Author: Alan Buddug

Every time I talk to a Democrat about Republicans, they say something about how, “Republicans always vote against their own interests,” which is interesting because Democrats definitely vote against their own interests.

So, what does it mean to vote against your own interests?

It really depends on what you want, and what you believe to be true.

Do you want financial success?
Do you want individual liberty?
Do you want cultural hegemony?
Do you want your enemies to be destroyed?

Economics

Republican-controlled governments cut taxes in a very specific way: They cut everyone’s taxes, cut programs that benefit the poor and middle class, and then passively allow tax cuts to anyone who is not wealthy to expire. The net result is that the wealthy end up with a lot more money. Wealthy people tend to hold on to additional wealth because they don’t need to spend it, so these tax cuts slow down the economy, which causes an overall downward trend. Many Americans, however, see themselves being on the brink of striking it rich, and so they see these tax cuts as beneficial to them, personally (while I agree that they probably are not about to strike it rich, there’s nothing attractive about that kind of negativity). Moreover, they’ve been taught that any effort by the government to move wealth from the rich to the poor is communism/socialism, and that communism/socialism will destroy the economy (this belief is also popular among Democrats).

Finally, racists believe that the US government uses progressive taxation systems (i.e., where the wealthy pay a higher percentage of taxes than people with less money) as a sneaky means of giving money to ethnic minorities (especially Black people) and taking it away from white people, and anti-Semites believe the same thing, but as a sneaky means of siphoning money away from Christians and giving it to Jewish people and their allies (which does often include Black people according to this conspiracy theory). If you don’t believe that a change in the tax code truly benefits you financially, are you really voting against your own interests if you oppose it?

If you are a racist, an anti-communist, or someone who believes you are about to be rich, voting Republican is not against your financial interests. Keep in mind that these ideas might not occur together in one person; i.e., you could have someone who is anti-communist and believes they are about to be rich, but they are not racist. They’d have to be willing to tolerate racists if they vote Republican, but if you’re living in a conservative community, tolerating racists has been normalized and is required for us all to function under capitalism (e.g., to hold a job) and be on good terms with our families, so you can see where it might not be a deal-killer.

Democrat-controlled governments create more relatively more economic success for the average person because they support progressive taxation — a tax system that charges a person a higher percentage of their income as tax the higher their income. However, they only support this to a point. Democrats would never support a system of taxation that reduced the power of the capitalist class (synonymous with “globalists”). Because progressive taxation allows people with less money to have a little more — even giving some a credit — and because people with less money typically spend that extra money, progressive taxation creates a more healthy economy with more money flowing between people at a higher speed. On the other hand, though, it doesn’t really allow working class people to thrive and even if there’s an issue that is extremely harmful to people, Democrats won’t solve it if it harms the financial position of the very rich.

Regarding thriving: Factually, the bureaucracy associated with doing business — which is fully supported by the Democrats — is severely prejudiced against the truly small business which cannot afford the army of financial bureaucrats and lawyers that big businesses have on staff. This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be rules, but rather that it would be simple to both simplify the process of compliance and relieve small businesses of the financial burden of compliance. Republicans at least give lip service to the idea of easing the burden of bureaucracy — though, in practice, they really mean deregulation which ends up empowering the rich and harming the working class.

So, if you want to really thrive, if you want the power of the very wealthy (which is based on money) to be curtailed, or if you want issues that are extremely harmful to everyone to be solved even if they threaten the financial position of the very rich, voting Democrat is not in your own interests.

Liberty

Positive Freedom is the freedom to do something, such as the freedom to get an abortion or the freedom to buy a gun. It might included less controversial things, like the freedom to practice your religion, or shave your head. Under our capitalism-based society, positive freedoms are frequently curtailed by your ability to pay.

Negative Freedom is the freedom from restrictions and impediments, which are typical caused by other people. Perhaps they make a law saying you can’t buy a certain thing (like a gun), or perhaps they physically stop you from going to church; these would be restrictions or impediments that would damage your freedom. As with positive freedom, you get more negative freedom under capitalism the more money you have.

Cultural Hegemony is the freedom to force other people to live in a way that allows you both positive or negative freedom. (Apologies to all the Marxists who are mad about that definition.) For example, if I want to live in a Christian society, other people are infringing on my freedom by not being Christians; if I force them to comply with Christianity, I am increasing my own personal freedom by depriving them of theirs. The most common kind of cultural hegemony is just influencing culture to define certain kinds of behavior as deviant, and others as normal. Normal people get all kinds of privileges that deviant people are denied.

The truth is that people usually frame “freedom” in such a way that it makes certain kinds of behavior deviant and others normal; i.e., nearly all discussion of freedom is an attempt at creating cultural hegemony. It’s not surprising, then, that since rich people have the most control in our society, that money is seen as a very normal justification of any and all behavior. We are a democracy, they say, but it is also perfectly natural that rich people can “influence” politicians with great big wheelbarrows full of cash. While pedophilia is reviled by most people, we also see it as normal that wealthy people can get away with it; we don’t like that they get away with it, but we somehow have accepted that it is just the way the world works.

Individual freedom isn’t really a thing that exists. Rather, there is an interplay between my freedom and someone else’s freedom. Even my right to live is balanced against someone else’s right to kill me. That may seem like a silly example, yet there are many situations where cultural norms allow someone to be killed, and a human being is just as dead if you shoot them with a gun or use your economic might to force them into a situation where they starve to death or are exposed to deadly chemicals.

That brings us a little closer to the truth, which is that my freedom should be curtailed if it harms you. The harm of shooting someone, or financially supporting an institution that will then use your money to harm someone (e.g., Chik-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, or the Biden administration with it’s $14.3 billion in support of Israel’s genocide against Palestine) is obvious.

What’s less obvious, but also real, is the harm of cultural degeneration. This phrase is typically used by racists to indicate that their supposedly superior culture is being harmed by the inferior cultures of other people, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about how capitalism commodifies and thus cheapens culture as it systematically assigns everything a dollar value and repackages it for sale. Globalism exposes people to other cultures (which is good) as a side-effect of this commodification, but ultimately destroys meaning and elevates the sensational at the cost of real culture; real culture helps bind people together and give them meaning. Capitalism aims to atomize the individual — make us each completely separate from everyone else — and then make every aspect of our relationships with each other transactional.

The Democratic Party cannot meaningfully speak against the cultural degeneration caused by capitalist globalism because it is on the side of capitalist globalism. The Republican Party, on the other hand, purposefully conflates the cultural degeneration caused by capitalist globalism with the imaginary, nonsensical enemies that it is constantly lying about to its constituents (e.g., saying that “the Jews” are destroying “white culture” even though it is really capitalism commodifying everyone’s culture). Voting for either option is voting against your own interests in terms of cultural degeneration.

Regarding freedom more generally, both Democrats and Republicans are actively harming other people with their lifestyle and imposing their lifestyle on others. I could get down in the weeds and talk about specific “freedoms” but that’s the main point. I will grant you that Republicans are worse about obviously trying to force their way of life on others, as well as being slightly worse about having completely unsubstantiated paranoid delusions about other people forcing their way of life onto Republicans (e.g., no one is going to force you to be gay).

I’m tired of them jamming it down my throat!

Republicans

Genocide

Most people aren’t in favor of genocide, which is why some fascist is always telling people that there’s absolutely no choice but to do genocide. What’s neat, though, is that fascists are never going to tell you to genocide your real enemies because (spoiler alert) they are your real enemies.

But hey, if a fascist has been whispering in your ear, and now you believe that Palestinians, trans people, Black people, Jewish people, atheists or whatever are out to destroy you and must be eliminated, then I guess voting for a Democrat or a Republican is in your interest!

Conclusion

If you are a Democrat and you’re walking around talking about how Republicans are stupid because they vote against their own interests, it is time to stop and reflect on your own errors instead.

How can you say to your brother, `Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7: 3-5

There’s a lot of debate online about electric vehicles these days, and like most online debates, it is mostly a combination of outright lies from shills and opinion from people who have no first-hand experience. I have now owned an electric vehicle for more than a year, and I’m happy to pass on my experience to you.

I will not be commenting on the particulars of my specific electric vehicle. As with gasoline-powered vehicles, there is wide variation in build quality and design details with electric vehicles. I’m going to stick to the things that are really about the EV experience, specifically.

First off, fueling my electric car has been much, much cheaper than fueling a gasoline-powered vehicle. Even with gasoline prices being as (subjectively) good as they are right now, recharging my electric car at home is dramatically cheaper. Now, if you don’t have a way to charge an electric car at home, charging would become very inconvenient and I would not recommend that you switch to electric until, perhaps, the Aptera comes out, but even then, it would depend on how you expect to use your vehicle. However, even if you could only use public chargers, you probably wouldn’t spend more on fuel than you do now, and EV’s produce significantly less carbon, stink, and noise than gasoline vehicles.

Electric vehicles are more expensive to buy than gasoline-powered, but the savings I get from charging my car at home made up for that difference before the car was a year old. That includes the cost of buying and setting up a charger in my garage.

In terms of convenience, charging at home is much more convenient than fueling up at a gas station. We usually end up taking a trip about once every two months that requires using a public charger. I prefer that to gassing up once a week at a public gas station (with an important caveat that I’ll cover below). In addition, I’m spending much less time and money on getting my vehicle serviced. Quite literally, the only service for the first 50,000 miles is getting the tires rotated. The most convenient car service is no car service.

The performance of an electric vehicle leaves gasoline vehicles in the dust. Even a budget EV is going to have better acceleration than most sporty gas cars. For example, a Dodge Charger with either the SXT or GT trim has approximately the same 0-60 time as a Chevy Bolt. The launch edition Aptera will have a 0-60 time of 4 seconds, which is faster than a Maserati Ghibli S Q4 and many other high-end sports cars. The 0-60 on the quickest Tesla is 2.3 seconds! The top speed on an EV is typically far enough above the US highway speed limit that it doesn’t matter. When I have to drive my gasoline vehicle to work, it makes me feel sad. It is also less safe because accelerating into traffic is dramatically more difficult with a gasoline vehicle. If you spend enough on a gas car to get decent acceleration, you’re into the financial territory of an EV but with added complication and expense.

Public charging does have a problem, though. If you are making a long drive on a peak travel day, like right around Thanksgiving or Christmas (so the chargers will be busier than usual), and if the weather is cold (which makes charging take a lot longer), then it is going to take a very long time to get charged up at the public charger. It usually takes me a total of about 20 minutes to charge at a public charger, but on a cold, busy day, it has taken as much as 45 minutes when you combine waiting for a charger to be available with the amount of time the actual charge takes. This particular issue might improve as Tesla continues to make their charge network more accessible to other EV’s, but right now it is a real problem. A workaround could be arranging for a charger in a garage at the other end of your journey (i.e., at the house of the relative who hosts holidays for your family), taking your other vehicle for such trips (the average US household has more cars than drivers), or renting a vehicle; none of those are convenient or accessible enough to call a “solution”.

What I cannot speak to is what life would be like if you had an electric vehicle and a way to charge it in your driveway, but not a garage. I suspect that in very cold weather, this would not work well (due to very low charge speed and snow getting in the vehicle’s charge port), but that is only a suspicion. The fact that a charger and a garage appear to be important accessories for your electric vehicle means that it is likely that electric car ownership will be something that only middle class and wealthy people can really participate in, and that is likely to be harmful in the long run for people with less money. Of course, it would be nice if car ownership were optional in the US, but it is not.

If you are planning to buy an electric vehicle, then the approach to home charging that I recommend is to install a 240 volt outlet in your garage (probably a NEMA 14-50, but shop around for chargers before making a decision on that) rather than trying to hard-wire the charger. Even though the maximum charge speed will be less with a plugged charger, you probably will not need that slightly higher speed, and you’ll gain ease of charger install and replacement. Installing a 240 volt outlet is probably something you should leave to an expert (adding a circuit is dangerous, and wiring for 240 volts is a little more complicated than 120) but if you can do it yourself (or have a friend help), you will save a lot of money. Chargers typically have at least 20 feet of cable, but you’ll want to plan the location of that outlet carefully.

Leftists note a strong historical tendency of liberal democracy to lead to fascism, and the US appears to be undergoing such a transition currently. What is it about a liberal democracy that leads to fascism?

1. Liberal democracies uphold the hierarchy of wealth as a valid hierarchy, in contrast to traditional hierarchies (based on, for example, race, gender, or religion) which they see as invalid.
2. Since the hierarchy of wealth as seen as valid, owners of capital are allowed to amass great power relative to working class people.
3. Once a small minority of people holds massive power over everyone else, they are able to leverage that power to control the democracy itself, making it an anocracy. The correct term for those people is “elites”.
4. This massive power differential between the elites and working class people creates an environment of increasing dissatisfaction among working class people as well as material deprivation regarding necessities like food and housing.

The typical response of the elites to these conditions is to:

1. Deny that there is a problem with material conditions (i.e., the economy). The Democratic Party did this just the other day: They tweeted out the results of a survey that asked respondents about current economic conditions and labeled responses that indicated dissatisfaction with the US economic climate as “wrong”. While their statistics were probably accurate, they were certainly misleading (e.g., there’s been a substantial improvement in the financial position of upper middle class and wealthy people since Biden took office and that drags the median up, even while blue-collar workers are experiencing a worsening crisis). Typically, they will also try to get working class people to compare themselves to citizens of some other nation (typically, a country suffering under the yoke of empire; i.e., conditions caused by our own country’s elites) and make the argument that working class people here are comparatively well-off. Part of this is response involves subtle propaganda, like a piece I saw a while back about a 20-something couple and the trendy-looking apartment they had purchased in New York City (here’s another one I found with a quick googling); without any explanation as to how young people could afford something so expensive, the (intended) implicit message is that young people are doing fine financially even though the typical young American is not. See also: “They are eating avocados.“
2. Deny that there are elites. They will literally laugh at you if you use the word and then go on a bizarre, rambling monologue about democracy, the complexity of the real world, and the rewards of “hard work” while strongly implying that you are a crazed conspiracy theorist. A strategy of the Democrats is to say that they are not elitists, but rather than they believe in doing what “the experts” say (a kind of technocracy); it’s just that the experts always seem to say that the path which benefits the elites is the right one. Meanwhile, the elites are not a conspiracy theory because they aren’t even hiding what they are doing.
3. Provide bread and circuses. The circuses would be entertainment media, and Americans are awash in entertainments, plus the economic relationship between the US and China means that Americans can afford the devices required to receive those entertainments more than they can afford food. The US economy is set up in such a way that tasty but harmful foods are relatively cheap (thus creating a correlation between poverty and obesity), but right now, all food prices are very high. Both of these strategies are at a breaking point because the elites want to provide these metaphorical opiates (and literal ones, too!) but they want the working class to pay for their own subjugation, and working class people are running out of credit and cash. Moreover, trashy food and pointless entertainment does not provide a rewarding, meaningful life and adds to the dissatisfaction of the working class.

Those are not responses from the elites that would improve conditions or even bolster stability. In fact, there’s nothing that would help the situation that the elites are willing to do. For example, they could:

1. Aid working class people in gaining more control over their workplaces and working conditions by, for example, supporting unions.
2. Provide enough pay to working class people to allow them to thrive.
3. Use the massive wealth of the elites to fund projects that benefit all instead of making working class people pay for them and letting the elites pay nothing in taxes.
4. Stop creating environmental conditions that harm working class people.
5. Nationalize industries (like healthcare) that provide a collective benefit in a way that reduces costs and simplifies the process of receiving services (e.g., instead of Obamacare/ACA, which benefited private health insurance companies more than working class people, they could have let anyone buy into Medicare; aka, Medicare for Anyone).

In the case of current-day America, the elites are neoliberals and are best represented by the core of the Democratic Party and the left edge of the Republican Party. Far-right Republicans (i.e., fascists) see opportunity in the failures of the elites, and throw out various non-solutions that further the cause of fascism:

1. They claim that the government itself is the problem, and attempt to flatten progressive taxes (like income tax) by lowering the tax rate on the most wealthy and, through a mostly-hidden sleight of hand, increasing taxes on the middle class (e.g., the Trump tax cuts expired for middle-class people, but did not expire for the very wealthy), while also attempting to increase the amount of government revenue from regressive taxes, like sales tax. When successful, this increases material problems for working class people and provides the elites with even more power.
2. Again, because “government is the problem”, they will attempt to privatize functions of government or sabotage government functions that are working well. For example, Trump put a man who owns a private delivery service in charge of the US postal service, and that man has sabotaged it (Biden did not remove him!). Republicans are always trying to privatize Social Security (a program with nearly universal approval), which would mean putting those funds under the control of private investment bankers. When successful, this strategy takes power away from the government and puts it directly into the hands of the elites, giving them more power (though it sacrifices the plausible deniability of having the government do your dirty work for you).
3. They “invoke acute hatred against some hapless minority groups, treating them as the ‘enemy within’ in a narrative of aggressive hypernationalism, and attribute all the existing social ills of the ‘nation’ to the presence of such groups” (from Neoliberalism and Fascism by Prabhat Patnaik) and then attempt to create legislation that reflects the logic of that narrative (e.g., ending protection of minority groups, or criminalizing the existence of a minority group). All elites, whether fascist or neoliberal, benefit from this ruse in the short term; in the longer term, a frenzy of murder tends to destabilize a nation and can result in a change to the power structure that threatens the power of current elites.

The intent of these fascist responses is to replace legitimate villains and complaints with those that are nonsensical. It is not typically designed to attribute legitimate complaints to nonsensical villains because that risks someone figuring out who the real villains are. So, for example, fascists would prefer something like, “The Jews (nonsensical villain) are instituting Cultural Marxism, which will make your children trans (nonsensical complaint),” rather than, “The Jews (nonsensical villain) are using capitalism to siphon wealth away from working class people (legitimate complaint),” because if you examine who is using capitalism to siphon wealth away from working class people, you would see that it is not any one ethnic group but rather an economic class (the very wealthy) and system (capitalism). So, importantly, the fascist response protects capitalism. Fascists intend to eventually use the power of capitalism in their favor, and they always favor capitalism if their side controls the capital. This is why the essence of fascism is “complete unreason” — the agitation of the people must be fully misdirected toward nonsense to accomplish the fascist’s goals.

The elite response to fascism is very interesting. From a normal, ethical, working-class perspective, fascism is very alarming, but from the perspective of the elites, fascism is a helpful tool toward maintaining control of society. It is the left that is truly terrifying to the elites; only the left denies them a strategy for maintaining minority control of society (the minority in this case is specifically very wealthy people). As a result, the elites respond to fascism by:

1. Going through the motions of opposing fascism without taking any kind of action fitting the scale and velocity of the threat. See, for example, the very slow, by-the-books prosecution of Donald Trump’s many crimes. We all know that the Biden administration controls the CIA and FBI, don’t we? Consider, in contrast, how executive branch institutions have historically come down on the left with speed, precision, and mercilessness. If Trump were a leftist, they would imprison him immediately — partially to induce attacks from his supporters so they could implement open warfare and slaughter the supporters; but he’s a fascist, so they continue to let him make terrorist threats against government officials.
2. Encouraging everyone to adhere to a strict policy of non-violence. (Violence creates chaos that can change power structures, which they explicitly do not want.) See, for example, everything the Democrats say, and the book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Chenoweth and Stephan. Does civil resistance work to change power structures? No. Never. At best, it can only succeed in forcing the existing power structure to change some detail of how it functions, and usually only temporarily.
3. Equating the threat of the left to the threat of fascism. The purpose of this is to shift the balance of public opinion against the left so it never appears to be a solution to the larger problem of liberalism; i.e., if Democrats oppose both, and Republicans only oppose the left, the balance is against the left.
4. Engaging in debate with fascism over the details of their hatred against various hapless minority groups; for example, when the fascists say that trans people are pedophiles who threaten our children and must be destroyed, elites might explain that actually, biological gender is very complicated, and trans people are less likely than cis individuals to do sex crimes. That’s all very nice, but now we are engaging with a fascist which creates the illusion that their ideas are worthy of consideration (rather than an active hallucination).

There are two important results to all these facts:

1. Elites want to support fascism just enough to be beneficial but then put the brakes on it before it turns into an orgy of violence. The coming fascist dictatorship in the US is likely to be horribly oppressive, but might not include widespread extrajudicial murder. It needs to be orderly and relatively “nonviolent” (i.e., with violence that is ultimately directed by elites and their agents [police] and not at elites) to serve their purposes. In addition to the direct benefit to elites of limiting chaos, this kind of control also allows them to continue to villainize any defensive leftist violence (and thus the left itself); such violence is necessarily extralegal and would be punished more than violence initiated by fascists.
2. Is voting for the Democrats really a solution? To anything? It seems like a vote for a Democrat is really just a vote to put off fascism a little bit longer rather than a vote for the opposite of fascism. The opposite of fascism is leftism — a fun fact that most Americans can no longer understand thanks to a decades-long propaganda campaign against, in essence, democracy. Voting for a Democrat is not the same as voting for democracy; what Americans call “left vs. right” is truly not that at all — what they call “left” is a near-fascist neoliberal order, and “right” is a squarely fascist, traditional order. Every time the Democrats have had an opportunity to move the country left, they have paused dramatically and done nothing. The most egregious example would be the 4 months that the Democratic Party had total control of both houses of Congress and the presidency (yes, it was technically only 4 months) but chose to use that advantage to pass the Affordable Care Act, a repackaging of a proposal from the right-wing Heritage Foundation that bolstered private insurance, instead of just letting Americans buy into Medicare at a break-even rate or doing something more substantial, like fixing the tax code or the Constitution. What could the left have done with those 4 months?

The comparison of liberalism to fascism is mostly hyperbole — except when it isn’t. There this saying on the left that liberals are opposed to genocide except for the current genocide and support social movements except the current social movement. In essence, liberalism tends to allow or even encourage things that would otherwise be considered fascism as long as those actions are directed against poor people who threaten the liberal order or worldview, then, later on, they celebrate successful movements and pretend they were always on the right side of history.

For example, the US liberal order needs Israel as a military stronghold to keep oil-rich Arab nations in line, so it will support genocidal actions of the Israeli government up and to the point where those actions might destabilize the region, thus threatening the flow of oil. Their genocidal actions will be justified and minimized, whereas the actions of poorer people that threaten US interests (by threatening Israel) will be condemned and exaggerated.

In the same vein, the US and its allies decided to go to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990 because his invasion of Kuwait gave him control of 20% of the world’s oil reserves — not for any other reason. Ultimately, well over a million people died to ostensibly protect the Kuwaiti government — a monarchy. Today, the government of Iraq is a democracy on the surface, but the CPA (the official representatives of western colonial powers that defeated Iraq) has the right to veto any legislation the government produces.

Another example would be how homeless people are treated by major liberal metropolitan areas. The existence of homeless people is prima facie evidence that neoliberalism has failed; though the issue is complex, the much longer explanation ends with: neoliberalism has failed. As a result, homeless people have to be villainized, hidden, and terrorized.

Yet another example is the Democratic Party’s fixation on “creating jobs” and, in particular, their insistence on solving the problem of working people needing to care for their children by proposing that the government pay strangers to take care of our children rather than just giving people who want to be full-time mothers to their own children a salary. The liberal approach converts children from people to be loved and nurtured into future labor resources to be grown up like wheat or rice. They wish to force everyone into the liberal paradigm — where all work becomes a transactional component of capitalism — with the threat of homelessness and starvation for those who refuse to comply or cannot comply. How is that not violence? (It is.)

Finally, we can talk about John Brown, the man who had to oppose both the racist slavers of the south (equivalent to today’s Republicans) and the complacent liberals of the north (equivalent to today’s Democrats). Now, of course, liberals are on the side of freeing the slaves, but at the time, they refused to do anything about it because it was too inconvenient and scary, and gosh, those slavers do make some good points about their property rights and the economy. Plus, they were racist, just less overtly racist than southerners (Lincoln himself saw freed slaves as a problem, and favored deporting them even 4 days before his death). The real abolitionists (like John Brown) were the equivalent of today’s leftists.

“Scratch a liberal and fascist bleeds.”

But — you know — don’t forget to, “Vote blue no matter who.”

Notes

Medicare for Anyone is substantially complicated in this article at HealthInsurance.org, but the article does a nice job of explaining the political situation around health insurance in the US. A simpler solution would be to allow anyone to buy into Medicare at a reasonable rate without any kind of overall subsidy (i.e., this portion of Medicare would not be subsidized as a program, but individual cost would vary according to ability to pay). Then, it would become a contest between government, which lacks the overhead of needing to produce profits to give to shareholders, and private industry, which is supposedly extremely efficient, but really is not. The more people who signed up for Medicare, the more the insurance risk would be spread out, and the cheaper Medicare would become; private insurance would become a historical curiosity from a past, barbaric age. The key here is that Medicare lacks the profit motive, making it inherently less expensive and more oriented toward customer care (rather than producing profits) but that if I’m wrong about that, this solution would allow the private insurance industry to prove itself and continue unabated.

Thanks to Spoonermeme, I recently learned that Columbia’s mayor, Barbara Buffaloe has flown all the way to Dubai to attend the UN’s 28th climate change conference. As Spoonermeme pointed out, Columbia, Missouri is a city that can’t even figure out recycling but it is spending many thousands of dollars to send their mayor to a climate conference. (The flight alone is over 18 hours and costs over $3000.) Certainly, Barbara could stand to get some education regarding climate change; we know she’s seriously lacking because she got on the radio shortly after being elected and bragged about how the city’s sustainability office made no substantive changes to the city during her time running it. However, she is unlikely to receive any schooling from COP28 because the entire affair has been conquered by fossil fuel magnates.

I hate to ever say that conservatives were right, but I’m about to in just a minute.

If you are not familiar with Dubai, it is a city in the United Arab Emirates, which is located between Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The United Arab Emirates’ oil and natural gas reserves are the world’s sixth and seventh-largest, respectively, but the UAE has also diversified into tourism, with Dubai specifically having become an international tourist destination. People go there to shop. It is a beautiful dystopia based on feeding the insatiable hungers of the world’s richest people.

For years, conservatives have been saying that environmentalism is a cover for globalism, and although they tend to be a tragically misinformed about the details, that is exactly what global elites wanted and with COP28, that dream appears to have bee fulfilled. Let me define a few words, though. The word “globalism” doesn’t mean a global Jewish/Satanic/communist conspiracy. The globalism is global capitalism, and the globalists are the very, very rich who have subverted democracy by decoupling themselves from the rule of nation states. These globalists are completely opposed to communism and while they may play at having deeper ideologies, their real ideology is domination through exorbitant wealth. They certainly use the language of the welfare state to justify their reign, but they never deliver on using the power of government to solve the problems of ordinary citizens.

The president of this year’s COP is Sultan al-Jaber, the chair of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), which pumped 2.7m barrels of oil a day in 2021, with plans to double that by 2027. The science of climate change is quite explicit about the fact that human survival depends on reducing the total output of carbon released immediately, and then going a step further to removing carbon from the atmosphere (a feat that no one currently knows how to accomplish in a way that results in net carbon reduction). In the context of the science, Adnoc’s plan to double production by 2027 is not only absurd but something beyond genocidal.

COP28 has the bigger carbon footprint than the previous 27 COP conferences owing to the fact that they invited a record 400,000 people to attend, including Columbia’s own fully useless mayor.

With COP28 having been taken over by the pro-fossil-fuel and pro-greed globalists, the heart of meaningful climate action has been conquered. Predictably, COP28 participants have pledged to increase the percentage of energy that comes from renewables without a hard commitment to reducing the production of fossil fuels. This fits perfectly with the track record of globalism which uses renewable energy as a way to facilitate economic growth (and greater profits) rather than as a replacement for carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Even if the ratio of renewables to carbon-based energy reached 99:1, the ratio means nothing if the absolute amount of carbon fuels burned has increased, yet this ratio is all neoliberal governments like the City of Columbia have to brag about, so that’s what they do.

Some governments who are attending COP28 plan to use nuclear power to offset use of coal and other fossil fuels to produce electricity. That’s fine now, but when the larger scheme of globalism falls apart and we no longer have the resources to maintain those reactors, they will become a significant hazard for the future, as will their significant waste materials.

So there we are are. Meaningful climate action has been conquered by capitalist globalism and clowns like Barbara Buffaloe have gone all the way to Dubai, mostly to shop because nothing else of substance is going to happen there.

Links Cited

Dubai is a Parody of the 21st Century (Adam Something; YouTube)

Spoonermeme post about Barbara Buffaloe and COP28 (Spoonermeme; Instagram)

(AUDIO): Columbia Mayor-Elect Barbara Buffaloe appears on 939 the Eagle’s “Wake Up Columbia”

Sultan al-Jaber: A quick guide to the COP28 president (BBC)

Top 5 Reasons Carbon Capture And Storage (CCS) Is Bogus (Peter Hart and Mark Schlosberg; Food and Water Watch)

Cop28 will have the biggest carbon footprint in the event’s history after UAE invited a record 400,000 people to attend (James Reynolds; Daily Mail)

Countries promise clean energy boost at COP28 to push out fossil fuels (Kate Abnett, Valerie Volcovici and David Stanway; Reuters)

What would happen if a nuclear reactor was suddenly abandoned (in a post-apocalyptic scenario)? (Caulley Johnson; Quora)

Long-term nuclear waste storage messages (Wikipedia)

UN warns Earth ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world’ (Frank Jordans and Seth Borenstein; Associated Press)

Survival of the Richest (Douglas Rushkoff; Medium)

Related: Bidenism and the End of the World

Related: The Washington Post is very worried that American women don’t want to marry Trump supporters by Dartagnan (Daily Kos)

So, as you may have read in the above article, the Washington Post is very worried that American women don’t want to marry Trump supporters. It’s essentially one of neoliberalism’s common anxieties — that something will happen to disrupt or slow down the production of labor resources. Since “the economy” is sacred to the cult of neoliberalism, they naturally conclude that women are just going to have to hold their noses and make babies with misogynists. The Washington Post is perhaps the most neoliberal news source there is, so of course that’s how they see the issue.

But is the problem really with the women who don’t want to be bound to people who hate them? Could it be the men, possibly, that are the problem? I have some questions for the men:

Fellas, is it gay to be clean?
Is it gay to be educated?
Is it gay to like women?

Yes, there’s a crisis of masculinity in America. Unfortunately, those who are most concerned about it have decided to blame all the wrong people and factors.

American men are less educated than women, more likely to become drug or alcohol addicts, less likely to have meaningful relationship, less likely to contribute to society, and more likely to kill themselves — and it is only getting worse. Republicans want to blame “the woke mind virus” and propose that the solution is preventing young people from voting, preventing women from voting, marrying girls off to adult men at the age of 14, defunding public education, and literally killing liberals — among other profoundly evil ideas.

Traditional conservative culture is so vehemently opposed to education — to knowing anything — that it has decided that education itself is feminine, or even “effeminate”; i.e., it is gay to be educated. Since it is OK for women and girls to be effeminate, we’ve ended up in a strange place where boys have been convinced that they should reject education and instead pursue things like sports, video games, and simple, raw aggression because it is more important for them to assert their masculinity through dominance than it is to know anything or to be a useful member of society. Once upon a time, women were barred from attending college, but now that education is gay, they account for 60% of college graduates, and the gap between men and women completing college looks like it will continue to widen.

Women even graduate high school at a higher rate than men in America.

Despite the claims from Republicans that liberalism is turning everyone gay, most people continue to be heterosexuals (functionally speaking). American men are far more likely to be conservative, and the incomes of younger men (those of reproductive age) are trending down relative to women (thanks to education being gay), and as a result, those men often find themselves in an awkward situation where they cannot find a romantic partner who makes less money than them — and having a partner who makes more than them makes them feel submissive. Feeling submissive is the worst feeling a conservative man can have; they see it as, essentially, being gay.

I should clarify a couple of things. First off, yes, American men, generally, still get paid more than American women on average — but men’s wages are trending down while women’s are trending up and that is a direct result of the trend in education. In 16 cities, young women already make more than young men. And yes, 73% of the seats on Congress are held by men — but those are old men — often very, very old men (Who is in charge in this clip of Mitch McConnell?). This crisis of masculinity is one that is concentrated in younger people — and everyone agrees on that point. It seems unlikely that education will cease to be a predictor of salary, and unless that happens, this trend will continue. Second, if you haven’t guessed yet, I’m a leftist and I don’t care what your sexual orientation is as long as you are having a nice time and treating other people with respect. When I’m saying things are “gay” I mean it with the utmost sarcasm and an ample helping of disdain for people who care about the sexual orientation of others.

Now, the next problem is that — if you are a manly, dominant, traditional man — you cannot like things that are feminine… because that would be gay. You’re supposed to want to have sex with women, but also dislike everything about women, because women are feminine. You are also required to dislike women who are not feminine enough because they are violating traditional values and culture.

(If you think you are a conservative man, but you disagree with all this, please look around you at your fellow conservative men, and I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.)

The possibilities for a man like this are very limited. He’s very unlikely to have a job that pays well, and most women will find him to be a risky proposition for a relationship, particularly since he obviously doesn’t like women. If he is one of the ones who literally thinks cleaning themselves is gay, things will be even worse. If he can keep from being homeless, he’s likely to be surviving off someone else’s money — his parents, a friend, or maybe a woman that he likely resents. He’s completely demoralized, and that makes him the perfect target for right-wing propaganda. (As of January of this year, over 7 million men of working age had dropped out of the workforce.)

Since the only kind of woman that a man who hates women can attract is a woman who hates men, the opinion that conservative men have of women continues to drop like a rock while their taste in women becomes more and more absurd. There’s an entire industry now of conservative men interviewing toxic women on social media and telling them that they are are lazy gold diggers and/or worthless because they are not virgins. Do you remember when right wingers were in love with Taylor Swift? The year was 2017. Yeah, she just wasn’t perfect enough, and now it is just 6 years later, and she’s the devil, apparently.

American men are in a downward spiral that will end in either the destruction of the United States as a world economic power or a matriarchy similar to the “Raising Gazorpazorp” episode of Rick and Morty. I’m only exaggerating a little. This situation is 100% the fault of conservative parents, and I do not think there’s a nice way out of it.

Neoliberals, meanwhile, strongly recommend that American women take one for the team in order to keep the economy going. “Both sides” are idiots.

Related: Young women earn more than men in 16 U.S. cities by Emily Peck (Axios) I disagree with Marianne Cooper on the detail of whether this trend will continue as women get older; the trend is that women are also holding more and more leadership positions as well.

Related: States With the Highest Percentage of Female Top Executives by Chris Gilligin (US News and World Report)

Related: Why America Has a Crisis of Masculinity by Derek Thompson, The Ringer, September 2022
‘Of Boys and Men’ author Richard Reeves talks male voting habits, educational success, and what the future of masculinity looks like

Related: The male college crisis is not just in enrollment, but completion by Richard B. Reeves and Ember Smith, The Brookings Institution, October 2021

Related: What’s the Matter with Men? by Andrees Kahloon, The New Yorker, January 2023

There’s a popular meme among right-wing people that basically says that liberals and LGBTQ people are both idiots for supporting Muslims in any way because Muslims hate and oppress LGBTQ people. This meme has been especially popular lately due to the conflict going on in Israel/Palestine, and part of this iteration of the meme is the idea that if you were LGBTQ and living in Gaza, you would be actively oppressed or perhaps murdered by the locals, and therefore, supporting Gaza is silly or stupid.

The first issue of note regarding this meme (and implied narrative) is that the right-wing people spreading this meme would like to commit genocide against both Muslims and LGBTQ people. It’s the equivalent of a schoolyard bully telling two of his victims, “Hey! You should fight each other!” with the major difference being that the schoolyard bully doesn’t always intend for their victims to die.

It would be fair to stop right there. If fascists want you to fight each other, it should be self-evident that you should choose the path of solidarity instead. However, there are lot of interesting details here.

Does Israel support LGBTQ people? Israel is supposedly the most developed place in the middle east in terms of LGBTQ rights, but gay marriage isn’t legal there and only 36% of Israelis support gay marriage according to a Pew research poll conducted this year. In contrast, Palestine still has the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936 which criminalizes sex between men, but does not seem to really enforce it. An exception is that in 2017, they considered prosecuting an author for including homosexual themes in his writing, but then they didn’t go through with it. I’m having trouble getting very excited about the differences between Palestine and Israel on this issue.

There are other times when liberals and leftists have supported a group of people that didn’t really support them back, and Ukraine comes to mind specifically. Ukraine is lousy with Nazis, particularly in their military, yet liberals and leftist both support Ukraine’s independence. Maybe that’s partially because (as is the case with Palestine/Israel), Ukraine is being actively invaded by another country (Russia). Perhaps it is also because the Russians have failed to make the case that they are significantly less evil than the Ukrainians. Among liberals, specifically, there’s also the fact that liberals want Ukraine on their team; leftists would rather Ukraine remained independent.

Here’s the thing, though: Good people have solidarity for others even if those others are not on their side. Good people are opposed to genocide and settler-colonialism regardless of who is doing it. While liberals are frequently disappointing, they are still consistently better people than conservatives, and it is no surprise that many of them want an end to the genocide happening in Gaza.

To get back to the initial meme — this idea that LGBTQ people are stupid for having solidarity with Gaza — it usually isn’t necessary to choose between solidarity and strategic thinking because solidarity is usually the better strategy! If things ever settled down over there and we all had a chance to talk about things like women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and whatever else might be an issue, we would do that. Right now, the ongoing extermination of an entire people is the bigger issue.

Update: I just want to clarify that I don’t know exactly what kind of people in the US are demanding a cease fire in Gaza, and I don’t know exactly what kind of people are supporting the complete destruction of Palestine. Democrats (in general) are clearly split on the issue.

After the mass murder in Maine last week, we again have a lot of conservatives saying that the problem is the person, not guns. OK, fine. The person had made terroristic threats. The police did nothing. His ex-wife was literally in hiding because he was a threat to her life and the life of their child. The police did nothing. Maine has a law that allows the police to take possession of the firearms of individuals with mental illness or who have made terroristic threats. The police did nothing. We now know that the murderer was a Trumper who followed genocidal social media. The police did nothing.

It’s almost like the police are on the side of mass murder.

Liberals want to pass laws banning guns. OK, fine. Who is going to enforce those laws. The police?

If liberals truly want anything to get better, they need to do something about the police…. first.

There’s this thing going on right now in Israel that is getting a lot of media attention, and a disproportionate amount of that has been focused on Mia Khalifa, an entertainer by trade who is not very skilled at crafting a nuanced political message. It simply is not her area of expertise — that’s OK, and she’s not the only entertainer struggling with that right now. Today, there’s a thread on Reddit discussing a response to Khalifa by an educated Muslim man who is clearly skilled at crafting propaganda. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find his name.

Disclaimer: I’m not clear on what Khalifa’s full position on the situation is, so I do not endorse her position, even though everything I’ve seen her express about this issue has been true. Please don’t assume I’ve seen everything she’s ever expressed about it.

Factually, the history of the region currently called “Israel” is incredibly complex and riddled with horrific, bloody conquests perpetrated by various ethnic groups. To say it “belongs” to any one ethnic group inherently, in the sense of a natural connection between blood and soil, is to embrace a fascist perspective. From an ethical perspective, every person should have a right to a home, including all Israelis and all Palestinians.

Below is the animation “This Land is Mine” by Nina Paley featuring “The Exodus Song” by Andy Williams. It’s a nice summary of the history of the region. There’s a link to more detail in the YouTube description. Paley is ethnically Jewish.

To get back to Mia Khalifa, she and the fellow rebutting her are both saying things that are true, yet they clearly have a strong disagreement with one another. Khalifa isn’t lying in any sense — she’s saying things that are factual (though lacking nuance) and that she believes are true. On the other hand, the guy rebutting her is saying things that are true, but he’s purposefully being deceptive.

First off, what do they mean when they say “Israel”? Khalifa means the word to refer to the current iteration of Canaan (that’s the earliest known name for the region, so I’m going to use that for just a moment). There have been other iterations of Canaan that were called Israel, but they are not qualitatively the same as this iteration of Canaan that is called Israel. The guy rebutting her is claiming that Israel is much older than 75 years, and that’s true, but he’s being purposefully deceptive by using a different definition of Israel from what Khalifa is using. Using Khalifa’s definition of Israel, it is, in fact, only 75 years old. (Does that detail really matter?)

In case you’re wondering, the Canaanites were neither Jewish nor Muslim, but their genes are present in both groups today. If we’re using “firsties” to determine who the region belongs to, both Israelis and Palestinians have a valid claim, so it isn’t even an interesting perspective.

Using a different definition is a common strategy in conservative media (which would include both right-wing media and liberal media). For example, obviously, chaos is bad, and if you define anarchy as chaos, then obviously anarchy is bad, too. The point is to pretend that actual anarchist agree with this definition of the word anarchy, which isn’t true; anarchists understand anarchy to be order. Conservative media will never address the fact that their enemies (in this case, anarchists) are using a different version of the word. This is the propaganda strategy of using variant definitions of words to delegitimize your opponent.

People get really mad about “semantic arguments” which just means defining terms, or sometimes defining terms in a way that allows you to win an argument. However, if we are not agreed on what the key terms of an argument mean, we cannot have a meaningful argument, and in many cases, the meanings of words are the meat of the argument itself. Using a different definition of a word is a propaganda technique that goes hand-in-hand with selective facts. In the case of the man rebutting Khalifa, he uses a different definition of Israel from what she uses, and then leaves out a huge chunk of history as well. When the two participants in an argument are using different definitions of words, and also a different set of true facts, the result is “talking past each other” and it only serves to reinforce whatever position each audience member brought with them to the debate. It does not serve to inform or enlighten.

This is the essential difference between how right-wing media lies versus how liberal media lies. Right-wing media just straight up says things that are not true (some incredibly crazy shit), whereas liberal media lies by omitting particular facts and defining terms in a beneficial way. In the reporting of the current round of conflict in the region, we’re seeing both types of lies. The claims that Hamas was killing civilians, beheading babies, and raping people all now appear to have been lies in the fullest sense (special thanks to that dumb-ass Biden for repeating and legitimizing right-wing media lies). We’re also seeing things like Palestinians being called “Palestinians” while Israelis are called “Israeli people“; there’s technically nothing untrue about it, but it creates a very different overall narrative.

The tricky little question that people like to ask is, “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

As I understand it, if you say “yes” it means you support Jewish people but you also support all actions of the Israeli government and military, details of how the British established this particular version of the region, and the idea that Palestinians do not belong in the region.

If you say “no” it means you are anti-Semitic.

I support the existence of the Jewish people and the existence of the Palestinian people. Moreover, I support both groups being safe and living without fear. I support both groups having free access to trade so they might pursue happiness. I support both groups living in their homes without another group forcibly seizing or destroying those homes. I support both groups obtaining homes if they do not currently have homes, but not at the cost of depriving another group of homes.

The funny thing about that question — Does Israel have a right to exist? — is that many anti-Semites in the US would say “yes” to it, but their yes would have a very peculiar subtext. American anti-Semites want all Jewish people to be confined to Israel, and while they hate Jewish people, they also hate Muslims, and see the US-backed establishment of Israel as a Jewish-only state as a means of diminishing both groups by pitting them against each other. Some American anti-Semites are also adherents to a particular type of Christian millenarianism that hates Jewish people, but also sees the control of the region by Jewish people (including the re-building of the Temple) as a vital component to the necessary and desired Apocalypse, during which a few Jewish people will convert to Christianity, and the rest will be destroyed. Essentially, this group sees Israel as a means of destroying the Jewish people as well as all of their other enemies.

In essence, it is time to find better questions.

Do people have a right to live?

Do people have a right to exist as a people?

Do people have a right to a home?

Do people have a right to pursue happiness?

Since Barak Obama won the presidential election of 2008 (or perhaps since Reagan), US conservatives have been becoming progressively more openly right-wing. I continue to wonder if there really is such a thing as “conservatives” or whether a conservative is just a fascist who is less strident. Democrats certainly believe that conservatives exist and continue to market their candidates toward conservatives — with little to no luck. Instead, it looks like almost all conservatives might be embarrassed about people like Donald Trump, but will continue to vote for such people saying that they “have no choice”; i.e., the Democrat is somehow just not conservative enough for them. Joe Biden, they say, is a communist (it’s silly every time they say it, but they keep doing it).

So, first off, if you have 9 people sitting at a table with a Nazi, you’ve got 10 Nazis at that table. Once a person sides with fascism, they are a fascist and the idea that they “had no choice” is absurd. Per Wilhoit’s law, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Conservatives want their culture to be the dominant culture, and they want their people to be the dominant people; they are not interested in any kind of diversity and they see the law as something that should force rebellious individuals to conform to the conservative worldview. The only freedoms they are interested in is the freedom to comply with conservative culture and freedom for conservatives to dominate non-conservatives. The difference between a “conservative” and a “fascist” is really just an issue of how far they are willing to go to accomplish their goals at this moment.

I’ve seen people online note that the form of conservative hatreds is generally dictated by a relatively small group of far-right elites whose primary goal is to sow division. That’s absolutely true. The problem, though, is that the conservative goal of complete cultural dominance doesn’t go away just because powerful individuals are not steering it toward an enemy. Rather, in the absence of active leadership, conservatives come up with their owns ideas that are frankly just not that much different from what right-wing elites have been promoting.

I think what confuses people is that every once in a while, you will see a conservative saying something that really seems leftist, such as:

Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

That was Tucker Carlson sounding like he’s ready to launch capitalism right into the sun. He said that a while ago, but very recently I saw Charlie Kirk agreeing with Russell Brand when he said,

…an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit from medical emergencies, where a military industrial complex benefits from war…you are going to generate states of perpetual crisis

Charlie Kirk said that Brand, “Absolutely nailed it.”

Again, sounds like he’s ready to dump capitalism for good.

The thing, though, is liberal conservatives (i.e., Democrats) and traditionalist conservatives (i.e., Republicans) are not trying to conserve the same hierarchies, and Republicans only ever liked capitalism because they believed it was working to support the hierarchies they care about. When it isn’t supporting their beloved hierarchies, they are suddenly ready it to send it to the guillotine. Moreover, when they see it isn’t supporting their beloved hierarchies, they attribute its motivations to those of their traditional enemies — Jews, people of color, non-Christians, uppity women, etc.

On the other hand, liberal conservatives (Democrats) love capitalism and see the hierarchy of capital as the only valid hierarchy. They see any other hierarchy (e.g., those based on sex, gender, color, religion) as being illegitimate and they will try to eradicate it. For example, one test of whether a person is a traditional conservative or a liberal conservative is whether they believe that Black people have less money (on average) because of a systemic flaw in capitalism that can be eradicated (liberal) or because something is wrong with Black people (traditional). In contrast, a leftist would note that capitalism intends to create inequities (it’s a feature not a bug) and that traditional hierarchies often choose who ends up bearing the weight of those inequities; i.e., while personal actions do have an effect on personal outcomes, the overall trend is caused by the combination of liberal and traditional cultural and legal systems.

To get back to the main question, can traditional conservatives — the ones who have gone full fascist — be brought back into the fold of liberalism? Or — better yet — can we present an argument to a fascist that will make them see the light and become leftists?

At first glance, the answer is yes. Fascism tends to use leftist arguments against the status quo (which is usually liberalism because liberalism has an inherent tendency to spawn fascism), but then take a hard right when it comes to solutions and instead of blaming capitalism, it blames traditional enemies instead. Would it be so hard to just get the fascist or conservative to objectively look at the problem and see that it comes from those in society who have the most power (the wealthy) and can only be solved by democratizing power?

Certainly, there are individuals who that might work on, and for that reason, I think it is commendable to try.

However, for the vast majority of people who are willing to slide from conservativism into fascism (e.g., everyone who voted for Trump), redemption is not possible because they have — at the core of their personality — a need to dominate other people. They find solidarity — which is the most essential component of leftism — to be submissive and weak, and therefore, detestable. They believe in a world of alphas, betas and omegas — and are constantly terrified that their place in the hierarchy might be slipping. Their most basic problem with leftism is that it is kind. Yes, they frequently call it “stupid” but they believe it is stupid primarily because it is kind.

American fascists have been vocal for quite some time about their goal of forcefully imposing their take on the Christian religion on their fellow citizens, and then the world. To my point, this version of Christianity does not include kindness:

“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—’turn the other cheek’—[and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?'” Moore said. “When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,” he added. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”

Russell Moore, former top official for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), quoted in Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus
By Aila Slisco On 8/9/23 at 7:17 PM EDT

In fact, their rationale for hating each of their traditional enemies comes down to dominance and cruelty, and their belief that they, as the masters of dominance and cruelty, are the only group deserving of power, and that only a nation based on dominance and cruelty can thrive. When one of their hated groups attains even a modicum of power, it enrages fascists, and their most basic rationale for why such people are illegitimate rulers is because they are submissive, weak — and kind.

This position is not redeemable. The only way a fascist is going to become a truly better person is by hitting rock-bottom and rebuilding their personality from the ground up. While this is possible, it will only happen once in a blue moon.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading a lot of what communists post online to try to understand their perspective. While I don’t have a position on what strategies are valid or moral in the struggle to achieve a more democratic society, I do now have a better understanding of the communist perspective — that the rot of fascism must be forcefully excised from society if humanity is to ever achieve anything better. And no, I’m not promoting that perspective, nor suggesting any kind of details about how that should happen — I’m merely saying, “I see their point.”

What is clear is that Americans can’t keep allowing fascists to chisel away at democracy. What we are doing right now is akin to allowing a safe cracker to continue to try different combinations on a safe while we stand a good distance away telling them that they’re naughty. Prosecuting some of them is nice, but it isn’t the programmatic negation of fascist power that is required. Historically, liberalism has been unable to provide the correct amount of resistance to fascism because it explicitly favors fascism over any flavor of leftism, and actively uses fascism to create a false political center around itself and draw people away from the left because leftism would spell the end to liberal, neo-liberal, and globalist power (these are different aspects of a single political movement).

At this point, you’ve probably heard of Project 2025, the “conservative” plan to forcefully impose an authoritarian government based on Christian dominionism (which is ironically anti-Jesus) on the American public by capturing the presidency (via a severely bent but not broken electoral system), ignoring the other two branches of federal government (unless, of course, they cooperate), and then ending US democracy. To be clear, the USA would still have a democracy, but only fascists would be classified as citizens; other people would not be allowed to vote. This isn’t the first time they’ve had this plan; it’s just the most coherent expression of the plan so far. America needs a counter-plan, but may not be able to come up with it since liberals are unwilling to embrace the left (and, in essence, true democracy).

Take from beloved liberal centrist Robert Reich: Trumpism is fascism, Donald Trump is a fascist.