Author: Alan Buddug

The US has failed dramatically in its response to COVID-19 — as have other far-right nations. This correlation between cultural conservativism and the inability to rationally and responsibly deal with the pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of American conservatives.

All viruses are contagious in one way or another, and all viruses mutate. Most mutations result in a virus that doesn’t work, but some result in a more effective virus. The rate at which these more effective viruses are created depends almost entirely on how many people are infected with the virus, and a successful mutation can’t be successful unless it can infect a new host.

The medical community’s guidance on COVID-19 was designed to accomplish two things: 1) To save as many people as possible from death, and 2) To prevent the virus from mutating into a new strain before it could be defeated with a vaccine. But instead of going along with that guidance (masks, social distancing, closing schools, closing bars, restaurants, etc.), Americans chose to fight against that guidance as did people in places like Britain, South Africa, and Brazil.

The result of those poor decisions is that the virus has won — there are now at least four versions of COVID-19:
1) Wuhan: Original COVID-19
2) UK: B.1.1.7
3) South Africa: B.1.351
4) Brazil: P.1

I say that the virus has won because it is adapting faster than we can get people vaccinated — but this is only because so many people chose to do the wrong thing. While some experts say it will take 7 years to get COVID-19 under control, other experts have been saying for a long time that we will not get it under control at all.

You may be aware that in the US there is a very strong correlation between conservativism and age, and if you’ve been reading our website, you know that Democrats and Republicans are both conservatives. Because the deaths caused by COVID-19 mostly affect elderly people, COVID-19 is a disease that kills conservatives.

The upshot of all this is that conservatives have chosen to kill conservatives. It’s not really surprising — we’ve learned over the last 5 years that conservatives would rather die than accept that their worldview is incorrect. While the QAnon people live in a more fantastical reality than regular Republicans, and Republicans live in a more fantastical reality than Democrats, Democrats are also living in a fantastical reality. Those three realities share a common thread — a desperate need to sustain their way of life, and purposeful rewriting of any part of reality that conflicts with that.

The US response to COVID-19 (meaning the combined response of the government and the American people as a whole) has become an enormous conservative suicide machine. It’s like Jonestown except that the mob is even more enthusiastic about drinking the Kool-Aid because not every cup is poisoned. Over 465,000 people have died so far, and I would guess that is over 400,000 conservatives, and with the virus adapting faster than our response, I think we can eventually (years from now) achieve a death count of conservatives that is in the millions.

Consider what this will do to elections. In 2020, there are many elections that were decided by a very small difference in votes. This disease-caused demographic shift — in conjunction with already existing demographic shifts — might well end conservative dominance of the US much more quickly than we had expected that to happen. That won’t result in the end of bad governance in the US — because it just means the Democrats will gain solid control of national government — but it will mean the end of the legitimization of the truly looney bullshit that we’ve been dealing with lately.

As I mentioned, this relationship between COVID-19 response failure and conservativeness doesn’t just exist in the US. This death-induced shift to the left will be a global phenomenon.

It’s funny that conservatives are convinced that COVID-19 is a conspiracy, and yet the “conspiracy” that’s really hurting conservativism is their own misinformation about COVID-19. Although, maybe that misinformation was purposefully planted in online conservative communities by Satanic, baby-eating lizard people in order to defeat the forces of good, Christian, capitalist heroes. (It wasn’t.)

A consistent thread in American politics — going back to before the US declared its independence from Britain — is that there are Satanists among us, organizing, controlling things, and coming for our children. One of the most prominent features of QAnon is this very thing — they say that the Democratic party is made up of a cabal of Satanists that are also running an organized pedophilia operation. It’s not true, but let’s break down this whole thing and figure out whether there are any Satanists, who they are, whether they are controlling things, and whether there are any organized pedophilia rings hiding in plain sight among powerful people.

1. Are there Satanists?

I don’t know about you, but when I think of what a Satanist is, I think of a person that a) believes Satan is a real entity, and b) worships that evil entity. To believe Satan is real, you’d have to take important parts of the Bible — the parts referencing Satan — as real, but then you’d have to turn the moral lessons of the Bible on their head and declare that the ethic of Satan is the superior ethic.

The Church of Satan is real. It was founded by Anton LaVey, who based it entirely on the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand. There’s just one problem — neither LaVey nor Rand believed that Satan (or God) are real. Rand was outspoken in her atheism — she did not believe God or any other supernatural force exists. LaVey didn’t believe in any such thing, either, but in contrast to Rand, he saw Satan as a potent symbol of rebellion against selflessness and the moral superiority of selfishness. He referred to the Church of Satan as a “cosmic joy buzzer” — an edifice designed specifically to freak people out. All of the offshoots of the Church of Satan have followed this same idea — embracing Satan as a symbol while not actually believing in the literal existence of Satan (or God).

To be clear: Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” (a philosophy based on the subjective perspective of a malignant narcissist) and Anton LaVey’s Satanism are evil — they’re just not something you could call “worshipping Satan”. They aren’t what normal people would consider “real Satanism”. To find a “real” Satanist, we’d need to find someone who sees both the Bible and the work of Ayn Rand as foundational to their ideology because a real Satanist would have to believe that Satan is real.

Look! I found one! His name is Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan is a former politicians who served in US Congress from 1999 to 2019. He was quite vocal about his enthusiasm for both his Catholic faith and Ayn Rand; therefore, he is a Satanist. Would he admit to being a Satanist? Probably not.

2. Are these Satanist controlling things?

“Controlling” might be too strong a word, but the Tea Party Republicans (including Paul Ryan), with their dual devotion to Christian ideology and Ayn Rand’s “evil is good” philosophy, are the force that has brought the Republican party as a whole to the place it is in today. Their anti-science and anti-community positions are both manifestations of an ideology that puts the selfish individual above all else, much like Satan put his own glorification above the Will of God.

To be anti-science, you have to believe that your own ideas about something are more valid than the facts and interpretation provided by experts in their fields. To be anti-community, you have to believe that your happiness, comfort and safety are more important than everyone else’s. The Tea Party has been a campaign of selfishness and selfishness is winning.

3. Are Satanists in positions of power running organized pedophilia rings?

In this world, the closest thing we have to a powerful group running an organized pedophilia ring would be the Catholic Church and its campaign to hide the sexual abuse priests have committed against their own parishioners. The Catholic Church doesn’t seem to be encouraging the abuse, but when it occurs, they have attempted to hide the abuse and instead of punishing the pedophile, they’ve relocated him, which only provides him with new victims.

To be fair, there seems to be a shift in the church hierarchy’s position on abuse by priest and it is led by Pope Francis. I am not yet certain how serious they are about this shift, and of course, we will need to see if the policy changes stick after a new Pope is inaugurated.

But are these priests Satanists? I think it is possible, but there’s no evidence to that effect. They have not publicly endorsed a Satanic ethic, unlike Tea Party Republicans.

There are other groups running human trafficking rings and some of those traffic children. But those are not “powerful people” — they are common criminals. Recently, two FBI agents were killed and three wounded while attempting to apprehend a pedophile, and even wealthy pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were eventually taken down by the US federal government (despite many politicians, including Donald Trump, having benefited from Epstein’s money).

In short, there’s absolutely no evidence of any powerful group of politicians running a pedophile ring.

4. Are Democrats pedophiles?

In terms of whether Democrats are more likely to be pedophiles, the answer seems to be “no”. In fact, we see in Republican ideology ideas that support pedophilia — specifically, the rejection of sexual consent (Republicans seem to not even understand what sexual consent is) and the rejection of the responsibility of male sexual aggressors in sexual assault (i.e., the “she was asking for it” defense).

If you look at political sex scandals, Democratic sex scandals are typically a man making non-consensual and offensive sexual overtures toward an adult woman. A great example would be Anthony Wiener who kept texting women pictures of his wiener. Another would be Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinksy which, though technically consensual, involved a problematic power dynamic and violation of Clinton’s marital vows (we presume).

On the other hand, Republican sex scandals tend to be a lot more repugnant. Here are some examples:
– Republican Ray Moore had a habit of pursuing adolescent girls (children) at the mall (he is a pedophile); Evangelicals and Trump endorsed him anyway.
– Republican Newt Gingrich was a serial adulterer, yet was one of the most outspoken attackers of Bill Clinton over the same issue.
– Republican Donald Trump had an extramarital affair with at least one porn star, was a rampant womanizer, bragged about sexually assaulting women, bragged about viewing nude adolescent girls (children) in the context of a beauty pageant (this makes him a pedophile), and was accused of raping one of his three wives.
– Rev. George Alan Rekers is a prominent anti-gay activist and part of two anti-gay organizations: Family Research Council and National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). He also cheated on his wife with a male prostitute while he was on vacation.
– Republican Dennis Hastert was a serial molester of boys (a pedophile). He was also a staunchly opposed to gay rights and abortion while he served in the US Congress.

Speaking of abortion, there’s a long trend of Republican anti-abortion lawmakers paying for women to have abortions.

Even among those Republicans who manage to practice what they preach, we see a weird belief that they can’t control their sexual urges. For example, Mike Pence won’t allow himself to be alone with a woman for fear that little Mike will compel him to do something immoral. Apparently, he is aware that he has no self-control.

Finally, Janus and Janus (1993) found that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to participate in BDSM. Given their view of sexual consent, this fact is quite concerning.

In conclusion, if we are deciding whether Democrats or Republicans are the most sexually noxious, that award goes to the Republicans, and includes the award for the most pedophilia of the two parties. Really, it’s no contest. If you want a more interesting competition, perhaps consider comparing Republicans to Libertarians; I don’t know how that would turn out.

Related: No, Biden did not lower the age of consent.

CONCLUSION

Every part of QAnon’s Satanic pedophile conspiracy theory is not only wrong but specifically designed to point you away from the real pedophiles and Satanists.

People don’t believe me when I tell them that the world is completely failing to address climate change, and that the worst scientific predictions are going to come true as a result. Typically, they’ll point to carbon capture technology as one of the innovations that will not only save us, but allow humanity to keep doing what it is doing without even so much as an inconvenience or uncomfortable moment.

However, carbon capture is a lot like recycling in that it is hypothetically a good idea, but because it was implemented by a fossil fuel industry (or adjacent industry) that is desperate to fool the public so it can keep on raking in enormous profits, it is actually an elaborate ruse.

Related: How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

The Petra Nova plant in Thompson, Texas (outside of Houston) used to be the only Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) plant in the entire USA, but then it closed near the end of January, just barely making it to four years of operation. The details of its operating model — and the reason it shut down — illustrate quite effectively that CSS was an elaborate ruse meant to convince comfortable liberals that the problem of climate change was being addressed, while basically not doing anything about climate change.

When I imagine CSS, I think of the carbon being converted to little black cubes, and then maybe they sell them as dice or something. Of course, in my imagination, the sequestration process doesn’t take any extra energy — it might even be powered by the wind or solar. That’s not what was happening at all.

In reality, the Petra Nova plant was a complex made up of four coal-fired power plants and a smaller natural gas plant. Only one of the four coal-fired power plants was using CSS, and the CSS process was powered by the natural gas plant. The “sequestered” carbon wasn’t turned into little cubes, but rather the scrubbers recovered carbon gas that was then used to pump into an oil field; this process increased the amount of oil that could be extracted from the fields where it was used. I don’t know whether the gas was able to escape after being used in this way, but my guess is that they didn’t care whether it did or not, so it probably did.

This is capitalism, so the whole project had to be “financially sustainable” which means that when the price of oil plummeted due to the pandemic, they shut down the CSS process completely — not that it matters, because it wasn’t ever really sequestering any carbon. Now, renewable energy has become cheap enough that it no longer makes sense to run coal-fired plants at all, making the entire “clean coal” propaganda campaign from the right wing all the more absurd.

Let me just emphasize: Because the CSS process was powered by a natural gas plant that didn’t use CSS, and because the recovered gasses are just injected into an oil field (and ultimately re-released) and thus used to extract more oil than otherwise would have been extracted, CSS actually produces more carbon emissions than would have been produced without it. It’s a really bad joke.

Here is a more detailed article about the Petra Nova plant by Molly Taft, published at Gizmodo.

I don’t want you to give up hope that we can do something about climate change (although there’s no longer any hope of “stopping” it — we can only potentially keep it from killing us all at this point). What I hope you take away from the Petra Nova ruse (and the recycling ruse) is that capitalism will always fail to do the right thing. Solutions to climate change exist, but they exist outside of capitalism. If we continue to put capital in charge of climate, it will kill us all.

Today is the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance which marks the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945, and I am saddened to see in the news that it appears as if the machine of liberalism is set to again allow the Trump regime to avoid the consequences of their actions. The Republican party has gradually taken the role of open promoters of fascism since the Tea Party movement first appeared in 2009, and today Republicans in the US Senate are taking the absurd position that Donald Trump cannot be punished for the sedition he incited while he was in office, because he is no longer in office.

I might ask if I punch a Nazi in the face while I’m at work, but then quit my job immediately thereafter, does that stop the law from convicting me of assault? Can I just wait four years and go back to the same job without consequences? Seems like the answers to those questions as it applies to me is no. It seems like the implicit purpose of resistance to impeachment is to facilitate the next round of fascism.

During Trump’s time in office, we weren’t just heading “towards” fascism; the United States attained actual clear-cut fascism when we built concentration camps (complete with purposefully inadequate healthcare and torturous living conditions that actually killed people) and separated immigrant children permanently from their parents (a total of over 5400 children were separated from their families, over 500 permanently).

Not only were immigrants coming from south of the US on the list of people to be the victims of genocide, but also Muslims, LGBTQ people, anyone on the left, and yes, Jewish people (declaring a group a “nationality” is a first step toward declaring them an enemy, and attacks against Jewish people increased markedly during Trump’s time in office). The ongoing low-grade genocide against Black America was ratcheted up a bit, and women weren’t subjected to genocide, but instead marginalized via Trump’s Supreme Court appointments. In the long term, I expect that Democrats and even moderate Republicans would have been added to that list. (Apologies to all the groups I’ve likely left out.)

Thank goodness our democratic institutions held, right? No, that’s not what happened at all. Rather, the Trump regime was able to demonstrate over and over again that America’s political bureaucracy was powerless to stop them — and that trend continues today with the resistance to impeachment by fascists in the Republican party. Make no mistake — any politician opposing the (wholly inadequate) impeachment of Donald Trump is a fascist.

The things that stopped the Trump regime from instituting a fully-functioning fascist state and genocide were two things: Incompetence and cowardice.

The incompetence of Trump was truly breathtaking, but shouldn’t be surprising. Fascism and a narcissistic culture go hand-in-hand, and the problem with a narcissistic leader is that they know very little and think they know everything. It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect on steroids. Not only did he constantly make bad decisions, but he fired most of the experts on his staff that could have helped him succeed. In particular, firing Steve Bannon was a monumental mistake. And, of course, we saw the incompetence of Trump’s cult on January 6 when they tried to overthrow the government in a truly idiotic way.

The cowardice manifested in Trump refusing to commit to overthrowing the government. Had he done so — had he ever actually clearly given the explicit order that his followers were so desperate to receive — the outcome might have been very, very different. And, again, his followers also demonstrated a great deal of cowardice. We can attribute all this cowardice to narcissism as well.

What we are looking at, then, is a coup that killed itself while the established order was powerless to do anything about it. On the Holocaust Day of Remembrance, it’s popular to say “Never Again” but that’s a wish that requires material action to manifest. In the meantime, there’s every indication that it will happen again, and next time their leader will be more competent than Donald Trump.

America’s biggest problem — the one that prohibits any kind of real progress toward democracy — is its culture of narcissism. We usually think of narcissism as a personality disorder which is “characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for other people” but in the US, a prolonged campaign of propaganda has made narcissism into a core part of our culture.

The most important part of this pro-narcissism propaganda is that it redefined narcissistic behavior and traits as being normal — even going so far as to make us believe that narcissism is a natural and good part of every human being’s personality. This not only erases narcissism as a disorder but also portrays the narcissist as the ideal person. Ayn Rand called this big lie “The Virtue of Selfishness” and it is part of her pseudo-philosophy of Objectivism, which is not at all objective but rather a subjective take on reality from a pro-narcissist point of view.

Ayn Rand said that, “…rational interests of men do not clash — that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.” In other words, Rand claimed that a society based entirely on selfishness would not have any conflict, and then she went on to connect that idea to capitalism, effectively saying that the only path to a peaceful society would be unbridled capitalism. (It’s funny because the whole point of capitalism is to achieve a level of ownership that makes it so you don’t have to work — the aspiring capitalist wants to just rake in the profits while others work for them, and they take all the credit.)

There’s a step further into evil in her ideology, though. Not only did she say a society based on selfishness would not have conflict, but she also claimed that since every human being is innately narcissistic, that anyone claiming to be working for the greater good is a fraud and the cause of societal conflict. She was claiming, essentially, that good people are the real evil.

Even those who are not narcissists are trained to emulate the behavior of a narcissist. If you refuse to compete, or if you try to do the right thing, people will tell you that you are foolish, that “it isn’t going to work” and in fact it doesn’t work because nothing works without the organized support of the whole community. In our case, the whole community is working to fight each other to the death — though usually in an economic way rather than by physical combat — and so that is what “works”.

Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is the Bible of evil, but even Americans who claim that they don’t like Ayn Rand support this basic idea — that everyone is essentially narcissistic, so society is evil, and the only way to make it less evil is to double-down on selfishness. In my experience, the only people who are willing to consider the idea that people can be better are on the left. That does not include Democrats who are more than happy to agree with Rand on the point of innate human narcissism, despite the fact that they usually say they don’t agree with Rand.

The social science is quite clear, though: Not only are human beings born with empathy and concern for other people, but those anti-narcissistic functions are one of the most important keys to our specie’s success on this planet — if not the most important one. The cultural narcissism of the USA — and the entire west — may provide an advantage in the relatively short term, but it comes with horror, suffering, and ultimately, destruction. That innate goodness that we are born with is destroyed in our early years through the peculiar way we raise children.

Narcissists are not concerned with the long term. One of the most important components of the personality disorder — as well as the cultural disorder — is a fixation on short-term outcomes. This is why the “time horizon” for corporations is typically in the range of three to five years, in contrast with the time horizon for sustainable societies which is more like seven generations — that comes out to well over one hundred years.

This lack of concern for the future — and especially the future of people who are not me — is the primary driver behind climate change denial. There is more than one kind of climate change denial; there is denying that there is climate change, there is denying that people cause climate change, there is denying that it is a significant problem, and there is denying that it is a significant problem now. However, I’ve come to believe that these are all the result of the same thing: Denial that it is going to affect me, and that’s why even Democrats — who are supposedly pro-environment — are opposed to doing what is required to mitigate the predicament. They think it will not affect them, and they simply do not care if it affects anyone else — they don’t even care if it ends humanity.

The climate change debate really is narcissism in a nutshell. The majority of American adults — well over 100 million people — would prefer to roll the dice on murdering their own children or grandchildren and extinguishing all human beings than be in any way inconvenienced or less comfortable. It isn’t just the challenge of imagining a probabilistic future that is causing this failure. These same Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — continue to vote for wars of choice and the overthrow of other nations because they just do not care about other people, and they believe these things provide them with a benefit.

As we now face a growing probability of human extinction from climate change (and other issues), most Americans just don’t care. They see it as an inevitability that will come near the end of their lives. Interestingly, this timing has a lot to do with narcissism. Narcissists can’t disconnect the end of themselves from the end of the world, and see no point to the world continuing after their death — because they really only care about themselves. They would rather destroy the world they live in, in fact, than admit that the false, grandiose idea that they have of themselves is false — even if that kills them, too. That’s why this purposeful careening toward destruction is an essential part of the culture of narcissism.

Those that do care about others are locked into this same path, though, because they continue to believe Ayn Rand’s lies about the nature of human beings. The first step forward is for all of us to admit the truth: That human beings can be authentically good.

On Friday, January 23, 2021, Facebook conducted a second purge of leftist accounts. As with the first purge (August 19, 2020), no explanation of any kind was offered to those whose accounts were disabled, and there appear to be no conditions under which Facebook will reinstate the accounts. Some of the individuals whose accounts were disabled are detailed in an article from the World Socialist Website, but we’ve also noted that several of our Missouri comrades who somehow escaped the first purge lost their accounts on Friday.

Facebook hasn’t made any public statement about this latest wave of leftist bans. We’ve had to figure out that something deliberate was happening on our own.

In the meantime, I’ve learned that at least some individuals who were promoting the falsehoods of the Qanon conspiracy theory have been warned by Facebook that they must remove any posts containing misinformation from their accounts or have them disabled. The reason Qanon people are getting a warning and an opportunity to remove the bullshit, while the left is not getting this opportunity is twofold.

First, leftists are not posting bullshit. Our posts are the truth, so there’s nothing to correct.

Second, Facebook — like all of neoliberalism — wants to hide that the left exists at all. By hiding it, they don’t have to address it. If they addressed it, people would figure out that neoliberalism is a scam and that the left represents a general approach to getting out of it (we can certainly disagree on the details of how to do that). The Democratic party wants you to believe that they — a near-right party representing the ruling elite of global capitalism — are the left, so they don’t want the real left around for comparison. Renegade Cut covered this well in this video.

In contrast, Qanon is best defeated by shining a light on it because if you hear about it all at once, it seems silly (it only tricks people who are sucked into it slowly). Qanon is basically what happens when you try to figure out what’s broken about society, but you’ve already predetermined that the answer can’t be capitalism. It is a Rube Goldberg machine meant to solve a problem while simultaneously completely avoiding the correct answer. This is why capitalists waited so long to crack down on Qanon’s misinformation — it didn’t seem like a threat. Rather, it seemed like just another component of the pro-capitalist lies that we’re all swimming in — until it went after Congress and Joe Biden.

Remember, Trump had done several impeachable things before the House of Representatives decided to actually impeach him the first time. Concentration camps, stealing children from their families, banning Muslims from coming into the US, and ejecting trans soldiers from our military were all fine, apparently, because none of those affected the power of capital. The action they would not tolerate was him going after Biden, who had already been chosen as the next President by the donor class.

So, basically, any leftist account that posts true criticism of capital and has a significant number of people following it will be banned by Facebook eventually, effectively extinguishing criticism of capitalism from the platform. Qanon followers are allowed to continue because they do not criticize capital — in fact, their misinformation protects capital from criticism (even if it is disruptive). It’s a smart strategy for Zuckerberg; as long as Facebook maintains its monopoly on American’s eyeballs, this approach will mean political agitation remains well below the level required for material change to occur, and he gets to keep his $100.4 billion.

The power of Facebook to silence political positions that it doesn’t like is extremely dangerous, but these bans are not a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment only requires that the US government allow free speech; it has no bearing on the behavior of a corporation. This is by design. Because we’re living under liberalism (a pseudo-democracy in which capitalists are the ruling class and can use their economic power to rule in an authoritarian fashion), and because each corporation is essentially its own little authoritarian state (some pretend to be more or less democratic, but that’s anocracy — fake democracy), they extinguish any anti-capitalist speech within their sphere of influence.

I don’t have a clear idea for how to fix this problem; however, it seems clear that part of the problem is that there is no protection for political positions and political groups. Democracy only really works if minority rights are protected, and there are many different minority groups that do have nominal civil rights protection, but political groups do not have that protection.

Misinformation is certainly a problem, but there’s a difference between “having a political position” and “spreading lies”. We can agree on the facts and still have different ideas about what to do about those facts; that’s a political position. If some people are mostly accepting of reality, while another group is rejecting reality (for whatever reason), that’s a different problem.

We know it’s not productive or nice to insult the intelligence of conservatives. We really do try not to do it. If you’re a conservative reading this, and you don’t want people treating you like you’re dumb, then I’ve got a really hot tip for you right here.

Joe Biden is not a socialist.

The Democratic party are not socialists.

That’s it. Now, I don’t know why you all keep saying that Joe Biden and his party are socialists. Maybe someone lied to you and told you that they were. Maybe you’re using the word in a way that’s not right — because someone lied to you about what it means. I don’t know.

But today, Joe Biden is going to become our new President, and he is not a socialist. He’s not a communist. He’s not an anarchist. Those of us on the left might like him if he were any of those things, but he is not and we think he’s a sack of shit.

If you want a really long explanation of all of the above, I’m adding a link to a YouTube video below. It’s extremely thorough and dense, but it’s also the whole damn thing in one YouTube video, so it is worth your time.

Now — if what you hate about Biden is something else — something that is not socialism, like, for example, globalism — we might actually agree with you.

The big question our club is chewing on right now is whether or not community defense organizations on the left, specifically, and antifascists in general should be showing up to counter Trump’s minions on January 17 when they have planned to be present at state capitals nationwide. It’s not clear whether this will be just another gathering of clowns, an organized insurrection, or something in between (like we saw on January 6).

Right now, our answer is: No, antifascists should not show up at state capitals on January 17. We also do not think antifascists should show up at the inauguration in DC on January 20.

It’s a tricky question, though. It is factually true that when fascists organize in public spaces and are not effectively shut down, it emboldens them and their next event is bigger, more dangerous, and closer to their genocidal goals. Usually, it is the left that must take on the role of countering them because the state — and the police, specifically — just doesn’t mind fascism that much. At least half of the police are themselves fascists.

If you watch the January 12 episode of Renegade Cut, you’ll see that they suggest that antifascists should always show up to counter fascists, and it’s a good argument.

Our argument for not showing up for this specific event is:

1. Right now, the police are countering Trump’s minions; Trumpers are being shut down without the left’s involvement. While this could certainly change at any moment, and may vary depending on which state capital we’re talking about, it is generally a good thing when your enemies are fighting each other. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that a few police officers and Trumpers might become better people through the experience of having to face each other as enemies. It could break the spell of misinformation driving them.
2. The left is almost universally seen as the enemy by conservative voters; these are the most powerful block of voters for both the Republican and Democratic parties. If the left shows up in a way that is visible, it allows the police and Trump’s minions to pivot toward fighting the left together. This unity would destroy the learning opportunity presented by the police and Trumpers fighting each other, allows for an alternate narrative (“both sides are bad”), and creates a very real danger of unity between Trumpers, police and complacent liberals.
3. We talk a lot about how conservatives are resistant to reality; unfortunately, this problem includes conservative Democratic voters (Bidenists). I believe that the only way they are ever going to agree to fight against fascism (both in terms of state policy and local action) is if confirmable Trumpers are allowed to do horrible things — more horrible than what happened on January 6. It’s sad and horrible, but the longer America puts off the fight against fascism, the more sad and horrible things will become. The risk is that the right wing would be so organized that the left’s absence would allow them to get control of the federal government; I absolutely do not think that’s going to happen. This particular insurrection will be crushed, even if it takes longer than we might like. In terms of an historical analog, if you look at Nazi Germany, it took the combination of humiliating defeat and the public revelation of the Nazi’s horrible crimes to get the German people as a whole to agree to shutting down fascism — and they still have the occasional Nazi pop up despite their continued strong opposition to fascism. The reason the Weimar Republic went full Nazi in the first place is because complacent liberals preferred the Nazis to the various leftists that were fighting the Nazis in the streets.
4. We have nothing to gain by defending the Biden government, or any neoliberal state government. Liberals use the left for leverage, and then ignore us or worse. From an historical perspective, the story is always the same: Liberals use the left and then destroy it.

If it seemed likely that the Biden government would fall without the help of the left, then, yes, we’d recommend defending it because the Biden government is better than any overtly fascist government would be. That does not appear to be the case, though.

We should still defend our communities, though. The first line of defense is recommending that people who are likely targets of fascist violence stay away from state capitals on January 17. The next thing to consider is any likely specific targets (whether individual people or structures) in your community. In the case of people, relocating them for the weekend is the best strategy. In terms of a structure, relocating the people who might be inside it is a great idea. In cases where you’re not able to relocate people, armed defense and/or creating barriers to violent attack would be appropriate (depending on what the people you are defending would prefer). However, because in many cases the people you will want to defend are liberals, and because we must always get their consent, you might find that there simply isn’t any way to help them because they are not willing to accept the reality of what is happening.

We are still strongly ambivalent about this issue, and could change our minds at any moment, especially if our understanding of what’s going to happen on January 17 or 20 changes dramatically. Obviously, we don’t want anyone to die, but conservatives in both parties have allowed things to get so out-of-hand that a significant death toll is now inevitable. We’re forced, then, to weigh the deaths resulting from our inaction against the deaths resulting from our taking action; right now it really seems like inaction is the correct strategy, but we’re all going to have to reconsider the conditions on the ground every single day.

In terms of where antifascists should focus their energy, it’s our opinion currently that public education should be the number one priority. We have 110 million Americans who are completely lost right now. When we started this club in 2016, we thought everyone just knew what fascism is and that it should be stopped — we thought people understood basic political concepts; we sure were wrong about that.