Field Notes: Long Time Coming

 

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“Skull Mask E-Girls” and Fascist Micro-community Targeting

Over the course of my recent absence, I built up a small collection of links to stories I would have talked about if I was around, but didn’t because I was busy trying to help take care of a seriously ill family member. Unfortunately the news cycle doesn’t stop, and over the past few weeks it has dawned on me that I’m highly unlikely to get around to discussing this backlog of stories in a handful of Recommended Reading posts each week.

So I’m going to start just sharing them, along with a couple of value added kind of paragraphs, until my tab bar is empty and things can go back to normal; starting with this September 7th, 2022 piece by Hazel Woodrow at AntiHate.ca. Today we’re talking about fascism, and e-girls – no, really:

Feminine Fascism: Girls and Young Women in Hate Subcultures

Look, I won’t lie to you, one of the reasons I’m sharing a story about the spread of fascist ideology in online subcultures orientated towards young women, is so we can all stare in horrified fascination at terms like “aspiring tradwife” and “skull mask e-girl.” This story is just weird enough that it’s easy to forget how depressing the idea of very young women openly embracing (explicitly misogynist) fascist ideology for favestars and influencer cred really is. If you have teen girls in your immediate family or life circle, it might be a good idea to dive into this one just so you know the warning signs to look out for, and that’s no laughing matter.

For our purposes here however, this story demonstrates two important things about fascism that I’ve been struggling to communicate in my work. First, while this modern fascist cultural movement that’s sweeping across the entire Pig Empire has a powerful distorting affect on the “meatspace” world, its gateway ideologies and recruiting pitches for the Volkish masses, are primarily happening online; and the fascists are actively targeting very young people on these platforms.

Secondly, the popularity of social media is allowing fascist movements and ideologues to target incredibly small, even obscure online communities, with custom tailored propaganda; and they’re certainly using that technology to its full advantage.

Of course, this won’t be news to those of you who’ve encountered a fashy spin cycle class, or realize that in retrospect Gamergate does look an awful lot like a dry run for the social media propaganda and harassment campaign that helped put Trump in power in 2016. But the idea that aspiring neo-nazi spin doctors have successfully replaced Hitlerjugend indoctrination programs with Tik Tok influencers and image boards, should alarm a media establishment that’s often quite busy pretending fascism only looks like Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and maybe Kanye West.

I mean, once they’re done laughing about the absurdity of the term “skull mask e-girl,” anyway.

 

Recommended Reading: Van Zandt Dishes Truth

Van Zandt Tried To Get Trump To Release Leonard Peltier From Prison

I figured it might be a good idea to ease our way back into Recommended Reading posts, so today I’d like to start us off with a Huffington Post politics interview with actor, musician, and justice advocate Steven Van Zandt; who most of you will likely know best as Silvio Dante on The Sopranos.

While there are a number of things I find interesting about this interview, I think the most fascinating thing here might be that it got printed at all. Guided by strong journalistic instincts, interviewer Jennifer Bendery allows Van Zandt to hold court on a number of normally taboo topics in corporate media; including the duplicity of rogue Democrat Senators like Manchin and Sinema, the failure of the Biden Administration to properly deal with a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, and America’s continued inhumane and authoritarian incarceration of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier.

Frankly, for a man who is more or less a liberal celebrity, Van Zandt’s clarity of insight and refusal to tolerate nonsense excuses, is a refreshing change from soulless neoliberal ghouls like Matt Yglesias and David Shor; thinkers who reportedly represent the intellectual pole star of the Biden administration. Owing to his status as an entertainer, Van Zandt is allowed to say many things we all know are true, and yet any one of us would catch a two week ban for posting on social media – a fact that by itself, makes this interview worth reading.

Of course, nobody’s perfect, and in some ways Van Zandt still comes off as a cranky boomer liberal who almost certainly doesn’t know the constitutional definition of “treason.” Despite this however, my own personal experience over the past couple of years tells me that Steve’s views are far more in line with the rank and file, “middle class” Democrat voter than media influencers would have you believe; a voter whose support is much more important than pleasing a few Substack writers who think surrendering abortion rights and being just a bit more racist is the recipe for stopping an ongoing fascist takeover of American society.

If Biden and the Democrats want to win, both this fall and in 2024, they’d be wise to spend more time listening to guys like Steven Van Zandt, and a little less time fawning over millionaire centrist gurus who clearly don’t give one rat’s backside about the folks these fundie fascist creeps harm. And whether the President cares about winning elections on not, both human decency and even the barest shred of respect for justice dictates he should free Leonard Peltier immediately.

 

The Red-Brown Alliance is a Fascist Grift

 

 

Warning: some nonsense in the comments has been sticking in my craw for 24 hours now, so I’m going to stay on theme and keep talking about reactionary grifters trying to sell you fascism presented as left wing action; and why folks keep falling for it.

Far be it from me to boldly declare “I told you so,” but given the recent disintegration of the Patriotic Socialist movement, the continued far right trajectory of Substack contrarian bros like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, and now fascists who cosplay as Marxists like Jaxon Hinkle more or less admitting they’re trying to recruit you into MAGA fascism, it is in fact fair to say I told you so – the info graphic above is almost two years old.

Furthermore, while I’m certainly glad that these specific reactionary grifters are finally being exposed at large, it’s hard to consider this a watershed moment when the reason so many of my friends and associates fell for the preposterous idea of an alliance between the left and far right, against “the system,” remains more or less intact.

The fact is that if you grew up in the Pig Empire, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ve got a head full of reactionary ideas, taught to you through an all pervasive propaganda model that influences every aspect of the world you experience. Furthermore, your education is more or less designed and controlled by capitalist reactionaries; if not outright fascists. In short, unless you go out of your way to learn about sharing, cooperation, and other ways to look at the world, the plain truth is you don’t know much about anything good; and what you do know, was taught to you by rotten people who don’t have your best interest at heart.

If you do not make a vigilant effort to actively examine, deconstruct, and discard those harmful ideas on an ongoing basis (a process known among some on the left as “decolonizing your mind”) it will remain extremely easy for far right propagandists to play on your reactionary beliefs and sympathies. This in turn allows them to lead you into trap after trap, and grift after grift. Destroying the fascist inside your head is a time consuming, painstaking process that doesn’t always feel good; which is why most people can rarely bear to do it – but the real world fascist propagandist doesn’t care; he and his droning parrot minions prey on those knowledge gaps and embedded reactionary ideas you’ve been carrying around most of your life.

I’ve never been the kind of person to insist that you can’t be a socialist without reading weighty tomes of tedious theory, but there are some basic principles involved in being a leftist that are wholly incompatible with American reactionary movements. Leftists are anti-fascist, American reactionaries are literally fascists. Leftists are anti-racist; American reactionaries literally organize around racialized hatred and violence. Leftists are anti-capitalist; American reactionaries are being lead around by freakjob nazi billionaires and their seed money. Leftism is about helping people and smashing power hierarchies; American fascism seeks to harm the marginalized and reinforce those same harmful hierarchies. Which side do you think “maga communists” and twitchy white reactionaries organizing around “anti-wokeness” are on here?

Frankly, this isn’t complicated stuff, and if you’re still having trouble figuring out why your progressive and pinko friends aren’t interested in the latest news from the Jimmy Dore Show here in 2022, chances are that’s a “you” problem. The fact is you can have socialism, or you can have reaction; you can be friends with the marginalized, or you can be friends with the folks seeking to harm them. I for one am very tired of tolerating folks in our community who seek to do both; being a leftist is about fighting reaction, not helping it – accelerationism, which is what you’re preaching when you team up with nazis because you both hate liberals, is a fascist ideology, and it leads you to the same place all fascists end up.

If you’re still pushing this garbage after more or less every grifter in this sphere masks off and the whole “anti-woke” controversy is being exposed as a right wing billionaire driven propaganda operation, chances are that you and my transgender butt were never on the same side to begin with.

Sorry about the rant; I just want to make sure we all understand each other going forward.

 

Video Recommendation: Some Protest and Civility Theory

As folks who’ve been reading my work for a while know, I’m a big fan of YouTube creator Second Thought’s videos and have analyzed several of them in a regular feature I used to do called Film Sessions. Tonight I’m fighting a bout of insomnia and I decided to go crawling through Second Thought’s back catalogue until my brain got tired enough to stop telling me I can’t sleep. That’s where I stumbled on the video I’m sharing here today – “Why Peaceful Protest Won’t Solve Anything.”

Why Peaceful Protest Won’t Solve Anything

Now to be clear, there’s a lot about this presentation that legitimately counts as “basic theory” when it comes to political discourse in the Pig Empire; a lot of folks reading this don’t really need to hear that the driving force behind civility discourse and tone policing behavior is the desire to tell marginalized and victimized people to shut up and like it; many of you have lived this experience.

With that having been noted, my own interactions out here on social media every day make it clear that not *everyone* understands this concept and as I’ve said, I think this creator is an excellent teacher to learn basic left wing ideas from.

For those of you looking for something beyond just the basics however, I think you’ll still find this video pretty useful. In particular, our presenter’s thoughts on the way systemic violence permeates the political process and the rule of the powerful, while simultaneously not being acknowledged as such, are laid out thoroughly and yet succinctly – in a way that structurally challenges basic assumptions, while still operating within a (small d) democratic framework. After all, can any establishment that calls waving signs outside a SCOTUS judge’s home “violence” but treats passing forced birth policies that unquestionably will cost lives as explicitly nonviolent, be taken at its word, or even be considered legitimate under democratic principles at all?

All in all, you could find a lot worse ways to spend 16 minutes of your time; and it sure beats doom scrolling Twitter while everyone else is blissfully asleep.

 

 Get Comfortable With Sweeping Reform

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

There’s Never Been a Better Moment to Disempower the Supreme Court

So I’m sharing this opinion piece from Luke Savage over at Jacobin here primarily to prove a point about how poorly prepared American society is to address the fascist threat; even after the President of the United States comes out and admits that “yup, it’s fascism.” In this piece, Savage articulates the fundamental problem with having a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS possessing the power to override both preexisting laws, and the democratic will of the people – with the obvious example being the Dobbs ruling that struck down Roe vs Wade at a time when literally 70% of Americans support legalized abortion rights. For good measure, Savage also throws in some polling numbers that show Americans would also be supportive of reducing the court’s ability to simply void their civil rights. As the author points out, this is a great political environment to discuss de-fanging the Supreme Court; and the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

All of this is blatantly obvious stuff, kitchen table politics at its finest really; but I guarantee you that if Luke took his argument to Democrat strategists, they would shoot it down as unrealistic, and loudly declare that “it just can’t be done.” And that, I think more than anything is the attitude that has me convinced the liberal establishment is still useless to regular people in the fight against fascism.

The simple truth is that fascism is not normal politics, and the United States was never designed to be a real democracy; in fact, the ability for rich reactionaries to void the will of the people is literally baked into American “liberal democracy” as exemplified by institutions like the US Senate, and the Supreme Court. There are no mechanisms in the fascist state that is America, to actually stop a fully empowered fascist movement with control of multiple branches of government and the judiciary; nothing about what has happened before, or the rules as they exist now, is getting us out of this fascist nightmare.

Which begs the question; if the courts intend to empower a fascist dictatorship, and we have no recourse under law or politics to stop them; what next? Listening to liberal strategists talk about what we can’t do in the fight to stop fascists will have you believing the answer is “endure a fascist dictatorship while smugly knowing you were right” – a plan that probably only works if you’re white and reactionary enough for the fascists to tolerate you um, existing.

So my question to liberals who keep saying things like “we can’t reform the Supreme Court” or “we can’t remove the filibuster and actually govern” is this – what exactly is your alternative? Do you sincerely think a couple hundred million Americans are going to go down with the ship because your norms dictate the fascists win this time? Personally, I’d advise you folks to get comfortable with sweeping reforms; because whether its on the Hill, or in the streets, an effective resistance to fascism is coming and if we have to do this without you, there won’t be a place for you in the world that’s born afterwards.

 

You Can’t Wish Fascism Away

 

 

You folks are going to have to forgive me if I go off on a rant here, but if one more “very serious person” shouts at me “what exactly is Biden/the Department of Justice supposed to do” I’m going to lose it. The answer is arrest rich fascists that planned and organized a coup attempt. It was arrest rich fascists that planned and organized a coup attempt back when Biden took office, and assuming you folks don’t fumble away control of the government this Fall, it will still be arrest rich fascists that planned and organized a coup attempt next Spring.

There has never been any question that these people broke laws; from inciting a riot, to sedition, and even on down into the shady financing and fraudulent fundraising that went into this whole operation. The obvious truth is that when a whole bunch of rich nazis get together and try to overthrow the government, if you let them all go (and indeed, allow them to fund raise off of, and profit from the coup attempt) they’re just going to try again; and don’t give me any crap about Godwin’s Law on this one either because this time, that *is* exactly what Hitler did.

Now fascists are literally transforming the laws; giving themselves the right to simply void and replace election results they don’t like, passing bills that criminalize their political enemies and marginalized people they despise. Does the portion of the liberal establishment that keeps swearing up and down to me on TV they’re trying to stop the fascists honestly believe this is going to get *easier* if the GOP takes over Congress after these midterm elections? Do they even understand that MAGA fascism will be impossible to stop if they lose their paper-thin majority in the US Senate? Are we really going to bet the future of everything on a coin flip and whether or not the votes even count in places like Arizona and Georgia after a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court gets done with making a mockery of our election laws?

Once again I am saying to you folks that hope is not a strategy. Arrest some rich (and guilty) fascists. Stop pretending the problem is that the establishment doesn’t know what to do; plenty of people from all walks of life have told you directly how to beat these maggots. Cowardice, is not the same thing as cunning; grow a spine while it still matters, because right now it’s looking like you bougie establishment liberals aren’t much use to anyone but yourselves – and we are all running out of time.

 

That Time Ebay Execs Did a Corporate Psy-Op

In today’s edition of Recommended Reading, I’d like to share an extremely important (and disturbingly entertaining) story that’s been getting a lot of attention in European media, but has barely come up in American news. In this horrifying September 29th, 2022 article we learn about the curious case of an entire seven man ring of high level Ebay executives who’ve (now) been convicted for conducting a sustained, and objectively bizarre harassment campaign against David and Ina Steiner; the publishers of a small circulation newsletter about e-commerce that had been, you guessed it, critical of Ebay.

Ebay executive given nearly five years for terrorizing couple reporting on firm

On one hand, there is no denying the slapstick nature of what these corporate maggots tried to do here; you’d think executives of a multi-billion dollar company would at least be able to cover their tracks as well as extremely online transphobes at Kiwi Farms when conducting *checks notes* a sustained trolling effort designed to make a couple of their online critics commit suicide, apparently. While that’s absolutely mind numbing and pretty grim in its own right, I’d like you to take a moment and place this incident in the context of billionaire thought-crafting and psy-ops we’ve been discussing on my blogs recently.

Sure, these Ebay guys are assclowns, but what happens when the billionaires running online psy-ops and mass harassment campaigns to destroy their critics aren’t this incompetent? Please try and remember the numerous, out in the open but also lightly reported times we’ve caught billionaire vampires running overtly fascist propaganda online and in the media – from the Koch network funding anti critical race theory propaganda, to Peter Thiel buying up maggots like Glenn Greenwald for his Rumble network, and on through two nazi fracking billionaires being the reason anyone has ever heard of Ben Shapiro, there’s a lot of evidence now that nazism is being funded by billionaire fascists, and it exists more or less in the open.

If this is what they’re getting caught doing on the cheap, what are the truly rich and careful guys getting away with? Did Bob Mercer’s algorithms help put Trump in power? How tight are the relationships between numerous GOP politicians around the country and fascist street gangs like the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Three Percenters? Is it really a coincidence that the Devos family’s fingerprints are all over the Michigan anti-LGBT movement at the same time they’re pushing school vouchers and plans to privatize education? In light of these obvious corruptions, collaborations, and yes, psy-ops against the public, designed to support them, is it really that hard to believe the Libs of Tik Tok lady and say Jackson Hinkle are probably dancing on some nazi billionaire’s well-funded string as well?

Obviously, I’d argue no; especially since as demonstrated in Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning” the primary source of racist and reactionary ideology in American history, has always been rich people; and indeed, whether poor folks are raging bigots or not, they typically lack the power to do something like “install a fascist regime in the Pig Empire” – and they sure as sh*t lack the capital.

 

Video Recommendation: Fascist Martha’s Vineyard Stunt

At this point I just don’t feel ready to hammer out a full length Film Sessions analysis post, but I wanted to close things off today by sharing this recent Some More News video about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to literally kidnap a bunch of (real life human being) migrants in Texas, and spend twelve million dollars to ship them to Martha’s Vineyard as a form of fascist trolling.

While our host Cody Johnson remains an extremely funny guy, I’m primarily interested in what this episode can show us about the issues I’ve been discussing recently on my blogs; ruling class power and the lack of accountability, the abject criminality and open fascism of even the mainstream leaders of this fascist movement, and the way influential reactionaries can control the discourse – and in turn, shape the ideas that drive our society.

The GOP’s Martha’s Vineyard Stunt Backfired And Then They Just Lied About It

At the end of the day we’re talking about a fascist politician using his power and longstanding public resentment towards even asylum-seeking migrants, to illegally and dishonestly transport highly vulnerable people halfway across the country, in a coordinated multi-million dollar fascist media stunt designed to “own the libs.” And the honest truth is that while we’re all recoiling in horror at treating migrants as living pawns in an objectively illegal human smuggling plot, fascists like DeSantis are laughing all the way to the top as dehumanizing ideologies fuel their rise to power. Why? More or less it’s because nobody has the balls to arrest an elected governor – even, and perhaps especially if he’s a nazi crook.

If that isn’t a recipe for the exact type of capitalist-fueled fascist takeover I’ve been trying to describe to you folks for these past seven years, then I’m the Queen of Spain. And lads, I’m definitely not the bloody Queen of Spain.

 

The Joker Gets Away Again; In Flint

Alrighty folks; it’s my “take it easy and recuperate” day so you’re going to have to forgive me for ranting a little bit here. As I’ve written on many occasions, I consider my evolution as a left wing scholar to be something of an ongoing and indeed, never ending process. As such asking me a question like “what made you an anarchist” is actually extremely difficult to answer; let alone if one uses loaded terror state language like “what radicalized you?”

If however you were to ask me to list some formative moments in the process by which I realized it’s all made up, to the advantage of the capitalist class and against us, the labor class, I can guarantee you that the Kafkaesque sh*tshow that went down (and continues to go down) in Flint will make that list.

Michigan Judge Drops Flint Water Crisis Charges Against 7 Officials

I mean here you have the simplest possible story of greed, malevolence, and profiting from the deaths of the marginalized; a bunch of GOP politicians literally poisoned a whole, predominantly Black, predominantly labor class city, for money. We know they did it, we caught them red-handed, it’s documented in their own papers and meeting notes. We know they didn’t care, we know the decision to ignore all the warnings was racialized, we know this was murder for money, writ large.

To this date, nobody has gone to jail and nobody is going to; even though whole generations of people from Flint will continue to suffer from exposure to lead in their water decades after we finally replace all the corroded pipes – which STILL hasn’t happened; as the article above makes clear. Do you sincerely think folks who buried their love ones (or will bury their love ones) because of poisoned water give a flying f*ck that it cost the GOP some elections and Rick Snyder isn’t Governor anymore? I’ll bet you a pound of my own flesh, they do not.

People want to tell me all the time that I’m out of line for saying that capitalism is one giant conspiracy by the rich, against the poor; that’s fine, they’re welcome to their opinion. But when the (then) Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, and all his nazi party buddies in Michigan can literally poison a whole city and get away with it because some two-bit prosecutor is either too incompetent, or too reluctant, to play Simon Says properly, you don’t have the right to tell me I’m crazy when I say rich people killing us for profits – and getting away with it.

 

Recommended Reading: Inflation Discourse Is a Capitalist Lie

As those of you who follow me across multiple social media platforms not doubt know, I’m not a very big fan of the mainstream media discourse around “inflation” here in the Pig Empire.

I’ve pointing out that scaremongering about inflation is the lever by which neoliberal governments crack open and deploy austerity policies. I’ve noted that inflation is used by those who set monetary policy in the capitalist world to openly attack labor rights and wage standards. In this particular round of inflation-based f*ckery, I’ve repeatedly stated that the inflation crisis we’re still managing today is the direct result of giving rich people and corporations huge piles of cash twice in the past five years (Trump’s tax cut, Covid relief policies geared towards businesses and the wealthy) – not a one time stimulus check to everyday Americans. After all, when poor people have money they buy consumer goods, and that shouldn’t increase prices unless there’s a shortage of consumer goods (there isn’t.) When rich people have money however, they buy your house and charge you rent to live in it; and they sure aren’t making any more land on this here planet Earth.

Of all the things I’ve tried to teach people about the inflation swindle in the Pig Empire however, the one that seems to produce the most pushback is the idea that a significant portion of increased prices during this crisis has absolutely nothing to do with inflation at all and is simply about corporate gouging. While most people have no problem believing corporate executives are greedy pigs, the idea that they’d see a bunch of stories about rising inflation as a green light to raise prices and profits “just because” is a bridge too far for many of the people I know. Well, if folks don’t want to hear it from my mouth, perhaps they’ll accept it from Iron Mountain CEO, William Meaney:

CEO Says He’s Been “Praying for Inflation” Because It’s an Excuse to Jack Up Prices

Yeah buddy, that’s an I told you so:

“On a 2018 earnings call, he invoked a Native American ritual, telling participants that “it’s kind of like a rain dance, I pray for inflation every day I come to work because … our top line is really driven by inflation. … Every point of inflation expands our margins.”

Iron Mountain’s CFO Barry A. Hytinen also said on an earnings call this past April that “we do have very strong pricing power” and for the company, inflation is “actually a net positive.”

Frankly however this short article from Jon Schwarz and Ken Klippenstein over at the Intercept is worth reading for more than just the “I told you so” factor. In particular, I think the authors do a pretty good job of highlighting the linked relationship between price increases and modern corporate profits; in addition to demonstrating that your average CEO is a “kinder, gentler” ghoul than they used to be – but a ghoul nonetheless.

Once again I am saying to you that there is in fact nobody guarding the hen house and the wolves are buying up Senators like you or I might collect baseball cards. There’s nothing natural or cyclical about these economic gyrations at all; unless you count greed as a force of nature.

 

Driverless Is a Dud but Capitalists Don’t Care

Warning: Late-Afternoon trash posting ahead.

I’ll spare you the hassle of dealing with Bloomberg (ick) and just give you the tl;dr here:

Remember that whole driverless car uproar in 2017 when virtually every media outlet and fancy VC tech firm was promising the future would be here by 2020? Yeah, despite investing (probably more than) a hundred billion dollars in the project, with some of the best minds in the industry working on it around the clock, this entire scheme/technology hasn’t gone anywhere since then.

Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere

The reason are numerous of course, but more or less it comes down to the fact that once again Tech bros lied to you – humans are actually extremely good drivers and right now computers really aren’t. The rest of the article is mostly a fluff piece for a buddy of Peter Thiel’s that Trump pardoned, who has given up on driverless cars and is doing driverless dump trucks on remote construction sites now – I would definitely skip that part.

Personally I’m a little more interested in two things the article really doesn’t talk about at all. First, what happens when investors (who DO typically read Bloomberg!) figure out all these A-list companies are sitting on a whole pile of absolutely nothing despite pouring capital into the project like I slam back vodka on the weekends? I dunno if you’ve noticed but this isn’t exactly a time of stability and growth for the global economy; even if rich pigs keep getting richer regardless.

And my second question is, have we as a society slid so far into either fascism, or neoliberalism (ideologies that both explicitly devalue certain kinds of human lives) that it doesn’t matter anyway? Are these reactionary tech bros, the companies they run, and the politicians they own, just going to roll out fleets of these killer self-driving cars and say “oopsie” afterwards? If the recent history of unhinged corporate malfeasance in the Pig Empire is any indication, I’m afraid that might be a very real possibility.

 

What to Do About Musk Twitter: Discord Decamp

Alrighty folks, today has turned out to be a pretty terrible day for writing in my world, so let’s talk a little bit about social media; specifically the giant elephant in the room that is Twitter. As you know, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Twitter that revolves around the platform more or less wishing mouthy antifascists and anarchists who talk back to rich people, would die in a fire. Censorship, harassment by internet nazis, and constantly having to rebuild my accounts have been non stop problems for several years now; particularly post Christmas 2020.

Despite this I stay on Twitter for four primary reasons:

A) it’s where the majority (but not all) of my friends are.

B) I have built a larger following for my work on Twitter than other social media sites, and I use social media to promote my writing.

C) I am a news junkie and it’s actually hard to find a more efficient way to keep track of literally everything than following 400 news organizations and just staring at the feed like a hungry coyote.

D) sometimes it’s just easier to trashpost and other than Mastodon (which has a very small userbase) no other social media service is as good for, well, trashposting.

Unfortunately, and as you may have heard, it’s looking like a very real possibility that Twitter is going to be bought up by a billionaire Afrikaner winger whose going to turn it into a weird “mega ap” and invite all the fascists back from Trump’s (failing) Truth Social. You might know the dude; it’s Elon Musk, the clown prince of reactionary rich guy trashposters. In other words, as crappy and hostile to leftist thought as Twitter is now, there’s a very good chance it’s about to get a whole lot worse – on pretty much all possible fronts.

This has put me in a position where using Twitter as the home base for my writing, despite hating the service, is even more ridiculous than it has been up until now. I’ve already started taking steps to move more of my work off Twitter, and on to other social media sites (including here on Facebook.)

I’ve also decamped to Discord – you can find an invite to my server by clicking here (https://discord.gg/NMzxUDq) or asking me for a new link whenever you’d like to join. I haven’t really been on Mastodon much recently, but if things do go completely sideways with Twitter you will probably be able to find me there again eventually as well.

Now I do want to be clear that I’m not deleting my Twitter account. I really don’t know how much Musk is going to change Twitter yet, or for that matter if he’s actually going to pull the deal to buy it off – although I would suggest it’s more likely that he succeeds than fails at this point. I’m just starting to phase Twitter out as my home base, and doing more with Discord and Facebook right now. You might even have noticed the shift already, just in terms of raw post count and what goes where.

By that same measure however, if Musk does turn Twitter into a high end fascist trashposting site like it was becoming in 2017 and 2018, my status on the platform is in danger – I am likely to be banned, suspended, or simply leave; with little or no warning. If you primarily follow me on Twitter, and you want to find me after such an event happens, it’d probably be a pretty good idea to follow me on other social media websites – like, subscribe, whatever seems appropriate for the given service.

Finally, please let me apologize for the disruption some of this is going to cause; I personally would have preferred if Twitter hadn’t forced Musk to go through with the purchase because as crappy as the site is, it can still get a whole lot worse. I am however not the decider of these things and I was getting kinda sick of Twitter refusing to show my followers a significant percentage of my posts anyway.

If of course you’ve already left Twitter, and follow me on other social media services, feel free to disregard this notice entirely.

 

Recommended Reading: The Bottom Line

Recently, I wrote about my ongoing outrage at the fact that more or less nobody has been ultimately held responsible for poisoning the city of Flint Michigan for a profit, and it looks like nobody ever will be held responsible. In the comments, someone mentioned that this scenario was repeating itself in Jackson Mississippi as we speak. I agreed with them, but then it occurred to me that due to my recent absence, I hadn’t actually written anything about the (capitalist and racialized) water crisis there. Obviously, I can’t really address that completely in one casual Facebook post; but I can work to establish some common facts and language between us all to discuss the crisis going forward. Think of it like homework; other people besides me find homework fun, right?

Anyway, in today’s recommended reading post I’d like to take a look at this October 4th expose and background piece from Matthew Cunningham-Cook and Ricardo Gomez on Lever News:

Wall Street Is Behind Jackson’s Water Crisis

I chose this piece for two reasons. First, it does a great job of providing a rough outline of events that left Jackson residents without water, as well as the longstanding funding problems with local infrastructure, and the racialized (and wholly unsatisfactory) response to that from both the state and federal levels of government over the years. As primers go, this one is pretty solid.

Perhaps more importantly however, I chose this story because rather than either totally ignoring, or focusing only on the bald-faced racism at work here in risking the lives and health of Jackson residents for a quick buck (or because you simply don’t care about non-white people,) our authors also work to expose the villains in the financial sector who have also played a major, and largely undisclosed role in this completely predictable disaster. From the story:

“In 2018, ratings analysts at Moody’s Investor Service — a credit rating agency with a legacy of misconduct — downgraded Jackson’s bond rating to a junk status, citing in part the “low wealth and income indicators of residents.” The decision happened even though Jackson has never defaulted on its debt.

Moody’s move jacked up the price of borrowing for Jackson, costing the cash-strapped city between $2 and $4 million per year in additional debt service costs — a massive financial roadblock to officials’ plans to fix the municipality’s aging water system. And since the state of Mississippi and the federal government refused to use their powers to address the city’s infrastructure problems, that meant Jackson was essentially powerless to stop the impending catastrophe.”

Of course, if you read along a little further in the story, you’ll find that there’s naturally a racial component to even this establishment capitalist screwjob; given the racial disparities in health outcomes in a private medical regime like America’s, and the fact that bond markets always seem to have a habit of crushing non-white cities, this is hardly a new scenario in our history – in fact, bankers bankrupting majority minority communities who’ve never defaulted on a payment, was quite the popular reoccurring story in the lead up to and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The simple truth is that under a free market fundamentalist framework like the one we live under, and the one described in that Bobby/Watchmen meme I posted the other day, there is a price threshold where the bankers are just going to let you die, or might even actively encourage that outcome. And if that happens, you can bet your bottom dollar that our laws and opinion makers will work overtime to make sure all of the guys who decided to pull the plug because some lives just aren’t worth enough, get away with it.

 

Journal: A Classical American Public-Private Partnership

The Early IWW’s Unionism Was So Effective That Capitalists Decided It Had to Be Smashed

Alright so right off the hop I should confess that I don’t really care if you read this (decent enough) interview with labor and legal scholar Ahmed White over on Jacobin. He has a book out, called “Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers” – but I haven’t read it, so I’m not going to recommend it yet; even though I buy pretty much anything Wobbly related eventually, and I’m willing to bet I will like this book when I read it.

I have however read another important (and unfortunately, rarer) book about American state repression, or state supported repression against American workers, leftists, and marginalized folks demanding their rights; including of course the Civil Rights movement. That book, by Bud and Ruth Schultz, is called “It Can Happen Here” and contains several first hand accounts of the state, backed by quasi-official vigilantes any reasonable person would call fascist, suppressing the Wobblies (and other American labor movements too.)

That’s the part I’d like to focus on here today from both of these sources; that public private partnership between capital, the state, and various quasi-official fascist posses or gangs. While many folks know that the government ultimately deployed the Espionage Act to arrest members of the IWW for opposition to the war, few people are aware of the complex relationship between company-hired Pinkertons, local white supremacist groups, police, and even portions of the army, that were deployed to attack the union from all sides, and destroy it at all costs. As such, IWW members could be expected to be attacked by gangs, beaten and arrested by police, only to then be charged by the state for the crime of resisting those abuses – sound familiar? It should after the 2020 George Floyd protests in America.

Furthermore, this is type of behavior, this coming together of seemingly divergent reactionary forces to protect Americans from, umm, labor rights, is hardly isolated in American history. Indeed, the two founding criminal enterprises that allowed for the origin of the United States, genocide of Indigenous peoples and African chattel slavery, would both have been impossible without precisely this cozy relationship between elite capital, the state, and mouth-breathing, armed fascists looking to impose the supposed “rights” of capitalists, with violence. What exactly is a slave-catcher’s posse if not a quasi-sanctioned white supremacist gang seeking to enforce property rights for a businessman?

Indeed, this is the original model of defending American business from “undesirables” actually. That pattern has repeated itself over and over, whether we’re talking about the Klan and the cops teaming up to terrorize the Civil Rights movement, or the military, the feds, and reactionary street gangs full of “patriots” beating up hippies in the anti-war movement. These same cross-class, full press tactics featuring unlikely alliances would be deployed against AIM, the anti-nuke movement, anti-globalization protesters, anti-war protesters and up on through today; more or less any time someone threatened either the ruling class capitalist order, of one of the businesses it cherishes – including war.

All of which brings us today; a moment where climate crisis and resistance to the rule of capital is threatening that very capitalist order. A time when labor organizers are forming unions and taking strike actions against capital almost every day. A day when the highly-lucrative business of white supremacy stands partially under siege in the “West.” And unfortunately, also a moment where reactionary futurist billionaires are funding a Pig Empire-wide fascist movement whose tentacles range from street gangs like the Proud Boys, to sanctioned fascist gangs like police forces, through the Republican Party, and on into the real halls of power – the corporate boardrooms of America.

This is not random, or anomalous; these folks represent the modern tendrils of the exact same power structure, and the exact same form of repression that ultimately did in the IWW. And they’re coming for you, next. In other words, if you think Republicans and Hedge Fund managers working with 3 Percenter militias is wild, hold on to your backside now, because near as I can tell – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

Podcast Pick: Trust and Experts

Alright then my friends, to wrap things off tonight I’d like to switch things up a little and share a mainstream theory discussion from Australian radio a friend recommended to me. Titled “Trust and skepticism in a post-truth world” I must confess that I know very little about the program, the host, or the guest in this episode – Associate Professor of Philosophy, Mark Alfano.

Trust and scepticism in a post-truth world

Inside however, this half hour discussion explores how what most of us define as “knowledge” really is a question of trusting sources we regard as experts by simply taking their word for it, and how that process can be successfully hijacked by grifters and reactionaries selling emotional appeals and fantasy. While there’s certainly some rubbernecking at Q-Anon cultists by the host in here, Alfano’s critique is far more pointed and focuses on things like the proliferation of fake experts, and the unreasonable time requirements needed to for normal people to debunk a never ending stream of lies. Which isn’t to say he lets grifters, conspiracy theorists and reactionaries weaponizing a lack of trust off the hook; but it’s truly so rare in these discussions to hear someone point out that say, for profit diploma mills and class hegemony in the composition of the media, has a direct bearing on why the public doesn’t always trust the experts.

If I were to offer a critique here, it’s that Alfano doesn’t quite go far enough in this regard; and perhaps that’s because his host seems interested in keeping this discussion firmly confined in the mainstream liberal consensus on disinformation and democratic norms. Throughout the interview you can hear him finding ways to suggest that as long as money is more important than the truth, social trust in the establishment will continue to be harmed; but he never does quite get there. As any student of media critics like Parenti, Chomsky, or McChesney will tell you, the experts in the media on your TV at night have done a whole lot of just outright lying too, and that’s been know to affect trust – but that topic isn’t discussed much here.

I don’t want folks to get this twisted; people don’t believe fascist conspiracy theories because their TV lied to them about the Iraq War. They believe fascist conspiracy theories because they’re reactionaries, raised in a reactionary country, and they feel threatened by even the possible dismemberment of white supremacy.

But part of how you end up with fascist conspiracy theories in the mainstream discourse is when the experts on your TV lie to you so often that the evening news becomes a choose your own adventure story that’s primarily about feels, and vibes; not facts. Of course that describes Fox News, but it describes MSNBC too, just to a lesser degree. Sooner or later, someone comes along with a more compelling story; and clearly, fascist ideology is a pretty compelling story in a place like Amerikkka. The past eight or so years at least, have proven that much.

 

Capitalists Do Fascism Because They’re Greedy