnap Trans Children From Parents, Force Misgendering, Corrective Medical Procedures Outlawed.
First, They’re Coming For The Trans Kids
Image of original letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, ordering state child welfare agencies to prosecute parents and physicians of any trans kids who are actively attempting transition for abuse.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott yesterday ordered the state child welfare agency to immediately begin investigating and prosecuting any parent or doctor of a trans minor who has taken any transitional steps e.g. hormone therapy.
In the letter, Abbott notes that “it is already against the law to subject Texas children to…elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”
He goes on to remind people of what “mandated reporter” means, thus making clear without stating it outright that as of now every single doctor, teacher, psychologist, or whomever else in Texas is aware of a child transitioning and does not immediately turn in the parents for abuse investigation, will themselves be sanctioned with the possibilities including loss of license and jail time.
Of course there are already plenty of state hotline numbers to call in “anonymous tips” and so forth.
This not only flies in the face of medical science and psychology and human rights and every other decent thing, it is a textbook execution of Nazi policies of identifying and scapegoating already-targeted social outgroups in order to encourage the more venal, ignorant, evil, and insane among the population to become even more aggressive and violent toward the scapegoats, and hiding behind the cover of abused authority in the form of oppressive, targeted regulation and cooperative lickspittles and lapdogs in the constabulary and judiciary.
Houston, We Have A Problem
There is simply no valid reasoning that supports the ongoing delusion we don’t have a fascism problem. A *Nazi* problem. This absolutely can not stand, not even for a day. Every activist in Texas needs to focus on ending this immediately and making damned sure nobody can try it again.
Greg Abbott is a Nazi. Not a Nazi-like thing, not an almost Nazi, not a wannabe Nazi. Everyone involved in making this possible is a Nazi.
The entire system and set of values and regulations described in his order are Nazism. It’s a whole good old boys’ system where anyone with a grudge can destroy lives under the auspices of obeying the law, and where even attempting to do the right thing is a criminal act. No different than encouraging schoolchildren to report parental disloyalty to the Nazis, or the USSR, or Big brother.
It’s meta-coercion, an entire new layer of abused power and oppression. Abbott and his fellow Nazis are sending the message loudly and clearly that not only will there be no tolerance for non-binary sexuality and identity in Texas, there will be no tolerance for any attempt to change that odious condition. If you’re a parent accused of abuse, your parental rights can be terminated and you may never get them back. Your kid will be shuttled into the foster system – or worse the shadow foster system – and subject to whatever “treatment” the state deems necessary to force them into “normality.”
In their confidence that a majority of Texans will support this behavior, the Nazis are sending the message that if you are trans, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are the parent of a trans child, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are a physician or psychologist treating a trans or intersex minor in any way the state of Texas concludes to be an attempt to help a patient physically transition, or if you even hear about it and fail to tell the authorities, you are defenseless and a criminal and legally forbidden to practice your profession.
When an abuse charge is levied, this immediately puts the option on the table of taking the kids out of their homes and putting them in foster care or some sort of state-mandated “correction” program like gay conversion therapy, as if electroshock and bullying and trauma are going to make these kids not who they are. The mere presence of this option in this instance is ludicrous, evil, and outrageous.
There is only one word for any of this.
Yes, Nazi.
You may now end your internal dialogue; this is what Nazism looks like
This is where that whole difficult discussion comes from about whether antisemitism is required for Nazism. (This discussion is largely made difficult by shallow, slow thinkers who can’t tell the difference between noting Nazism isn’t ONLY antisemitic, and claiming it’s not so at all.)
Antisemitism was waiting for a Hitler to show up and exploit it.
Racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia have been waiting for a Trump to show up and exploit it – or more to the point, waiting for a Trump to show up who’s so mendacious and narcissistic any one of several dozen fascists and Nazis and autocrats can control him easily with threat or bribery.
It’s the same Nazism, folks, it’s just different targets. The targets now are the ones you see scaring bigots in the news – trans people, especially kids; the LGBTQIA+; the educated; the compassionate; black people who insist their lives matter; people who get angry when police keep murdering the innocent and getting away with it; the increasingly desperate, hostile, and populous ranks of the poor; and as always the anti-fascists who would stand in defense of all of those targets and indeed take the offense against fascist or Nazi or other autocratic/totalitarian power grab.
This is openly flaunted fascism, totalitarian autocracy that’s not merely autocratic and totalitarian but smug, laughing in your face as if to say “look how many stupid evil people there are, that we could so easily con them into giving us power, and you think you can stand against us? Please.”
They think we’re going to sit back and let this happen. The whole point of this is to terrorize us into sitting back and letting this happen.
Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Not.
What To Do About It
Due to my public profile it would be foolish of me to make any specific recommendations for direct action. If I said “it’s time to hit the streets,” one of the Nazis would find a way to make something bad happen on the streets and then hold me responsible. So I can’t tell you that you should be marching or protesting 24/7 in front of the Governor’s mansion or what have you.
I can say that whatever you choose to do, be careful. Consider your actions to avoid setting yourselves up to get hurt or have someone else’s crimes blamed on you.
But stand. Now. Activate your networks, be smart, work together, get on the phones, get on the TV stations, get on social media and END THIS, immediately. The ACLU / ACLU of Texas should already be in court.
Aside from covering my own backside legally, as a tactical matter I don’t advise creating a situation that could be exploited by inauthentic actors, for instance a large raucous march on the Capital. We have learned time and time again that this is most often the outcome the fascists and Nazis of the world hope for because it gives them cover to be even more violent, to actually hurt and kill people and imprison them under false pretenses and seize their assets and destroy their lives.
We have learned time and again that any time the Nazis and fascists – be they calling themselves the “Patriot Front” or the “Proud Boys” or the “Oathkeepers” or “Prayer Warriors” (a common phrase in evangelical and charismatic Christian sects that has been co-opted by white supremacists other fascist types because it’s about impossible to tell at a glance whether you’re looking at “prayer warriors” or “Prayer Warriors”) or whatever – believe they have a decent shot of getting away with it during antifascist demonstrations, they will absolutely murder, and their traitorous minions and lapdogs in law enforcement and the judiciary will do everything possible to facilitate oppression. One need look no further than Kyle Rittenhouse to validate that the American legal system has fully established a pathway to the open murder of antifascists during street protests.
Fortunately for the sane and decent among us, there are other tools in the box. Not every legislator and judge supports this and those who don’t need to know we’re behind them. The ACLU and other civic groups have active chapters in Texas who should already be activated on this. If you are a Texas citizen you have local legislators you can contact. This list gives you the phone contact information for every state representative. This one has your state senators. Some of them also include e-mail contact, but this is definitely more of a phone call situation anyway.
You may consider saying something like “The oppression and targeting of trans children and their families is not just scientifically and morally wrong and a direct assault on the fundamental rights of humanity which are the basis of our democracy. This order is an unquestionable attempt to employ tactics of persecution, and terrorism intended not only to oppress trans people but to intimidate their allies into silence and criminalize those allies who are medical, psychological, or psychiatric professionals, as well as the parents and other family and friends of trans minors in transition. The people of Texas will not stand for this, nor will we support anyone who does, regardless of party.”
You may consider reaching out to companies in the state encouraging them to do business in a less fascist environment, but don’t expect a great response there; fascism and Nazism are great for business. Maybe an approach like refusing to participate in SXSW would be useful; maybe it would be more effective to triple the size; that’s not my decision to make, but certainly activists and citizens in Texas should be having these conversations right now.
We’re not in the 80’s and 90’s anymore, when we should have been taking all of this kind of behavior more seriously and putting a stop to it before it got out of hand. We can’t keep pretending that if we just ignore it, it’ll go away. We can’t keep pretending that as long as it’s not us personally being persecuted, that this hasn’t gotten out of hand. We did that for decades.
Now it’s out of hand, and the good people of Texas are going to have to figure out how to get their state back from the Nazis when it appears half the voters in the state, at least, don’t want the Nazis to go away because they are Nazis.
It’s not up to me to tell y’all what to do…but you damned sure better do something, fast.
Because even if you’re not trans yourself, nor a parent of a trans person, or even know a trans person, two things are certain: that trans people are human beings, and that if these human beings can be treated this way, so can you.
Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.
The man who fractured Martin Gugino’s skull is out on bail, along with the only other officer of dozens who witnessed the assault and did nothing.
We still have an avowed and publicly declared fascist controlling the executive branch, and scores of not-so-publicly declared fascists in Congress, to say nothing of a judiciary that has been filled with rot.
22 states still have no legal age requirement for marriage, with parental consent – “parental consent” being a mechanism used for thousands of years to legitimize pedophilia.
8 states still forbid atheists from holding office.
There are still uncountable millions without health insurance – 44 million *before* COVID, and untold millions more since. Health care is still treated as a benefit of employment rather than a human right.
Profit interests still hold power – in some cases nearly absolute power – in our prisons and criminal justice system, our schools, our hospitals, and our elections.
Women still aren’t paid the same as men.
Thousands of police with records of violence, including both domestic violence and illegal assaults of captives, continue to be employed.
Nothing, still, has been done to help the over half a million homeless people, including about 18 thousand unaccompanied, unsheltered minors, in this country – again, pre-covid numbers.
Nothing, still, has been done to help the 38 million Americans living in poverty – pre-covid.
Legal abortions are still nearly impossible to obtain in vast stretches of our nation.
Most states still do not have laws requiring mandatory termination of parental rights in cases of rape.
Hundreds of police officers have walked off their jobs in recent weeks in protest against demands for accountability and transparency related to abuse of police power.
Thousands of pathetic, cowardly, entitled, overgrown infants continue to terrorize the streets of this nation with terrorist displays of deadly force and threat of violence against any and all who threaten the totalitarian oligarchy these supplicant bootlickers think is going to benefit them as long as they’ve got enough guns and MAGA hats.
Oh, and in case we’re not noticing, COVID-19’s “second wave” is happening before the first one was over because these same sniveling lickspittles can’t stop kissing their own asses long enough to grasp what “deadly pandemic” means. It probably doesn’t help that, under the guise of “freedom of speech,” much of the media and even the “president” himself continue to insist it’s not a thing, because if it was they’d lose money.
The struggle, as they say, is not merely “not over.” It’s barely begun. It’s not going to be easy. Some of us may lose our lives in this struggle, as some of us already have, to say nothing of grievous and permanently disabling injuries at the hands of militarized police and white fascist bigots who have, in at least some cases, been coddled by police rather than properly arrested and charged.
Some of us will become estranged (or further estranged) from family. Some of us will end marriages. Some of us will lose our livelihoods for speaking out. I personally have been targeted by fake “Antifa” trolls (and they ARE fake, at least one of them is well known to me and has been stalking me for decades) who outed my home address, putting nine other innocent people in danger of violence at the hands of bigots and fascists who might not like what I have to say.
None of us wants to go through that, and yet…we must. We must because decency and compassion demand it. We must because the very concepts of human freedom and dignity are at stake. We must because until the oligarchy that controls most of the planet is crushed into a bad memory, we are all a moment’s notice away from returning to the darkest of all imaginable dark ages, a world in which all the evils of the past combine with the technology of the future to create a dystopian hellscape that Orwell couldn’t have imagined in his worst nightmares.
“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”
We MUST keep fighting. MUST. It’s been a minute since anyone in this country had to truly and seriously consider whether they’re willing to risk their lives to uphold and advance the cause of human decency, compassion, and dignity; to wonder if they might just end up being a martyr for the causes of justice, equality, prosperity, and peace.
That time is now. That place is now. We who cherish genuine freedom and who seek genuine progress are looking directly into the eye of our moment in history. One hundred years from now, either this moment will be taught as the moment when we finally decided to start living up to our own hype…or it won’t be taught at all.
Nazi rally of SS and SA troops in Nuremberg, Germany, 1935. Image public domain via US National Archives & Wikimedia Commons.
In my last article I discussed some broad generalities that empower and normalize the slow-motion fascist occupation of the United States Government. Now, let’s start talking about solutions.
I’ve asserted that this occupation exists and is actively working to reshape our nation.
Based on the feedback, that’s not a real hopeful message, and it wasn’t intended to be. It’s not happy news, and we all need a swift kick in the butt for letting things get this far.
Beating ourselves up even more, however, isn’t going to solve the problem. Feeling hopeless…well, it sure isn’t my goal to make people feel that way, at the same time I’m forced to think that it’s not a bad thing. There are millions of people in this country who feel, and have felt, that hopelessness every single day of our lives, and maybe it’s not a bad thing for the shoe to be on the other foot, so to speak. In spite of that, though, wallowing in self-recrimination (or inducing you to do so) isn’t my purpose in writing.
Now is the time to stop wallowing in it and start looking within ourselves and at the greater society as a whole and decide what we’re going to do about it, what we need to do about it, if we intend to have hope at all, let alone successfully end the occupation.
Step one is always: look in the mirror. Look at the accouterments of your life. Look at your own behavior. Do you sit and say nothing when the drunk uncle starts preaching MAGA at the family reunion? If you’re white, do you just sort of laugh uncomfortably when your white friends tell “n****r” jokes? That’s a surface thing, right there. A glaring, enormous bit of personal behavior you can change to help undermine all of the thought and behavior patterns that empower and normalize fascist thinking. Stop flinching. We all own this, and we’re all going to have to take these steps one way or another.
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Maybe in your world, the aggressions aren’t so cut and dried. Maybe instead of wearing white hoods and talking about what has eight legs and says “Hodedo,” Uncle Bigot is more into the what-abouts. Like every time a cop kills a person who was no real threat to them, pulling out the ‘what about his criminal record’ and ‘why didn’t he cooperate’ and ‘black on black crime’ tropes. What are the assumptions in that thinking? Don’t we all, to some degree or another, find ourselves thinking in these terms? Even I, anti-authoritarian as I am, get a laugh out of Det. Olivia Benson illegally breaking in to a suspects apartment while they’re mid-coitus and making a joke about “exigent circmstances, I heard a woman scream,” or watching some doofus on COPS try to tell the officer arresting him that he hasn’t smoked pot while he’s got a joint behind his ear in plain sight of the camera.
I kind of hate to give up that guilty pleasure, that schadenfreude. We all do it, it’s just part of human nature to get a little personal lift out of going “look at that idiot!” But back to the mirror – how do these narratives normalize fascist authoritarianism? As others have pointed out, why are the internal affairs investigators in police procedurals always written as the “bad guys” who are just interfering in the ability of a “good cop who isn’t afraid to break the rules” to get his man? Why do police portrayals in general come down to either egregious violations of civil rights normalized under the guise of “justice,” or comically inept rubes who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of?
Is it sinking in yet?
We’re gonna have to give some of these things up. Here’s another thought – why are our schoolchildren (and I’ll get you did it to) taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, before they’re taught how to uphold the values that flag ostensibly represents? Being the little social outcast I am, I stopped participating in like fourth grade, but this isn’t about me patting myself on the back for being so woke – there’s enough of that shallow, empty garbage on the internet. What I want to know is, what are you teaching your kids about that flag?
Because it’s parenting too, right? We thrive in this country on authoritarian parenting. While hard, recent data is difficult to come by, indications are that somewhere between 60 and 90% of parents still believe that spanking is an acceptable form of discipline (PDF), even though every serious study of the issue in the last fifty years has unambiguously said it’s not just ineffective but highly counter-effective.
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Yet we continue to do it, don’t we? We’ll say with a complete lack of self-awareness “my parents spanked me and I turned out fine,” even though we manifestly didn’t because we turned out to be someone who thinks hitting a child is okay, and it’s not.
We’ll argue back and forth all day long about teaching “respect,” but we’re not teaching respect; we’re teaching fear of authority and rule by force, aren’t we? Isn’t it true, and isn’t it time we accepted as true, that if we’re doing our jobs properly our kids are absolutely going to rebel against us and push back against our values and demand that we validate and justify those values whether doing so makes us comfortable or not? Are you a parent who falls back to “because I said so” and “as long as you live in my house,” instead of being able to admit and discuss our own flaws in thinking, or for that matter to effectively explore and explain our values?
How does that normalize unquestioning fealty to authority, and how does that empower and normalize what ultimately becomes fascism in our kids’ thinking? Have you really thought about that? Have you looked inside yourself and asked whether you, yourself, haven’t been normalized and acclimated to authoritarianism – which is the root of fascism – far more deeply than you realized? Or have you decided that it’s just “easier” to say “because I said so” rather than taking the chance of having to defend your position and coming to the realization that you can’t?
Nobody said this was going to be easy. In fact I’m trying to make clear that it’s very much going to be hard. Even those of us who have been going over these things in our minds and making adjustments for years still have plenty of work to do. What I’ve written here isn’t an all-encompassing plan of action; it’s a start. The point I’m making – or trying to, in my clumsy way – is that it starts with us. You, me, your crazy aunt, your kindly old gramma who keeps making the snide remarks about der Schwarze.
Your kindly old gramma does that because when you don’t ask her to stop, that makes it okay for her. Your crazy uncle probably cares a whole lot less about worshiping Trump than he does about gaining attention and feeling like people think he’s smart, because nobody’s bothered telling him that they really don’t. Your drunk brother-in-law yammers on about “the antifa terrorists” because nobody around him has bothered standing up to that ignorance, or even pointing out the basic linguistic reality that “opposing anti-fascism” is “fascism.”
These are tough conversations to have. They may cost you relationships and friendships that you’d rather not lose. This process is not painless…but getting here wasn’t painless for millions of disenfranchised, marginalized, and oppressed people, whether that’s a race, a sexual identity, or just being someone like me who doesn’t fit comfortably into other people’s pigeonholes.
While I can’t really make it easy for you, perhaps these thoughts will help. I’ve gone through these processes myself many times, and continue to do so daily. Just try to remember; for every dominant social group you’re a member of, there are thousands of people who have been hurt by our passive-aggressive refusal to stand up against the status quo of nationalism, xenophobia, othering, and so forth.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the culture in which you were raised. In accepting that responsibility and living up to it, you become part of the improvement of the culture as a whole.
A little cognitive dissonance experienced in the process of trying to grow to be better people really isn’t that much to ask. Is it?
There is a fascist occupation happening in our country.
The United States of America is currently occupied by fascists, up to and including the President.
That’s not hyperbole. I wish it were. Frankly, I’ve been saying that we’re in a state of coup for years now, but it’s finally to the point where no reasonable person can deny it.
You need to understand that this did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For forty years, fascists – calling themselves “constitutional republicans,” “christian fundamentalists,” and other dishonest labels – have been deliberately occupying every level of government in this country. It’s part of their strategy, and it’s been widely reported since at least the late 1980’s, and we all just ignored it because “it can’t happen here” and “we’re better than that.”
In 2016, they took the White House…or so you’d think, but the reality is that happened in 1980 and we didn’t notice.
None of this is an accident. It’s planned, it’s been planned, and it’s been a long time coming, and we didn’t just let it happen, we helped it happen. We helped it happen by getting gung-ho and enlisting after 9-11, we helped it happen by allowing the military-industrial complex to not just eat up a sizeable portion of our GDP but to entangle itself in the profit margins of the elite, so as to ensure they too would help advance the coup.
We helped it by deifying Ronald Reagan, who was a really terrible human being, a white supremacist, anti-environmentalist, homophobe, bigot, and misogynist…but he was so darned polite and well-spoken and affable while he did it, and it made us feel all warm and fuzzy about hating the mythic “welfare queens” and ignoring the AIDS crisis because it was a “gay disease.”
This is starting to make you angry, reading this article. You’re thinking to yourself “hey wait a minute now, I’m not part of this, and attacking that nice old man Reagan is just a step too far!”
But I could literally hyperlinkeverywordinthisarticletoadifferent story about how this has been happening for decades, and some of the articles are decades old. We didn’t listen.
Military contractors, police contractors, and yes even the people who produce cop shows, wittingly or unwittingly, have all been footsoldiers and communication directors for the slow rolling conversion of this nation into a fascist state.
They’ve done it through propaganda, they’ve done it through appealing to venal material greed, they’ve done it through appealing to our egos, they’ve done it through programming the very same young men and women who sign up to defend this nation to feel their fealty to a flag, a political party, icons, and symbols while slowly fading out even the most basic notions of common decency and social contract from education under the rubric of “fighting socialism.”
We haven’t just been had, we’ve been taken. I’ve got my own responsibility to bear in that – I should have been screaming this much more loudly from the rooftops decades ago, but like a fascist occupant of a group that thinks it’s a manners and common ground organization is so good at arguing, you’ve got to make the message palatable, right? Because politics done right is politics that destroys a democracy without the democracy realizing who’s firing on it. Because the only thing Occupy Democrats is occupying is their own material greed. Because people of no ethics and fewer morals can push people like me right out of a potentially good organization with manipulative claptrap like being “cognizant of my agenda,” an agenda that didn’t exist and an accusation that I should have punched in the mouth when it was made.
We’re all guilty on this one, or at least most of us, even if only by virtue of having bought in to any number of tropes and propaganda narratives designed to make us doubt the strength of our SYSTEMS when it’s not the systems but the PEOPLE who are the problem.
If we’re lucky, it’s gonna be a long ride.
If we’re not, pretty soon they’re just gonna stop even trying to pretend, and we’re going to be crushed. Including Mr. Cognizant Of Your Agenda and Mr. Occupy Democrats and Matthew “Addicting Info” Desmond and all the other accidental and deliberate double agents who have all contributed to the coup in their own way. Usually their own way is by trying to gain money and ego boosts by destroying political discourse with pandering and shallow sloganeering and refusal to stand up and speak truth without shame under the stupid, self-serving rubric of popular appeal and “growing the page” and “getting more likes.”
I have watched organizations not just abandon their principles but allow them to be turned into weapons – and some of those I *have* warned about in plain text, repeatedly, but still pulled my punches because I have friends whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt and whose friendship I didn’t want to lose who are major players in those organizations.
I don’t think most of those folks are wittingly working for the enemy, mind you. I think they’re well-intended and mostly just like me, trying to find the best way to avoid hurting people’s feelings.
We’ve allowed calls for civility and decorum to be weaponized, and our own best intentions turned into tools of treason against our country.
I should have stood up taller, spoken more loudly, but until now, nobody would have listened anyway.
I think some people – and some of you are reading this, or at least there’s no reason you shouldn’t be – are much more ready to listen now than they were six months ago, or five years ago, or ten, or twenty.
There’s still time to turn this around and be the nation we’ve been pretending to be…but it’s going to take work, and it’s going to cost some people some friendships, and maybe worse.
Suit up, kids. This really is the “moment” I’ve been telling you was coming for a long time, and it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better.
Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.
