Author: Alan Buddug

There’s this ongoing political conversation wherein liberals say, “We must ban assault rifles,” and then conservatives respond with an overly pedantic definition of “assault rifle” in order to mock the liberals, who rightly see the conservative response as a steaming pile of horseshit.

But maybe we should all be clear on what an assault rifle is, and why it is (or isn’t) a particularly deadly firearm.

Most gun people recognize the StG-44 as the first assault rifle, and it has all the characteristics of today’s assault rifles (but only if we’re using the military definition of assault rifle). The full name of the gun would be “Sturmgewehr 1944” or “storm rifle of 1944”; the name literally means that the firearm is meant to be used by infantry to storm (or assault) a military target. It was one of the last significant inventions of Nazi Germany.

Characteristics of a military assault rifle include:

1. Ammunition fed by means of a detachable magazine (typically, but not necessarily, a box magazine). This is advantageous because it allows the soldier to quickly reload the weapon.
2. Fires an intermediate-size cartridge — i.e., neither an ineffective pistol cartridge, nor a full-size (and overpowered) rifle cartridge. A “Goldilocks” cartridge in terms of size. This is advantageous because the intermediate cartridge is just as effective (at killing people) as a full-sized cartridge at the ranges where gunfights typically occur, while being easier to shoot and lighter to carry. Because the smaller cartridge takes less time to complete combustion (relative to a full-sized rifle cartridge), this also means the assault rifle can have a shorter barrel, so it is easier to maneuver through a complex environment.
3. Select-fire. A military assault rifle has at least 3 fire-control settings: safe, single shot, and multiple shots per trigger pull. The multiple-shot setting might fire 2 shots, 3 shots, or continuously depending on the specific gun.

It’s this third characteristic (select-fire) that gets the conservative pedant all excited. Since all select-fire guns are legally and technically machine-guns, they are all strictly controlled by the US government. Every machine-gun must be registered. The owner has to pass a complete background check and submit their fingerprints as part of the background check and registration process. There’s also a $200 fee per registered item. In addition to all this, the civilian machine-gun registry was closed in 1986, meaning that no firearm has been allowed to be added to that registry since then. There are currently about 176,000 civilian-owned machine-guns in the US. (The rest of the 630,000 machine-guns in the US would be owned by non-civilians — mostly the police.)

As a result of all the above, almost none (percentage-wise) of the military-style rifles in the US are technically “assault rifles” because they are neither legally nor technically “machine-guns”. Yet, the conservative pedant’s response is still horseshit.

First off, what is the simple way to say “semi-automatic rifle firing an intermediate-sized cartridge fed from a detachable magazine”? The euphemism “military-style weapon” doesn’t really capture that meaning — it makes it sound like people are concerned about an aesthetic rather than functionality. The euphemism “sport-utility rifle” cleverly glosses over the functional niche that such a gun perfectly fills. I’ll state the obvious: Conservatives often limit language as a strategy toward controlling a narrative, and liberals let them get away with it.

Personally, I still think of semi-automatic rifles that fire an intermediate cartridge from a detachable magazine as “assault” rifles even if they are not machine-guns.

1. Regardless of whether a person is using their non-machine-gun for a noble purpose, a trivial purpose, or something pernicious, the niche that a semi-auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge that feeds from a detachable magazine fills most perfectly is that of killing people. Pro-gun conservatives know this; it is exactly the reason why they own these guns.
2. Full-auto functionality is not required for a not-a-machine-gun to perfectly fulfill most military scenarios where an assault rifle would be used. In fact, not all military semi-auto rifles in an intermediate cartridge that feed from a detachable magazine are full-auto. Are they not assault rifles? In fact, full auto fire is strongly discouraged by every military on Earth because it wastes ammunition and puts the soldier at a disadvantage when their magazine goes empty in (literally) 3 seconds.
3. Between training to fire more quickly (see, for example, Jerry Miculek) and devices that allow for an extremely high rate of fire while still technically firing once per actuation of the trigger (e.g., binary triggers), the functionality of a “machine-gun” is insignificant compared to the other characteristics of an assault rifle.

The core of the whole “assault rifle” issue is that liberals don’t understand guns and conservatives are (usually) unwilling to admit that they want to kill everyone who isn’t a conservative. OK, that wasn’t entirely fair — they’re perfectly willing to allow most non-conservatives to keep living if those people will simply bow to conservative authority and live under conditions of continuous suffering and humiliation. By “most” I mean like 60%.

They will, however, point out that the Second Amendment is not about hunting which sort of implies the truth. It’s certainly true that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. The purpose of the Second Amendment is about protecting the American people from tyranny, whether it comes from within or without. Unfortunately, we’re in this very awkward situation where the tyrants are the people who control almost all of the guns. I say “control” because while conservative civilians own far more guns than other civilians, there’s also the issue of the police and military, both of which are staffed by mostly conservatives and strangely immune from democratic oversight. If our society managed to disarm all civilians, the core problem would remain.

The Second Amendment was not intended to be about hunting, but it also wasn’t intended to be about the right to genocide. Conservatives know this, which is why they constantly fabricate tyranny in the form of conspiracy theories as an excuse to target some group for genocide while pretending they’re really fighting against tyranny. Right now, their most popular cover conspiracy is to claim that all trans women are actually pedophiles and that all pedophiles must be killed to protect our children from this sexual tyranny. As far as I can tell, all pedophiles are conservatives, so it’s an interesting strategy.

Related: Who are the child abusers? A case study ; We Found Those Satanic Pedophiles

While I don’t have the solution to this problem — and I don’t think a solution is forthcoming — I do see that the problem isn’t assault rifles, or really any other physical object, but rather conservatives and conservativism.

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.

Wilhoit’s Law

Unfortunately, liberals are just a different kind of conservative and they are under an interesting delusion that the guns of the police and military are their own guns (by proxy) and that those guns will tend to do the right thing from a liberal viewpoint. More precisely, they believe the police serve their interests and that they (liberals) deserve to be protected and not bound. Put another way, they believe the police will protect liberals and liberalism while binding those who oppose both. In truth, all military small arms must be controlled by a person — by definition — and that person is rarely if ever a liberal.

Are assault rifles more deadly than other guns? In short, yes — and that’s the whole point. But here’s why:

1. While a bullet fired from an assault rifle is generally less deadly than a bullet fired from a full-sized rifle, the difference is insignificant at normal distances for both combat and plain-old murder.
2. A bullet fired from an assault rifle is dramatically more deadly than one fired from a handgun (or a rifle that fires handgun ammunition).
3. The size of an assault rifle makes it more maneuverable (i.e., easier for moving quickly in a complex environment) relative to a full-size rifle.
4. It is easier to accurately fire an assault rifle quickly than it is to fire a full-size rifle quickly because the cartridge off the assault rifle is less powerful and thus causes less recoil.
5. The assault rifle and its ammunition are lighter than a full-size rifle and its ammunition, so the person using it can move faster and farther.
6. The detachable magazine makes reloading relatively quick and easy.
7. Since it is semi-automatic, it does not have to be reloaded between single shots. It only has to be reloaded between magazines. Therefore, it is easier to fire single shots in quick succession relative to a manually-operated firearm (e.g., bolt-action rifle, or pump-action shotgun).
8. Because an assault rifle has a stock, it can be shouldered, so it is easier for the shooter to hit their target in comparison to a handgun.

So, yes: An assault rifle is dramatically more deadly than a handgun, and slightly more deadly compared to a full-size rifle. However, the assault rifle is only deadlier than the full-size rifle if we are imagining a scenario where multiple shots are fired and/or the shooter is on the move. More importantly, it is only more deadly in the hypothetical sense. If we look at what kind of firearm actually ends up killing the most Americans, a very different picture forms.

Most (53-62% depending on the year) firearm-related deaths are suicides. The hypothetical deadliness of an assault rifle doesn’t apply there, and these deaths almost always involve a handgun. Similarly, handguns were used in most homicides in the US in 2019, whereas rifles of any type were only used in 2.6% of homicides. The FBI’s data on this is a little sloppy (thanks to police providing sloppy data), but, in essence, the US could eliminate at least 75% of firearm-related deaths by banning all handguns. What’s more likely is that banning all handguns would eliminate more like 90 to 95% of gun-related deaths*. In terms of actual, real-world deadliness, the handgun is the deadliest firearm despite the hypotheticals of assault rifles that I explained above.

Despite the relative deadliness of handguns, Americans continue to believe that a handgun is safe compared to any kind of long gun. When we are teaching liberals, centrists, and leftists to shoot, we find that they overwhelmingly request to learn how to shoot a handgun, and they all choose a handgun as their first firearm. When someone asks me what kind of gun they should get, I tell them an AR-15 (I would prefer that they work up to the more difficult and dangerous handgun), and they immediately say, “I was thinking handgun,” and they are clearly more comfortable with handguns. I do not know why this misconception continues to exist.

Related: Handgun as primary weapon in a civilian context (Tacticool Girlfriend)

I do not have any specific legislative ideas to provide as a solution for the current state of firearm law, mostly because Democrats and Republicans both insist on clinging dogmatically to absurd legislative agendas that are both nonsensical when compared to reality and clearly unachievable. I can point to handguns all I want, but Democrats will point to barrel shrouds and Republicans will point to machine-guns in response. Neither side wants to do anything about fascism, poverty, or the abject hopelessness of American society and both are using firearms as a distraction. The caustic culture that produces the mass shooter himself is treated as holy by the majority of Americans.

There was this joke about conservatives when the debate over the Affordable Care Act was raging — that the conservative health plan is, “don’t get sick, but if you do, die quickly.” In that spirit, the liberal position on guns appears to be, “pretend there’s no threat to the existence of marginalized people, and when that threat materializes, instead of fighting back, you should become a martyr so we can have a really nice candlelight vigil.” It’s not as slick, but you get the point.

*I’m making a silly assumption here for the sake of keeping it simple: That a ban would actually work. Probably, most handguns would not disappear if they were banned.

The federal government has quite complex rules regarding what firearms are legal and under what circumstances. Because the laws were not written well, the executive branch agency responsible for enforcing those laws has had no choice but to make sense of them. Recently the ATF changed their interpretation of a gun part called a “pistol brace”; where those devices were completely legal before, now having one on an AR-15-style firearm will change that firearm’s legal definition from a “pistol” to a “short-barreled rifle” if the gun has a barrel that is less than 16″ long. Since short-barreled rifles require registration (including submitting fingerprints, a complete background check, and a $200 fee), and failure to register the gun is a felony, this is a very big deal for many thousands of American gun owners.

Why aren’t these laws written well? They were created as a performative act to address voter fears that were not necessarily grounded in reality, and then the laws were altered based on gun industry lobbying. In the case of the short-barreled rifle rule, this is part of the 1932 National Firearms Act. The original intent of the NFA was to ban handguns and machineguns. Fear of both types of firearms was overblown due to the influence of early Hollywood and politicians (to what extent is hard to say). Handguns are the type of gun most used in crime as well as being most likely to be involved in firearm accidents and suicides. In order to close potential loopholes in the handgun ban, legislators added in other types of firearms that could be physically cut down to be just as concealable as handguns. Then, the gun lobby intervened and managed to get handguns — the original target of the legislation — removed because handguns were their biggest source of profit.

These same kinds of processes continue to occur. For example, most of the features banned in the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban had absolutely no impact on how lethal or hazardous a banned firearm was. Now, we have a situation where the Biden administration believes it must do “something” about guns, yet it has very little power to do anything. As a result, it is tweaking the details of how ATF enforces existing incoherent firearms laws, and a pistol-braced gun has become illegal even though handguns are legal and rifles are legal.

To be fair, the pistol brace was originally presented to ATF as a device for allowing people with physical disabilities to more easily use heavier handguns, but gun people (who are loath to give the federal government $200 and would definitely not like to register a firearm with the ATF) decided to just treat those braces like a stock. (Not a good stock, but still a stock.) Clearly, users were violating the intent of the law regarding short-barreled rifles, so it really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that ATF decided to change the rules.

Is the short-barreled rifle law reasonable? I honestly do not have a strong opinion, but it seems like short-barreled rifles are very dangerous in our imagination, but in practice, they really are not more dangerous than a rifle with a typical barrel length. It also seems like the complexity of the registration process and the amount of time it takes is absurd given the modern technology available. If the background check system were adequately funded, and if states were required to submit data to it, it should be a simple thing for people to be offered an instant check for NFA items (i.e., firearms and firearm accessories that are regulated under the National Firearms Act). Yes, even fingerprints can be done electronically, and that’s been the case for years. However, Democrats don’t want to make it easier, and Republicans don’t want to fund the government. Well, actually, Republicans don’t want it to be easier, either — they want to keep gun owners angry at the government and they know they will blame the Democrats for their frustrations.

Does this constant changing of the rules by ATF basically mean that an executive agency is creating laws? In a way, yes, but it is also true that the legislature has failed dramatically in its duty to make coherent legislation, and that the ATF has no choice but to try to make it coherent. While it is clear that some degree of interpretation is inevitable for agencies that execute the law, it is also true that things like the National Firearms Act and the ATF’s interpretation of it are ripe for a legal challenge because the degree of interpretation is so great.

I’m less interested in these hypothetical questions than I am in our material conditions — i.e., what do people have to do to avoid going to jail? The announcement of the new rule is here:
https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/factoring-criteria-firearms-attached-stabilizing-braces

ATF offers these solutions for those of you who own an AR-15-style gun with a barrel of less than 16″ and a pistol stabilizing brace:

1. Register the short-barreled rifle no later than 120 days after January 13, 2023.
2. Replace the short barrel with a 16-inch or longer rifle barrel
3. Permanently remove and dispose of, or alter, the “stabilizing brace” such that it cannot be reattached.
4. Turn in the firearm to your local ATF office.
5. Destroy the firearm.

If you choose the third option, and if you have a scope on the gun that can only be used if it is shouldered, you must also remove that scope until the gun is legally registered. My understanding at this moment is that if such an optic is attached to the gun, ATF might still interpret the gun as being a short-barreled rifle even though it should really be interpreted as useless.

Please note that you can do 2 and/or 3 now, and then do 1 later. Specifically, you could replace the short barrel with a 16″ or longer barrel, take your time registering it, then convert it back to the shorter barrel after it is fully registered. Or, you could destroy the stabilizing brace — leaving the gun in a fairly useless, but legal condition — then register it and put an actual stock on the gun (which is going to be a lot nicer than the whole stabilizing brace thing was).

Based on previous ATF interpretations and the above guidance from ATF, we can surmise that simply removing the stabilizing brace without destroying it is absolutely not going to get you off the hook if you own an AR-15-style weapon. They are clear about this, in fact. You must alter the brace “such that it cannot be reattached” if you go with this option. I was going to describe a circuitous method that might work to allow you to use the brace later without breaking the law, but really you just need to either destroy the brace or go with a different option.

If you take advantage of the 120-day grace period, they might not charge you the $200 tax — but I am not sure about that at all, so please don’t count on it. I’ll update this page if I can figure out the answer to that question.

If you are a leftist with an AR-15-style weapon with a pistol stabilizing brace, it is imperative that you choose one of the solutions described above. The US government (including the Biden administration) and — especially — US law enforcement still hates you and would be thrilled to discover you to be in violation of the National Firearms Act. Please don’t let that happen to you. I’m very curious to see if leftists will be allowed to register these weapons, or if they will fail the extended background check without any explanation.

A year or so ago, I was helping a friend with a project in one of Columbia’s homeless camps, and we talked to one of the residents who was angry about thefts that had been happening in the camp — residents stealing from other residents. The thing that he said that really stuck with me was something to the effect of, “There’s no community here.” I instantly understood what he meant; there’s more to a community than just a bunch of people living in the same place. Yet, it is hard to explain exactly what a community is — perhaps because few of us have ever lived in one.

America doesn’t really have communities. We have bunches of people living geographically close together, but they are people that are not really connected to one another. For any home in American, the odds are that the occupants don’t even know the names of all the people living in adjacent homes. We are a people that have been perfectly atomized. When we call an area a “community” we are usually using the word in an aspirational sense.

We used to believe that wolf packs were organized in a strict hierarchy, with an “alpha wolf” at the top of that hierarchy. This term came out of Rudolph Schenkel’s 1947 study of a group of captive wolves; since then, we’ve learned that there are no “alpha wolves” in a naturally-occurring wolf pack, but they do exist in captive wolf packs.

Wolves are not supposed to exist in captivity. This is an unnatural condition for a wolf pack. In fact, the process of captivity is a traumatic, even apocalyptic, event for the pack, which likely doesn’t even represent a complete pack, but rather individuals captured from multiple packs and shoved together. A captive wolf pack is essentially a group of strangers, all with post-traumatic stress, and no real connection to one another. They live in a container that is dramatically smaller than what a naturally-occurring pack requires. They’ve been made permanently afraid; they are pathological. They are also very good analogs to the perfectly atomized people that live in America.

No, most Americans are not held in a container; however, wherever we go, our survival is uncertain and we are surrounded by strangers. Moreover, we are forced through economic pressure to choose containers to occupy on a recurring basis, and this economic pressure may seem subtle (and even normal), but is truly a threat to our very existence. If we don’t go to work — and occupy that authoritarian container of the workplace — we will not have enough money for food, a home, medical care, or — ironically — transportation to a workplace. Moreover, it is always possible that a damaged human being will snap from the combination of their personal trauma and the irrationality of modern life, and go on a murder spree (there were over 600 such events in the US in 2022). We live in constant fear just like a wolf in a cage.

If you take a traumatized wolf and free it, it isn’t going to do well. It is no longer equipped for real freedom and you can’t just shove it into an existing, healthy pack. The pack will not simply accept it, and the newly-freed wolf won’t behave in a way that ingratiates it to the pack. Freeing a captive wolf requires a very long process of naturally rebuilding the pack from scratch and is only possible because of the strength of instinctual behavior in wolves.

Related: How to teach wolves to be wild

The situation is much more difficult with humans. One of humanity’s strengths is that we can adapt to anything, and that adaption is a product of our behaviors being more learned than instinctual. A human being raised in a horrific environment internalizes that horror as normal — even good. Yet our instinct to build community still exists; the result is small, toxic communities that are transient, with “alpha” individuals that take advantage of the “omegas” and “betas” that serve the alpha and facilitate abuse. Any sincere attempt to build a healthy community will almost instantly attract toxic people yearning to find followers to worship them.

Ever wonder why it seems like the US has so many cults? It’s a direct result of how broken Americans are and their innate, human need for community. In a Venn diagram, the place where “abused people” and “need for community” overlaps is marked as “cults”. Some cults have gotten so big in the US that they are now officially religions. Cults build community but also purposefully separate individual members from the larger society. A cult leans on the need for community, while simultaneously abusing members to maintain the normalized culture of abuse that they experienced before joining — often through denying other basic human needs, but also through direct psychological and physical abuse. It seems irrational, but a human being raised under horrific conditions will often view some forms of abuse as good, nurturing, or as an expression of love.

Neoliberalism promotes atomization of the individual down to a single person who lives in a physically separate home, with only transactional relationships connecting them to other human beings, usually through the intermediary of a corporation. The corporation usually has an app. Here, conservativism, with it’s culture of toxicity, at least provides some semblance of family and community, though rife with abuse. In my experience, most leftists are people that understand that community is not only good but necessary, but who have also realized that conservative communities are toxic (because the only thing they really care about conserving is an oppressive hierarchy); in my experience, those people usually come from conservative backgrounds. Again, this is just what I’ve seen, but it seems like people who grow up in “liberal” homes simply do not care about community at all and usually don’t appreciate how abusive conservativism really is.

Related: Who are the child abusers? A case study

Right wing propaganda is currently going after two targets: trans people and our society’s shift to less environmentally destructive infrastructure (e.g., renewable energy and EV’s). Certainly, the attacks on trans people are the more alarming of the two things, but they tend to be more confined to far right spaces. In contrast, lies about renewable energy and battery electric vehicles seem a lot more likely to seep into the mainstream — and pop up in my news feed.

The difference is probably down to who is promoting each narrative. Anti-trans narratives are the obsession of the fully unhinged Christian fascists and white nationalists that make up 30% of US adults. In contrast, anti-environment narratives come out of the fossil fuel industry; they are well-funded, well-organized, and highly educated. However, they still follow simple narrative formats that we are all familiar with:

1. “I know you are but what am I?” Also known as the Peewee Herman Defense or the “Obama did it, too!” strategy, this right wing narrative fixates on negative aspects of the liberal position and implies that it is worse than the status quo. It never is, but they always focus on the flaws on the other side to cover up that fact.
2. “Chaos and destruction” Claiming that the liberal position is equivalent to burning all of western civilization to the ground for absolutely no reason. Basically, any sort of societal change looks like everything burning down in the conservative imagination, and this narrative leans in on that idea.

An example of the Peewee Herman Defense would be the guy Joe Rogan recently had on his show talking about how lithium is often mined under truly horrific conditions, and of course the point was to say, “Obviously, it is wrong for electric vehicles to exist because they include the product of exploited labor,” which is interesting because the people who are opposed to electric cars are not at all opposed to exploiting working people. Naturally, this kind of argument never comes anywhere close to the leftist position, which is that capitalism always exploits working people and damages the planet, and therefore, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and capitalism should be abolished. Rather, the narrative is meant to reinforce the status quo and keep the fossil fuel industry going — that’s because these narratives are being directly financed by the fossil fuel industry.

The implication that the fossil fuel industry is somehow ethical is laughable. At least with lithium production, whole nations aren’t being bombed to oblivion (yet). At least with battery electric vehicles, humanity might still have a future. Do people really think that no one is being exploited by fossil fuel extraction industries? Fossil fuels represent the ultimate exploitation of humanity because using them for our comfort and convenience today sentences future generations to horrific suffering and death, not to mention the wars that have been going on for well over a hundred years to secure access to cheap fossil fuels.

This particular argument — that we shouldn’t use EV’s because the batteries are unethically sourced — is a funny one because Joe Biden’s neoliberal administration has already improved the situation significantly by attaching a requirement to the federal tax credit for EV’s that requires them to have battery components sourced in the US and nations with trade agreements with the US. While it certainly won’t fix the problem (only abolishing capitalism could do that), it will improve the working conditions associated with EV batteries and give the US government leverage to further improve those conditions in the future. Moreover, they’re not going to suggest we go back to lead acid batteries in the many, many other products that use lithium ion batteries, are they? Sure, only lithium ion is really practical in small devices, but you do still have a choice to not use them — surely, the sad photos of lithium mines would justify simply not using anything with a lithium-based battery in it. There’s no federal policy encouraging ethical sourcing of the lithium in your smart phone.

An example of the Chaos and Destruction narrative would be an article by an economics professor that I read this morning that claimed that “environmentalists” want to burn western civilization to the ground in order to “create jobs”. Most of the article is a weird tangent focused on the idea that “jobs are not wealth” and the case of fires in London long ago that created a lot of jobs for working class people, and a man who joked that we should burn down Paris to create jobs in France to make a point about economics that seems to have been lost on the economist. His narrative is based around the false premise that neoliberals like the Biden administration want to literally destroy American energy infrastructure so it can be replaced with renewables. That’s not how things work at all; rather, all infrastructure has a lifespan, and the idea (briefly) is to build new energy infrastructure instead of replacing end-of-life fossil fuel infrastructure with more fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s easier than you’d think because the capitalist obsession with “efficiency” (i.e., money efficiency) means that most of that infrastructure is already at the edge of falling apart anyway.

I guess people are saying that renewables create jobs because America likes the idea of creating jobs. In the short term, a new industry is going to create jobs, but in the long term, it seems likely that the net number of jobs would be the same as before the transition. The more important issue (economically speaking) is that transitioning to a combination of renewable energy and nuclear (which is currently not renewable) would keep energy costs down and maintain the standard of living currently enjoyed by Americans. Failure to transition would result in the US falling further behind Europe.

The left’s position on all this would agree with the idea that jobs are not wealth, and we would put the lives and quality of life of human beings above both of those things. Capitalists “create jobs” to distract from the fact that they themselves aren’t working — rather, they get paid for just owning stuff. If they can get paid for just owning stuff, why can’t we get paid for just not taking that stuff away from them? Or — better yet — maybe we could build a society where everyone who can work does, no one gets rich by owning stuff, and the current generation isn’t sacrificing the future for today’s luxuries or trivial crap.

There is a punchline to the transition to renewables (which EV’s are part of) that will come to light soon enough. The people funding anti-transition propaganda know what’s up, and they’ve already been adjusting their lives and their investments to reflect the inevitability. It’s the common conservative individual living within relatively modest means that is going to suffer as a result of this propaganda.

Conservatives don’t believe in climate change or peak oil, but fossil fuel companies do, and that means that investment in fossil fuels is going to continue to drop relative to investment in renewables and nuclear, and at some point, returns on investment in fossil fuels will become unpredictable. When they become unpredictable, investment at extraction points will drop like a rock, followed by investment in fossil fuels at the market level. Most of the losses will be suffered by naïve investors who don’t get the joke. Because extraction of fossil fuels requires constant investment, this will mean a sudden drop in the availability of fossil fuels. The price will skyrocket, but companies will not increase their investment to match the price. The price of homes that rely less on fossil fuels will similarly skyrocket as will the price of EV’s.

These right wing narratives won’t stop the inevitable, but they will make it a lot more painful, particularly for people of limited means living in conservative communities that have faithfully eschewed investment in transition. If those people live in rural areas, and are thus more dependent on transportation to get resources, it will be even worse. In our modern world, cities don’t produce resources, but everything flows into a city to be processed before it flows back out into the world. Rural communities might be where all the resources that matter start, but those communities rely on access to cities to get the finished products and refined resources they need to survive. This inevitable transition is likely to be the final blow that destroys rural America… because conservatives believed fossil fuel industry propaganda.

How will America eat without farmers, you ask? Our current mode of farming is factory farming, and as is the case with any other factory, the work can be done by robots.

From the viewpoint of fully unhinged Christian fascists and white supremacists, the destruction of rural communities and exurbia will be a direct attack on the white Christian way of life. They’ll respond by trying to force capitalist industry to go back to a fossil fuel world, but it won’t work because it really can’t, and they’ll pivot to taking out their rage on all their perceived enemies.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the only punchline to the joke.

The neoliberal plan for the future is that 100% of homes and vehicles will run on a combination of renewables and nuclear fission reactors. This plan assumes that both autonomous vehicles and nuclear fusion are inevitabilities (they are not). They assume that most people will not own a car, but will instead call one up when needed, and the vehicle will arrive at their house on its own volition. They assume that fusion will be readily available just in time to save us from shortages of nuclear fuel. Economic growth will continue and everything will be fine.

The second punchline is that this plan is not feasible. Even from the perspective of most people who vote Democrat, this plan is not feasible. “It will work because it must,” is not a plan. There have been countless times in human history when the only choice was success, but failure is what actually happened.

While the grid will be fine as we transition to electric vehicles, there just isn’t enough money to replace every internal combustion engine on earth with an electric motor in a timely fashion — there isn’t even strong agreement that this should happen. Moreover, autonomy is turning out to be much more difficult than Elon Musk and his fans imagined. Similarly, nuclear fusion is still (as always) 20 years away, and 20 years away is too long.

Technically, yesterday was too long. Climate change already has us and the rational goal now is to keep the entire human species from dying out; the more optimistic (and irrational) goal is to keep the loss of life at 1 or 2 billion. The human carrying capacity of the Earth was 3.5 billion in 1970 — that was the last year we were not exceeding the carrying capacity. Exceeding the carrying capacity of a planet means that you are depleting and damaging the resource capital of that planet (e.g., the biosphere) — in other words, you are reducing the carrying capacity of that planet. So, the carrying capacity of Earth is no longer 3.5 billion — it is substantially less than that. Moreover, there is a 30-year lag between when greenhouse gasses are released into the environment and when we see the resulting change in climate, so things would get much, much worse even if we stopped our excessive CO2 production today.

Related: Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists (60 Minutes, January 2, 2023)

Related: Global CO2 Levels (chart at co2levels.org)

My guess is that we are looking at the inevitable death of at least 6 billion people and that the resulting social and economic upheaval, as well as rightwing backlash, will likely increase that death toll to all human beings (complete human extinction), along with 85% of other species. If you don’t like this prediction, then prove me wrong. Find a path toward degrowth — reducing consumption in western nations while also reducing the human population to 2 billion — and prove me wrong.

If alien archeologists examine the United States of America after we are all gone, they’ll find a curious world where people living in material abundance (as illustrated by their homes that are filled to the brim with “products”) managed to die off from a combination of poisoning, starvation, murder, and just plain bad weather. In amongst the piles of stuff will probably be quite a few electric vehicles. That would be the third punchline.

Related: Elon Musk and the Default Plan

I’m not trying for nihilism here. My point is that we should do something because we still have the opportunity to prevent humanity from dying off completely, and we should finally get both serious and practical about making that happen instead of continuing with these bad jokes and their awful punchlines.

I wanted to call this “Planetina Did Nothing Wrong” because it would be funny, but unfortunately, Planetina did a lot wrong during her appearance as a parody of Captain Planet on season 5, episode 3 of Rick and Morty. Media false equivalence between the right and left extends even into fiction where things like this episode of Rick and Morty, which is supposed to just be entertainment, turn out to be neoliberal propaganda. The left does nothing, and we get fictional representations of ourselves perpetrating horrific crimes; the right does something horrific in real life, and the media buries the political angle.

This post was inspired by Doug J. Balloon’s “New York Times Pitchbot” account on Twitter:

Whether it's liberals biking and driving hybrid cars, or conservatives launching terrorist attacks on power plants, both sides are doing what they can to lower the nation's consumption of energy.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) December 5, 2022

Right after multiple people attacked power stations in Moore County, North Carolina with firearms, resulting in a power outage that affected 45,000 people (most of those people still don’t have power), a right-wing insurrectionist named Emily Rainey claimed that the attack was motivated by a desire to disrupt a drag show.

Emily Rainey, a former Army officer who resigned after the Army launched an investigation into her participation in the Jan. 6th attack, posted this about the power outage. pic.twitter.com/kiwyuafMmJ

— charlotteclymer@mastodon.social (@cmclymer) December 4, 2022

We know that far-right terrorists have motive, means, and opportunity as it relates the terrorist attack. Conservatives have been purposefully conflating drag performances, trans people, and pedophilia. (In truth, these are three entirely separate things.) Moreover, the trend of fascists plotting to attack electrical infrastructure in the US dates back to 2019 (pdf). Authorities agree that the attack on the electrical system in Moore county was an intentional attack, but they won’t say it was likely done by right-wing conservatives of the white supremacist Christian variety, even though it is obvious. To find a media outlet willing to state the obvious, we have to go to the left side of Twitter or an LGBTQ+ news site.

In the Planetina episode of Rick and Morty, Planetina starts out using her elemental powers to save people from disasters. When she changes her focus to defending the planet against capitalism, suddenly the tone of the narrative changes. Where she was portrayed as human-focused before, now she is portrayed as irrationally valuing the planet itself to the exclusion of human beings. It’s an interesting angle because — first off — this is exactly how conservatives (of both stripes) portray environmentalists — as people who care more about “nature” than humanity, but also because this planet is the one and only human habitat and the quality of that habitat directly affects every human being. Humanity and the planet are inseparable; concern for the condition of this planet is concern for human beings.

A writer of fiction has the option of having their characters behave in a way that illustrates a point even if the “real” person would never behave that way. Certainly, it was necessary for Planetina’s relationship with Morty to end, but they could easily have used Morty’s extremely flawed character to solve that problem; blaming it on Planetina was a purposeful criticism of environmentalism. Her slaughter of 300 miners was a choice that anti-environmentalist writers made. Real-life environmentalism is focused on getting control of Earth’s climate in order to save billions of human lives. Meanwhile, real-life fascists are willing to cut off power to 45,000 random people in winter just to stop a few people they hate from having fun (they failed).

It isn’t just Planetina or the terrorist attack in North Carolina that are the issue. We see this pattern in the media all the time. The “both sides” narrative divides the truth into the Democrat side and the Republican side, with the intended purpose of erasing the left’s position on every single political issue or recent event. The left’s positions have become absurd (i.e., they are perceived as absurd) despite being ethical, practical, and fact-based thanks to this prolonged propaganda campaign by traditional conservatives and neoliberals.

Related: The Many Flavors of Conservative

Related: The American Death Cult

The best definition of conservativism is: The belief that there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect (Wilhoit’s Law). You might expect that a conservative society would have two sets of laws — one set for the ingroups and a different set for the outgroups — but this would make the injustice of conservativism plain to be seen. While extremely conservative societies will generally have some targeted laws (e.g., men in Iran are never stoned to death for their clothing choices), the more common situation is for the law to be written in a way that is objectively neutral, but then conservatives weaponize the law using selective enforcement.

Selective enforcement is when the law applies differently to ingroups versus outgroups based on how authorities choose to enforce it. For example, in Columbia, MO, there is an open container law, but the enforcement of that law varies in ways that are intentionally hard to confirm. What is clear is that on the day of a big MU sporting event, people who are clearly older sports fans who have come to Columbia for that event are much less likely to experience the enforcement of the open container law. This makes sense from a cynical point of view: Columbia needs the money that those sports fans bring to town and Columbia (collectively) doesn’t want to alienate them by charging them with a crime; Columbia doesn’t even want to interrupt their fun by confiscating their open containers of liquor.

In a neo-liberal/capitalist society, it is always inconvenient/disadvantageous to use the law to control the behavior of relatively wealthy/powerful people, and it is always relatively convenient/advantageous to control the behavior of relatively marginalized people. The result is that neo-liberal societies tend to selectively enforce the law, so there ends up being one set of rules for the rich and another set for the poor — or even multiple layers of enforcement based on wealth. This is the most important mechanism by which neo-liberal conservativism is enforced.

Obviously, Republican conservatives (i.e., fascists) hate neo-liberal conservativism because they themselves sometimes end up having the law enforced against them. They do not, however, want anything resembling justice. Rather, they want a different form of conservativism where white, nominally Christian, straight men are the ingroup (which would include better access to wealth), and everyone else either serves that ingroup or is removed from society through execution, deportation, or imprisonment. Unlike neoliberal conservatives, racial/religious conservatives favor explicitly targeting outgroups with laws rather than favoring selective enforcement — but they will still use selective enforcement when they can.

Selective enforcement is very interesting in terms of firearm law. The reason racial/religious conservatives (fascists) are so strident about the Second Amendment is because they believe it will be selectively enforced against them in the context of a racial/religious war that pits the government-controlled forces of neoliberalism against the less organized and more poorly equipped forces of racial/religious conservativism (fascism). Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we know that when these same conservatives are faced with their enemies bearing effective small arms, they will immediately reverse their position on the Second Amendment and demand limitations.

Reagan demonstrated this twice. The first time was when Reagan was the governor of California. The Black Panthers made a legal show of force and Reagan (and the rest of the government) responded by limiting the Second Amendment rights of all Californians with the Mulford Act in 1967. Even the National Rifle Association supported this law because the NRA is a tool of racial/religious conservativism (fascism) first, and a proponent of civil rights second. The second time was after an assassin tried to kill Reagan based on the belief that killing any president (regardless of political party) would impress Jodie Foster; the result was the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act which limits the Second Amendment rights of all Americans. (This law was passed after Reagan was out of office, but explicitly supported by him.)

Selective enforcement is certainly a case of poor enforcement of the law (and is mostly perpetrated by the police), but that really isn’t the biggest problem with it.

You might expect me to say that the ingroup/outgroup distinction is the problem, but it really isn’t if we keep in mind Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance which says that,  “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” In other words, there is exactly one valid outgroup, and it is intolerant people — i.e., fascists. It is called a paradox for a reason. Frank Wilhoit (of Wilhoit’s Law) specifically pointed out that the only remedy for conservativism is anti-conservativism. “The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone” except that conservatives must be bound from doing fascism or changing the law to support their conservative principles (fascism being the actions that follow from believing in conservativism).

We should, however, minimize selective enforcement and the legal basis of anti-fascism should focus on making fascist actions illegal rather than creating laws that we hope will not be enforced against non-fascists. This is an important point, so let me put it another way: If we are making a law meant to target fascists, we must always ask, “If this law were being enforced by agents of fascism, could it be used to further the goals of fascism?”

Historically, in the US, selective enforcement has been used to uphold white supremacy, specifically. Even now, when neo-liberalism has supplanted racial/religious conservativism (fascism) as the dominant ideology, street-level law enforcement (the cops) still tend to enforce the law in a way that disadvantages people of color, and neoliberals are lukewarm regarding racism due to their cynical belief that everyone in America deserves their economic situation. We — as a society — could have chosen to selectively enforce the law against fascists and we could, as a result, be nearly fascist-free at this point. America has chosen — over and over again — to allow fascism to continue while at the same time viciously attacking the left and people of color — mostly with selective enforcement.

To end fascism (and ensure that selective enforcement is not being used to further the goals of fascism), fascists must be removed from positions of power at every level. As much as neoliberals claim to use data-driven policy making, they still refuse to do anything about the fact that the data shows that police officers are very likely to be white supremacists and domestic abusers (i.e., misogynists). While this might make a horrifying kind of sense in a conservative community (since it reflects the will of the far-right people that live in it), it doesn’t make sense at all in most American cities where the bulk of police officers work.

Municipal governments should be systematically removing police officers who are white supremacists or domestic abusers. Moreover, they should be removing officers who believe that police officers are an ingroup that should be protected and not bound and that normal citizens are an outgroup that should be bound and not protected. Optimally, we would have national policies to prevent fascists from becoming police in the first place, or from becoming a cop in a different community after they lose their job (much like a pedophile priest moving to a different Catholic church after he gets caught).

If the police are to be a legitimate institution in America and if we are to believe the Democratic Party’s position that police are a necessity that requires even more money (despite already receiving an obscene portion of municipal budgets), then the fascists working as police must be removed. No one who has organized as a fascist or who has been confirmed to have committed domestic abuse should be allowed to work as a police officer. It is our belief that the Democratic Party — while being substantially better than the Republicans — still holds onto a kernel of white supremacy and that it does not want fascism to be extinguished; i.e., the Democratic Party’s elites represent the softer side of American white supremacy. You can prove us wrong by getting rid of all those racist cops.

I’ve been following the story of the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs, and it is absolutely heartbreaking. I’m very appreciative of how the mainstream press and the LGBTQ+ community are handling it. I’m especially glad to hear that some of the patrons stopped the killer; the bravery of those individuals saved lives by resolving the situation much more quickly than would have been possible if they had waited for the police.

The preferred enemy for the far right has most recently been people who are trans, and they’ve been purposefully conflating transness with both drag and “grooming” (pedophilia). In essence, they’ve declared all three things to be one and the same; in truth, they are entirely separate and distinct from one another and only one of those three things (pedophilia) is evil. As GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ells pointed out in an interview on MSNBC, these false narratives are part of an environment of violence and hate that makes mass murder events like what happened in Colorado Springs inevitable. Genocidal right-wing narratives have driven an increase in documented hate crimes not only for LGBTQ+ people, but also Asian and Jewish people. The list of the far-right’s enemies is a lot longer than that, though, and it ends up covering just about everyone.

I’d like to talk about practical approaches to this problem because it isn’t going away anytime soon. As members of this club have said many times before, it is going to get worse.

First of all, the police are not the answer.

1. To have enough police to cover every potential target of right-wing violence is not possible, and as a result, when seconds count, the police will almost always be minutes away. This part, at least, is not their fault. The mere existence of police does not prevent violence; police can only react to violence (or start it themselves).
2. Police tend to be toward the far right politically; i.e., they are frequently part of the problem. This can create subtle changes in the speed and quality of their response that have a very significant impact in terms of lives lost. Specifically, the police will rarely care about a marginalized group of people as much as members of that community care about it. The ideas police have regarding who the good guys and bad guys are likely make them less motivated to risk their lives to save members of marginalized communities. It is entirely possible to call the police and have them attack the wrong side as as result of their prejudices.
3. Sometimes, the police simply don’t care to risk their lives even if it seems like the people affected would inspire them to do so (e.g., Uvalde). The police have absolutely no obligation (legally speaking) to serve or protect the community.

The phrase “we keep us safe” has a lot of layers and nuance, but in this context it means that the best people to take on the responsibility of minimizing a firearm-related terrorist attack are members of the community who are physically present at the potential site of an attack. If you are the organizer for an event or location that serves people who have been the subject of the right wing’s genocidal propaganda, it is my strong recommendation that you identify members of the community who are willing to volunteer as anti-terrorist security.

Anti-terrorist security is very different from normal event security. They are not acting as an authority figure for the event or location; e.g., they are not taking tickets or money, they are not preventing people from bringing in their own food/drink, and they are not addressing a normal belligerent patron. Their only purpose is to stop terrorists. Where a bouncer might wear a uniform that points out their authority, someone performing anti-terrorist security is better off blending in. (Anyone wearing a uniform is in more danger because they are likely to be the first targets of a terrorist.)

Should your community’s anti-terrorist security be armed? That would depend on the exact details of your strategy. Sure, yes — it is true that it is easier for a person armed with a gun to stop someone with a gun than it is for an unarmed person to do it. Depending on the details of the situation, it might not even be possible for an unarmed person to stop a killer with a gun. However, I also think there is great value in refusing to compromise your ethics based on what your enemies might do, and I think it is entirely possible to come up with adequately effective strategies that do not require your anti-terrorist security to be armed.

In either case, it is important to develop and implement that strategy and to not depend on the police solving the problem for you. In the long term, the goal would be to end fascism, but with nearly half of Americans (i.e., Republicans) actively participating in it and another near half (i.e., Democrats) going between merely ridiculing them and negotiating with them, there’s little indication that fascism will end in our lifetimes.

If you are in the Boone County area, we may be available to provide your group with a free workshop on disarming an active shooter so that your volunteers can be more effective in that situation.

Update:

The New York Times has an interview with Richard M. Fierro, who was the first person to attack the mass shooter at Club Q in Colorado Springs. (Fierro was soon backed up by a woman who has not been identified.) Fierro runs a brewery, but also served 15 years in the US Army. The interview basically confirms the practical advice I provided above. Due to his military experience (and trauma), Fierro always watches the door of any public location, ready to respond to an attack. In a situation where seconds or even parts of a second matter, I think it is worthwhile to talk about how to reduce that response time, even if only by a tiny bit, and I think having at least one more person primed to respond and explicitly giving those two people the responsibility to stop the shooter might have done just that. But keep in mind that once you’ve got a psychopathic murderer with a gun in the room with a crowd of people, there’s no success per se; there’s only minimizing losses at that point.

Joe Biden has now made a second speech about how America’s MAGAs are horrible people bent on ending democracy. And then he asked us to vote. I guess it makes sense to mainstream Democratic Party voters, but from my perspective, it was very concerning. For example: “extreme MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections, but elections being held now and into the future” and they are the driving force of the Republican Party which is going to “suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself” which means “denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts” and they’re doing this with premeditation (i.e., before they’ve even lost, they are claiming theft of the next election, just like Trump did during the 2016 and 2020 elections). They have already “emboldened violence and intimidation of voters and election officials” and there are “300 election deniers on the ballot all across America this year”. Obviously, this is “damaging, it’s corrosive, and it’s destructive”.

Why am I concerned? Imagine the king standing on the ramparts bellowing out a horrific summary of what is happening — explaining that an army of bloodthirsty psychopaths is about to breach the gates — and then he says, “So, we all need to vote. We need to vote against this madness!”

I mean… I guess?!?

Does he really think that voting is going to end the violence? Surely, he understands that the violence is only going to get worse and that we aren’t really voting “yes” or “no” to violence but rather choosing the form of it. The question is really, “Will the MAGA violence come from government agents or independent fascists?” The latter is the better option.

Moreover, his defense of democracy falls completely flat given that he and the rest of the mainstream Democratic Party are right of center. “We are capitalist. That’s just how it is,” explained Nancy Pelosi a while back. That means that capitalists are the ruling class of their ideal society. It’s better than MAGA fascism, but it isn’t democracy — not really.

“Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people,” Biden said. True! Can we have some of that democracy from the Democratic Party? Can you all throw “the moneyed” to the curb (or maybe even under the bus) and rule for the people? Ironically, the Republican Party is actually more democratic in terms of how responsive it is to the demands of its constituency in comparison to the Democratic Party — it’s just that what Republican voters want is fascism.

The Democratic press is just as useless as Biden himself in terms of navigating this moment in history. As I’ve mentioned before, Heather Cox Richardson is extremely well-informed, thorough and intelligent, but like others in the Democratic media has these strange blind spots. For example, in her piece covering Biden’s second anti-MAGA speech, she implies that the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband will finally make people see the light and reject MAGA fascism.  If a capitol riot that killed five people and involved thousands of others wasn’t enough to bring people around, why would a lone wolf attack on a congressperson’s house? To address Margaret Sullivan’s concern, no, the American press is not up to this moment that we are experiencing and that includes Heather Cox Richardson.

Let me tell you about how MAGAs are responding to the hammer attack. They are giddy. They are excited to see what happens next. They’re horny about it. They want to help future horrors happen. The left knows that MAGAs will never see the light. We’re hoping that something will happen to make the Democrats see it.

The Democratic Party — including leadership, voters, and base — does not understand the Paradox of Tolerance. In short, if a tolerant society chooses to tolerate intolerance — including intolerant ideologies and intolerant people — that creates the opportunity for intolerance to snuff out tolerance altogether. Sitting around demanding tolerance, decorum, and adherence to standard procedures does not work against an enemy hell bent on destroying all three. The Democratic Party does not know what to do about MAGA fascism; their paradigm offers absolutely no way forward.

Yes, you should vote. Yes, you should vote against the MAGAs and for the less-authoritarian, less-horrific vision of the Democratic Party. But the MAGAs aren’t going away and if the Democratic Party can’t figure out how to deal with them (and their own party’s hypocrisy), things will get much, much worse.

American conservativism has failed. That shouldn’t be a surprise since the failure of conservative politics is the motivation behind every openly fascist political movement. What is interesting, though, is that conservatives are beginning to acknowledge this failure and are struggling with how to separate themselves from the fascists that have taken over the Republican party and conservative discourse. It’s a struggle because it isn’t possible.

Let’s just review the only definition of “conservative” that has ever made any sense: Wilhoit’s Law, named for Frank Wilhoit, a composer who made a very popular comment to an online article once upon a time.

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.

Related: The Pithiest Critique of Modern Conservatism Keeps Getting Credited to the Wrong Man

Of course, there is a difference between “conservative” and “fascist” it just isn’t what conservatives hope it might be. The difference is that conservatives merely value the proposition described by Wilhoit (and believe it is true), whereas fascists implement it. If conservativism hasn’t failed, then there is no need to implement it, only conserve it. Action is only required when something has gone wrong (from the conservative view).

The Federalist has published a piece where a guy says that conservatives need to call themselves something else because all that they stand for has been lost, and then he conveniently mentions a number of things that represent what this new thing would strive to implement. How does this match up with Wilhoit’s Law?

The author of the Federalist piece promotes marriage, except it is the conservative model of marriage wherein the man becomes the “head” of the woman; i.e., a world where men are protected and women are bound, where the conservative model for relationships is encouraged and enforced (protected), and all other models rejected (bound).

The author of the Federalist piece promotes freedom of religion, except he really only means a conservative form of Christianity; i.e., a world where conservative Christians are protected and those of all other religious or metaphysical positions are bound.

He promotes freedom of the individual, except for the case of anyone who in any way offends the traditional conceptions of how gender and sexuality should or should not be expressed; i.e., a world where straight cis people are protected and all others are bound.

In order to resurrect these things which he claims have died (they have not), the author is willing to end the entire idea of small government conservativism and use both the carrot and the stick of big government to force time to run backwards to 1950. To give you a couple of examples, he would give big checks to married people with children in the manner of a socialist, and also imprison anyone who allows a child to be exposed to non-conservative gender ideas — even the child’s own parents. Of course, he would also imprison (possibly execute) women who have an abortion at any point in a pregnancy regardless of why they had the abortion.

It may surprise some readers to find Davidson promoting opposition to “corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces” (i.e., capitalism), but I’ve been pointing out for a very long time that conservatives do not genuinely care about capitalism — they don’t even know what it is. They see capitalism as a shorthand way to talk about their own economic privilege, and are quite willing to dispose of it if they feel it threatens their way of life.

Overall, the author’s position is basically the same as Steve Bannon’s, which is to say that it is a kind of conservative Leninism, which is to say Leninist tactics with a conservative aim; in short, it is fascism. A quote from the article:

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war. 

American fascism has been constant in its character since before the United States of America even existed — an ultra-violent racism, wrapped in a convoluted version of Christianity that directly opposes the teachings of Jesus Christ and is willing to collude with the wealthy as long as there is benefit in doing so. What’s interesting is that there isn’t a similarly strong thread of leftism in America (despite a few outliers like John Brown); the opposition to American fascism is American capitalism, a qualitatively different conservative movement. Indeed, Wilhoit’s famous comment includes this:

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists

If there is a superficial appearance that “both sides” (Democrats and Republicans) are the same, it is because they are both conservatives — just conservatives of a different flavor that see each other as convenient adversaries. Certainly, one of these conservative groups (the Democrats) is better, but it is also certainly not good. While the Republicans are significantly more extreme, the essential difference between the two is in terms of who they see as the ingroups and outgroups. We can only hope that this collapse of conservativism will spread to both parties and that it can be replaced with something better — something that is anti-conservative. Per Wilhoit:

 The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

One of the biggest ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is the shortage of computer chips. However, the shortage is more about the fact that market capitalism is extremely money-efficient, but not at all resilient. Resilience is expensive so you cannot be both money-efficient and resilient. However, because computer chips are so important to the functioning of global capitalism, capitalists and their lackeys have decided that chips are “strategic” and that the expense of resilience is worth the money — particularly if it is being paid for by middle class taxpayers instead of capitalists.

Chips provide many important functions, and many of those functions serve the purpose of helping the powerful maintain power. You’ve heard the phrase “bread and circuses” and chips help with both. In terms of bread (meaning vital resources), chips help people make sure the right resources are getting to the right place to keep people warm, healthy, safe, and fed. In fact, the very functioning of society now depends on every worker being “chipped” in the form of a smart phone or other chip-based device. In terms of circuses (meaning pacifying entertainments), chips have become a key component in delivering all kinds of entertainment to people to keep them distracted, immobile, misinformed, and passive. Another function has to do with violence, allowing weapons systems to kill and disrupt enemies more effectively and protecting our own people from attacks (especially if those people are wealthy). Another function is preventing information from being free; complex math can be used to control who can see information and when they can see it. An interesting side-effect of this fourth function of chips is that it can be used to make information that would otherwise be easy to duplicate into a product you can sell (e.g., movies and music). Finally, chips also increase the amount of information available to everyone — but most importantly, to bean counters. Chips help make more beans and help count those beans; they have become an essential component of neoliberalism (the religion of bean counting).

Most of what I will be saying here is based on this article:
The U.S. and its allies are joining forces on chips. That could stop China reaching the next level by Arjun Kharpal (CNBC)

The big players in this unfolding drama are:

• USA: Thought outsourcing the actual capital to factories in China was a good idea. Thought intellectual property was more important than material capital. Now re-learning that control of the means of production is important. The US often uses its massive military as a means of controlling capital that is physically in other countries, and of course the petrodollar continues to force other countries to obtain US dollars for the purpose of buying oil, but these strategies are inferior to direct control.
• China: Has successfully seized control of a huge chunk of the means of production. Has become impatient about fulfilling its dreams of rebuilding empire and is freaking global capitalism out… especially nations that are near it.
• South Korea: More capitalist than the US (see Squid Game and Parasite for film commentary on how that is going for them; note 1) and has China as an extremely close neighbor, so wants to keep selling chips and chip-based products to China.
• Netherlands: The Dutch company ASML is the only one in the entire dang world that can manufacturer the machines needed to make advanced chips.
• Japan, India, Australia, and Taiwan: Other countries that have chip fabrication facilities… and are also concerned about China’s aspirations because of their physical proximity.

Part of Biden’s agenda appears to be strengthening US manufacturing (i.e., relocating capital back to the US); at first glance, this is less money-efficient (though more resource-efficient), but capital is willing to let this happen because they want to protect against future disruptions. Disruption currently appears to be more expensive than investing in resilience (in the long term). The second part of Biden’s agenda is protecting global and domestic capitalism from Chinese nationalism; therefore, the Biden administration’s international chip project is specifically designed to cut out China and, in the long term, diminish it.

There are no communists or socialists involved in this chip dispute. China may (or may not!) have a long-term goal of communism, but is clearly operating with state capitalism controlled by a single-party political system with a nationalistic bent. Among these countries, Netherlands is actually the furthest left, with a political system featuring a strong emphasis on striving for broad consensus on important issues (note 2); though Netherlands is not leftist, consensus decision making is a foundational goal of leftist organizing. In contrast, both Chinese and US culture emphasize the idea that there is some specific group that is best able to make decisions; for China, that group is the Communist Party, and for the US that group is either capitalists (especially bean counters) or fascists (especially rich, white, cis, Christian men).

Solidarity is the most important aspect of leftism, and consensus governance is how you put that into practice in a leftist society. Right wing governance may include “consensus building” but this means using propaganda techniques to convince people that the ruling group’s decision is good, rather than actually using input from everyone to determine a course of action, and is often used only as a distraction during the implementation phase or as a performance of democracy (they will say that they allowed people to voice their opinion, though it wasn’t really part of the decision-making process).

Related: University of Missouri System approves new paid time off model for staff starting in 2024 This decision had a performative consensus building stage that was used as a distraction and to create a false impression of democratic process.

Notes:

1. “There’s nothing you can say about capitalism that it won’t subsume and sell back to you.” – Max Tempkin
2. Civil service systems in Western Europe edited by A. J. G. M. Bekke, Frits M. Meer, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000, Chapter 7 as quoted in Wikipedia entry Politics of the Netherlands