Field Notes: It Is Happening Again
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Quick Mix Anti-capitalist Climate Theory for the Whole Family
Well, I don’t know about you my friends, but most of my recent days seem to end in a puddle of anxiety and exhaustion; I guess that’s more or less how living in a time of rising fascism, at the literal end of the world is gonna be. That’s why in the evenings I like to kick off my shoes, put away my glasses and try to squeeze just one more important lefty lesson out of my day. That’s normal, right?
To that end then, I’d like to share another short but informative video I caught on YouTube over this past weekend. Running just over twenty minutes in length, this feature comes to us from the Our Changing Climate channel, and is titled “How the Rich REALLY Cause Climate Change.”
How the Rich Really Cause Climate Change
As always, you really should just watch the presentation, but to briefly sum up what’s going on here I’d describe this video as reasonably good, climate-based, anti-capitalist theory shared in a way that is unlikely to turn off liberals. Touching heavily on the Big Oil-created concept of “carbon footprints” our presenter compares the outrage stoked towards the fossil fuel consumption of celebrities in the mainstream discourse, to the absolute silence when large corporate actors like the Holcim Ltd produce many factors more carbon for a profit, in an effort to demonstrate the fundamental contradiction of trying to fight the climate crisis through individual choices, instead of collective anti-capitalist activism.
While the “baby’s first anti-capitalist climate discussion” tone may sometimes annoy more well-read leftists, overall this is a pretty good primer for why globalized capitalism is utterly incompatible with saving our shared habitable ecosystem. This is probably a great video to share with your labor class relatives who vote Democrat and don’t hate life itself, as a sort of stealth anti-capitalist therapy; the underlying premise here is firmly in line with most socialist thinkers in our society when it comes to the subject of who precisely is causing the climate catastrophe, and how to stop them from doing it.
If I had any complaints here, it’s that our presenter probably spent a little too much time defending Taylor Swift and other celebrities with private jets from criticism. After all, when people talk about unnecessary pollution by celebrities, they’re talking about literally thousands of people flying Leer Jets all over the Pig Empire on the regular, not just one Taylor Swift. Ultimately however I think I can forgive this oversight in the name of presenting left wing theory in an attractive and easy to consume package; if this is how we get your Taylor Swift-loving liberal family to understand either capitalism goes, or we say goodbye to a human species that is alive to enjoy new Taylor Swift albums, who am I to judge?
FF&F: A Multi-Purpose Fascist Propaganda Blitz
Okay, in this edition of Fascist Fails & F*ckery we’re going to switch things up a bit. Today we’re going to look at this breaking story by Robert Mackey, published over at The Intercept, to uncover some fascist lies and propaganda the mainstream corporate media hasn’t even had time to actively ignore yet:
Bizarre Republican Ad Blames Biden for Anti-Asian Violence Incited by Trump
To sum up here, three former Trump officials who’re almost certainly working with the fascist architect of modern GOP immigration policy, Stephen Miller, have formed a well-funded, shadowy non-profit group called “Citizens for Sanity.” This group in turn has dropped thirty-three million dollars on an election ad blitz that can only be described as fabrications, and overt fascist propaganda; effectively hijacking our normal “democratic” process to lie for power, and spread racialized hatred.
The ad is called “Why Don’t Asian Lives Matter to Joe Biden and His Left-Wing Allies?” Full of violent and distressing imagery from numerous hate crimes against Asian Americans, the spot seeks to shift blame from a GOP political order that spent months talking about the “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” to Joe Biden, who literally hadn’t even been elected yet when most of the attacks occured. More distressingly however, and as Mackey notes, the spot purposely includes mention of the Black Lives Matter movement, for “reasons.”
Look I’m not an idiot, and neither are you. Clearly this is a wretched piece of fascist propaganda designed to stoke racialized animosity between Asian and African Americans, in the hopes the fascist GOP can peel off some of the non-white votes they so desperately need to maintain white supremacy in a country that is becoming increasingly diverse all the time. Additionally, this is by no means a normal political ad; they’re using clips from attacks when Donald Trump was President, to stoke fears about racialized violence they’re actively courting, and blaming Biden for a crime epidemic that does not exist. This is Willie Horton writ-large, with a side of open fascism.
And furthermore, it should undoubtedly never see the light of day in a democratic country. Not only is the ad full of outright lies, but by any reasonable person’s definition, it’s hate speech; something that actually is illegal in much of the Pig Empire, but pretty much never comes up in American courts anymore. The fact that we live in a country where this fascist spot is more or less accepted, and even protected speech, because the airtime is being bought during an election, is evidence that we don’t have a democratic society even if we nominally get to vote in elections. This right here, is how fascism happens; it is allowed to happen under a false banner of tolerance and freedom, even by the folks the fascists mean to exterminate.
In the grand scheme of things, this may not seem like that big of a story; the truth however is that just because we’re desensitized to normalized lies and racist propaganda at election time in a post-Citizens United nation, doesn’t mean we’re immune to the catastrophic effects of normalized fascist propaganda in that same society. This story touches on almost everything we’ve been talking about in this series and our larger study of Pig Empire fascism, including dark money fascist propaganda networks, sanctified racist propaganda, the normalization of fascism as part of our political process, and perhaps, the utter lack of concern our mainstream media and political establishments are demonstrating in the face of a fascist order that clearly means to murder its enemies, and end whatever passes for democracy in this country.
All of which really brings us to one simple question; given what we’ve observed so far, do you think this is even going to make the evening news? Do you think a society that regards an ad like this as “fair and normal political practice” has much hope of stopping a fascist takeover? Yeah, me neither; and as always, while we sit around and wait to find out the answers to these questions, the fascists continue to organize and grow more powerful.
Journal: Beating Fascism With a United Antifascist Front
Well folks, while I did promise you in today’s meme post that I wasn’t going to tell you who to vote for, I was in fact careful not to promise you I wasn’t going to be talking about voting. If you’re the type of person whose personal vendetta against AOC and The Squad vastly outweighs your desire to stop the fascists, this post may well piss you off at some point; surprise, I’m kinda pissed off about an impending anti-trans pogrom myself, so I guess we’ll just have to be pissed off together. For everyone else’s sake, let’s just move on.
If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, you probably know that I have a profound love for Leon Trotsky’s post-Soviet writings, and I go back to re-study them often. In particular I’m very fond of his late 1920’s and early 1930’s writing about Fascism and anti-fascism in Europe; so much so that I’ve written extensively about Trotsky’s vitally important collection of essays “Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It.” You can find some of that writing, and a link to Trotsky’s work by following the link below:
Although pretty much everything Trotsky wrote about fascism can fairly be described as important, the most relevant portion of his work for our discussion today, is his writing about the formation and maintenance of a vast, society-wide united anti-fascist front. This is more or less a democratic alliance between everyone who has a vested stake in preventing the fascists from seizing power, or exercising that power to brutalize and murder their enemies. This would of course include marginalized people, liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, socialists, anarchists, communists and all manner of other people who don’t want to get stomped under the fascist boot; a group that you may be surprised to learn significantly outnumbers the actual fascists working to destroy our small-d democratic rights.
It is important to understand that while this democratic alliance would nominally involve strategic voting, the reality is that a united anti-fascist front has to go far beyond the ballot box to defend a society against fascism. We are talking about real physical action to protect folks targeted by the fascist order, from very real physical harm. We rally together, we march together, we man the barricades together, and if necessary we fight fascists in the streets together; even if they’re sanctified by an illegitimate fascist authority in control of political power. This is “we protect us” on a grand, and organized scale, and ultimately history has proven it’s the only viable, if not guaranteed, way to stop a fascist takeover in progress; particularly when that takeover is being aided by a formally reactionary and covertly white supremacist ruling class.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the guiding purpose of anti-fascist action is to make difficult to be a fascist, conduct fascist politics, and spread fascist propaganda. Sure, voting against the fascist is one relatively painless way to make life harder on a fascist order, but how can people do that when they’re being threatened by armed militia reactionaries, their voting rights are being restricted, and that fascist order is promising to disregard election results they don’t like in any place they have power; backed up presumably by a fascist Supreme Court that doesn’t give a rat’s wet behind about how the right seizes permanent political power, merely that they do? The answer is we band together to defend our democratic rights, including the right to protest and otherwise oppose a fascist regime, everywhere and across all fronts in our society. That is what a united front against fascism means.
Of course, it takes two, or in this case multitudes, to tango. The reality here is that many leftists reading this rightfully feel targeted and betrayed by a ruling class “liberal” establishment that consistently appeases fascists, while actively working to marginalize and disempower its own, actively antifascist, left flank. Here however I think many folks are making what I call a class categorization error. It is no surprise that the so-called “liberal” establishment would prefer fascism to sharing, because Amerikkka is a reactionary capitalist empire, and fascism is always birthed and allowed to dominate by a ruling capitalist class seeking to maintain power. By that same measure though, there are millions upon millions of American liberal voters in the labor class who aren’t ruling class reactionaries, and do want to stop the fascists.
These folks aren’t “the deep state” or “Big Empire,” they’re your aunties and uncles, your co-workers, and the guy up your block who still has an Obama sticker on his car window. One day, not that long ago, you, I, and most of the people reading this, were not so different than them; folks who want nice things, but are terrified enough of GOP reaction to settle for a managed slide into neofeudalist hell. These people, the labor class liberals, are also our people; we can all stand united together against fascism, or divided we will surely fall – and the neoliberal ruling class order you’re seeking revenge on, won’t give a damn one way or another.
Is this kind of united anti-fascist front a fantasy? Perhaps so, but while I was reading Trotsky, I started to ask myself what such a resistance movement might look like. What would it mean to see liberal soccer moms, American veterans, racial justice activists, socialist antifascists, and black bloc anarchists working together to protect us all from the fascist threat? What shape would that take? What kind of momentum would be required to see people stand even against fascists armed to the teeth, carrying the authority of an unjust law, on the streets of America? And then I realized that I’ve already seen what it looks like; it looks like the George Floyd protests in 2020 – and that time, we fought a fascist regime to a standstill.
A wise old man in a movie once told me “hope is a dangerous thing; hope can drive a man insane.” He was wrong; choose hope, choose life, choose to fight until we win. Fascism always carries the seeds of its own destruction; let’s help them return to the roots, together.
Recommended Reading: All The Small Things
Throughout much of my recent writing, I’ve made numerous references to what I call “small-d democratic rights,” so let’s briefly sum up what that means. Naturally, when I talk about “democratic rights” most folks will instantly think of the vote, but the truth is our democratic rights extend well beyond the ballot box, and indeed must do so to maintain anything even resembling a just society. We’re talking about things like free speech rights, the right to assemble and protest, the right not to be discriminated against by white supremacists who “disagree” with your right to purchase lunch at a certain public counter, and so forth. While this concept may be difficult to understand for folks in Pig Empire “democracies” who regard democratic rights as solely about the “fire and forget” act of voting in elections, it’s vitally important for a society under threat of a fascist takeover to grasp that the reactionaries aren’t just coming for your right to vote the fascists out.
Of course this isn’t to suggest that democratic rights aren’t also about the right to vote, or that fascists aren’t organizing to obliterate voting rights in America; anyone who has been following my Nina-Bytes articles about the elections-related cases before SCOTUS right now, knows the fascists are dedicated to keeping anyone who isn’t “white and right” enough from voting. All we’re noting here is that the fascists are not content to merely disenfranchise their enemies, but rather are seeking to obliterate their rights as valid members of society, wholesale. Which should terrify you, but doesn’t particularly seem to concern our ruling class establishment very much; consider me shocked, honest.
In today’s Recommended Reading post then I’d like to bring both of these vectors together in the context of a society-wide fascist takeover in progress; to do that, let’s take a look at this excellent October 24th article by Pema Levy over on Mother Jones:
This Supreme Court Term Is All About White Grievance
What we’re looking at here is a rundown of five interrelated reactionary, anti-democratic arguments sitting before a six to three, fascist high Supreme Court. While one of these dangerous arguments does involve gerrymandering and an attempt to finally kill off the Voting Rights Act, the other cases touch on issues like affirmative action in college admissions, laws protecting Indigenous adoption rights, and most notably, the right for business owners to discriminate against more or less anyone they don’t like – from gay couples looking for a wedding website, to say, African Americans who want to watch a movie on the big screen.
Perversely, the legal leg these challenges all propose to stand on is the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment; a law explicitly meant to stop white supremacist f*ckery after the abolition of slavery, as our author notes:
“In each of these cases, conservative activists and GOP-controlled states are making versions of the same argument: That the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to protect the rights of Black people, actually forbids laws that make society more equal. Through the cases runs the narrative that racism is over and woke liberals are discriminating against white people. The court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, is poised to agree.”
Frankly, while the author rightfully describes these cases as an anti-democratic prosecution of “white grievance” in this article, I think this framing might be missing larger forces at work here. For starters we’re talking about multiple Supreme Court cases that represent a skeleton-key for literally de-personing vast swathes of American society; targeted groups that typically don’t vote Republican and won’t do well under a fascist regime. History demonstrates to us that de-personing groups in a society, stripping away their civil and democratic rights, is the first step on a long and horrible road that can only end in enslavement, or genocide. Furthermore the fact that these legal arguments are being made using the language of “reverse racism,” a fascist fantasy concept that literally cannot exist in a white supremacist society, is profoundly threatening for marginalized folks and those who would oppose fascism in Amerikkka. Given that at least some of these arguments are likely to be accepted by a fascist-dominated Supreme Court, we will instantly be launched into a modern era of history where fascist propaganda and conspiracy theories have now obtained the force of jurisprudence; Weimar America will have definitively moved one step closer to what happens after the “Weimar” period ends in a fascist society.
And you can be damn sure that once one fascist fantasy becomes the basis of civil rights law, more will be soon to follow. All due to the whims of an antidemocratic body of fascist judges with no right to fashion law, and no elected mandate. You want to know what German society looked like right before the literal Nazi Party stamped out all the lights in Europe for just over a decade? Well, it looked a lot like this; let’s all hope we’re better fighters than they were, or this could go completely sideways at rapid speed.
Video Recommendation: Courting Fascism
Ahoy-hoy my chums, are you still desperately craving more hawt analysis of a fascist-dominated, anti-democratic American Supreme Court and its profoundly detrimental effect on all of our democratic rights? Of course you are; and you want it in video form because it’s like doom-scrolling on social media, but more passive and features disturbing jokes about massage oil!
In today’s video recommendation I’m once again returning to the hilarious Cody Johnston at Some More News for a feature titled, quite aptly, “How The Supreme Court Is Undermining Democracy.” You can check it out below:
How The Supreme Court Is Undermining Democracy
Obviously the idea here is to build off our earlier discussion about how fascists are using a reactionary-dominated Supreme Court to rapidly transform America into a disturbing caricature of our already quite reactionary society; a caricature I’ve taken to calling “the Pork Reich.” While there is a very small amount of repeat material from that discussion in this video, Cody also goes a lot deeper on the issue of the Supreme Court itself; including how it came to be controlled by fascists and motivated by right wing propaganda and conspiracy theories. And of course, he also covers why the court shouldn’t be able to re-write the laws of our land by cynically re-interpreting Constitutional Amendments.
Given that so much of the work I’ve shared with you recently involves understanding how Trump and the Republican Party packed the American judiciary full of unqualified reactionaries and ideologues, precisely to achieve this fun-house fascist fantasy political environment, this video is a very good source of background information for those discussions; both now and going forward. These stories, and the analysis presented in this feature, are very much a part of what I mean when I talk about politically-empowered fascism as a legalistic doctrine, and these critically important cases cannot be safely dismissed as mind-numbing battles between lawyers about minutia; courts like the current SCOTUS are where far healthier democracies than America’s have traditionally gone to die.
All of this is a certainly a lot to process, and as we’ve discussed numerous times in the past, it’s not a given that mainstream corporate media is going to lend you a helping hand by covering these issues in context. Thankfully, Johnston and his friends at Some More News are both brave enough to slog through it all, and funny enough to make learning about it disturbingly entertaining. My bet is you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll develop a strong aversion to Love Lotion; set aside an hour this evening and check it out.
PS: trust me, that bit about the massage oil will make sense once you watch the video.
Recommended Reading: Transmission
As I’ve alluded to in some of my recent writing, current events in Pig Empire life have forced me to write about three subjects I’ve been socially conditioned by the peanut gallery to avoid; electoral politics, transgender rights, and the actual history of Nazi Germany. Given that fascists have not stopped using attacks on trans rights as a skeleton key to unlock real political power in the past couple of days, I feel obligated to continue on in this vein; feel bads be damned. In today’s edition of Recommended Reading then, I’d like to go back to September, 2021 and take a look at this disturbingly prescient opinion piece by Jef Rouner, in the Houston Press:
The Time-Tested Practice of Using Transphobia to Seize Power
Do you remember the other day when I expressed shock that fascists were having so much success demonizing the very existence of trans women as a social contagion? It turns out that despite being a historical scholar of fascism, I’m also a bit of a blockhead with a huge blind spot for moments when my life intersects with the larger narrative. As Rouner points out and I certainly knew already, the literal freaking Nazi Party’s most famous book burning was at a medical science institute that studied transgender identities:
“The Nazis used those powers to justify the second fire that May, the attack on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology). Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, who was both gay and Jewish, the institute specialized in the scientific exploration of LGBT identities and especially the rising transgender population. All the famous images of Nazi book burnings come from the assault on the institute where tens of thousands of medical records and images were torched in the streets. Joseph Goebbels gave a speech at the burning, calling the authors of the works “intellectual filth.” The loss of the medical knowledge in that fire set the advancement of trans people worldwide back decades.”
Additionally, this is far from the only parallel that should be ringing alarm bells in a country that professes to care at all about the lives of trans people. Just as in our culture, trans people in Germany had achieved a degree of publicity and acceptance in some portions of Weimar Republic life that made it hard to imagine fascists would be able to successfully organize around “cleansing” us from society:
“Why? Because they were also easy to pick on. The Weimar Republic was a fantastically progressive place, and the blossoming acceptance of trans people was damn near revolutionary and even a pop culture phenomenon. However, it was no utopia, and all that acceptance actually made it easier for the Nazis to round people up starting in 1933. Many of the names came from Hirschfeld’s office records, where hundreds had sought help with gender affirming treatment and surgeries. The German public was not united in trans acceptance. As Matthew H. Birkhold puts it in Paris Review, “trans people were seen as especially dangerous, capable of corrupting youth and devastating birth rates.”
While I don’t want to just quote the whole article, it’s important to note that Rouner goes on to predict a GOP midterm election strategy based on demonizing trans people as child molesters, and warns of a pervasive “Good Germans” attitude among his friends in the nominal “center” of American politics. Given that fascist street gangs, professional propagandists, and reactionary Republican politicians are currently united behind a mission to criminalize trans identities, and calling anyone who disagrees a literal groomer while mainstream liberal media say little, and Democrat politicians do even less, it’s fair to say our author might have had a point when he wrote this all those months ago.
Look folks, I hate to interrupt our society-wide circle jerk of screaming “it’s the economy, stupid” at each other, but is anyone who isn’t a nazi or someone they’re fixing to exterminate even watching what’s going on here in Pig Empire life? This may come as a shock to very serious people, but there’s no verse in Martin Niemöller’s poem about everyone being safe until gas falls under $3.25 a gallon; once the fascists start coming for people, you don’t get a “I was super pissed about the economy” do-over. There’s a reason Mike Godwin suspended his own law, and it’s because Amerikkka and much of the larger Pig Empire is absolutely starting to look like a Third Reich speed run at the moment.
This pogrom, and that’s what it is, won’t end when they run out of trans people to demonize. Fascist movements in progress can’t be ignored; they have to be actively stopped. Unless the folks around me want to end up on the back of a truck swapping inflation jokes on the way to a labor camp, it might be time for everybody to start paying attention, and fighting back against fascism.
Recommended Reading: The Politics of Stochastic Terrorism
Last week I publish a post called “Wages of Rage” in which I tried to put a real world face on the consequences of the anti-trans and LGBTQ pogrom being conducted under the guise of “conservative politics” in the Pig Empire. In that story we looked at the catastrophic effects of a hate-speech fuelled harassment campaign against an individual drag performer, by Georgia’s own Congresswoman from Q-Anon, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today I want to step back and look at how this larger ecosystem of reactionary propaganda, demonization, and stochastic terrorism works, and the very real violence it is propagating against vulnerable trans people, mostly women and teens, in our society. To do that, let’s take a look at this extremely thorough explainer by John Knefel over at Media Matters:
Right-wing media are pushing for vigilantism against trans people
So what are we looking at here? Using their exact public statements, Knefel documents numerous calls for violence against trans people, the LBGTQ community, or members of their social support networks, in popular right wing media; from online propagandists, to talk show guests, and all the way through to powerful “conservative” media corporations with gigantic nightly audiences. The author then tracks this against documented evidence of a rise in real world hate crimes, and surprise; it turns out that there is a statistical correlation between Fox News guests calling for violence against queer people, and that violence occurring in real life. Who knew? Certainly not mainstream corporate media outlets fronting a “liberal” image, who have played their own part in spreading transphobia by pigeonholing calling trans people pedophiles as a “culture war” issue, beneath serious notice or discussion apparently.
Of course, transgender people really didn’t need a Media Matters article and data science work to know we’re facing down a well funded, totally mainstreamed, trans pogrom in progress; I can tell you from my own experiences, the vibes here are certainly pretty ominous. What I think truly speaks volumes however is that this article is from June of this year, and it was published on an outlet with very real ties to the Democratic Party in America. In other words, Democrat-friendly watchdogs have been warning about an ongoing Republican plan to gain political power by pushing eliminationist propaganda about trans people, and the party itself still doesn’t seem to give a damn, and clearly has no plan to counter this horrifying strategy.
Look folks, I told you already that I don’t expect America to start caring about transgender people anytime soon; I’m an optimist, not a fool. But it would be an absolute fricking tragedy if when the history of our era is written, the final analysis says “genocidal fascism won without resistance, because affluent white liberals in the political and media classes were feeling touchy about trans women in sports, “wokeness,” and “identity politics.” I’m not asking the liberal establishment to fight for my survival; I’m asking them to fight for their own – because you can be damn sure the death trains won’t stop once they’ve rounded up the tiny number of transgender people in America.
- nina illingworth
