#forget that this shit is electorally toxic

[dhaaruni]

That aside, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution grants American citizens the right to travel between states! States simply can't stop citizens from moving between states, regardless of what their purpose is!

[articlesofnote]

despised phrases: “political moment”

I spend a lot of time not talking about what goes on in my head because a) it’s hard to articulate, b) I don’t usually want to engage with how pessimistic I tend to be, and c) because of said pessimism most of what I would articulate would probably make things harder for the people around me, who are also struggling with what is more and more clearly a hell-world to which we have unwittingly contributed and continue, in many ways, to support under duress. i also spend a lot of time (a LOT of time) reading articles of political analysis, mostly left-leaning, which inform that pessimism-unto-despair that i suspect is harbored by many more than just myself.  i want to not think the things i think and feel the ways i feel about the world that i now know i’m living in.  how can any feeling person know what we know about the world and the suffering in it and not feel compelled to respond to it - to have it shape them?  how can you not take it in to yourself in some way and be transformed by it? or destroy your soul by trying to build walls against it?  a tangent worth exploring at a later time! in any case, it’s pretty clear from what reading i’ve done that the forces of our social universe are not of any moment, in any sense of that word.  there is a nigh-overwhelming weight of experience and emotion and attitude in every facet of what we experience in every moment of our lives - so overwhelming that truly, the only sane response is to spend most of our time ignoring it, so we can get on with our lives and not spend all of our time paralyzed by the knowledge that, for example, our standard of living is not only made possible but is ONLY possible through the immiseration of huge numbers of people.  And, moreover, that this has been true for generations at least, centuries more accurately - or in the most inclusive analysis, as long as we humans have been organizing ourselves into hierarchical societies. so what then does this phrase “political moment” mean? what rhetorical purpose does it serve?  there is the here and now, yes, and there is a true uniqueness in it - as the saying goes, you cannot step into the same river twice. but it seems to me that the phrase is more... insidious, perhaps? the right description escapes me at the moment.  it is as though those who use it would have you forget that the past exists and informs the present - as though the current “moment” is an isolated crystal of reality, disconnected from any forces that shaped it in to what it is - from any history we might understand and trust to inform our decisions.  rhetorically: “forget the past! it is done and dead! the demands of the present are too great to think about how we got here! and forget the future too! it cannot be known! there is only the Political Moment, the immediate constellation of power and structure that demands from you a singular response.” in other words - lest my prose get too abstract - “you’d better fucking vote for Biden!”  and as bitter a draught as this is to swallow, it must be swallowed, because (and I do agree with this) the alternative is devastating - really, the alternative is devastation itself. (vote biden and we’ll have a chance to save ourselves!) but god damnit, this too is insanity!  Biden represents the status quo that got us to this point!  History, alas, exists and is relevant!  Only by the conceit of the “political moment” can we ignore, even briefly, that Biden might as well be the flagbearer for the forces that destabilized American (global?) society to the point where paramount executive authority could fall to Trump.  And make no mistake!  You might as well say that power was fumbled into his hands - first by the Republican establishment in 2015, so wrapped up in fighting each other that they forgot to consider (until too late) that maybe Trump would actually win if they didn’t try to make him lose - then by the Democratic establishment, so blithely confident that Trumps’ lack of political legitimacy would doom him that they decided to run a campaign based on the attitude “well, she’s not the other guy!” what galls me is that it seems inarguably clear that this is not some accident on the part of the Democrats!  they don’t just happen to find themselves in this position every four years - they have a habit of ceding political capital to the Republicans every time it seems like they might have to actually fight on a point of principle!  year by year and issue by issue the Democrats enable an ever-more abusive institution and its growing coterie of fascist auxiliaries, and the fruits of their calculation are daily more obvious.  and they do it, as far as I can tell, solely so that when election seasons come they can say with at least some semblance of honesty... “well, at least we’re not the other guys!” (vote biden because he’s less obviously a criminal!) * * * so, after however many words i’ve spent getting to this point, here’s the argument i’m making: the democrats benefit so clearly from a truly toxic opposition that they are now, and have been for decades, motivated to foster that toxicity because it improves their electoral odds without their having to do anything other than be slightly less awful: do you want to shovel 100 tons of shit, or 99?  (”why do I have to shovel shit at all?” what are you, a communist?)  but because they’ve made this devil’s bargain, they have no positive accomplishments to point to any more, whereas the republicans have been vigorously and successfully pursuing their (horrifying, destructive, popular) policy agenda for at least twenty years at this point.  also, here’s the buried lede you’ve been waiting for: i’m pissed off by the phrase “political moment” because i think it’s part of a rhetorical strategy to keep folks from thinking about long-term structural trends that got us to where we are. (vote biden and don’t think about why you’re not voting for someone better!) because i believe in intellectual honesty, and also because i want to feel there has been some point to my writing all of this down, i’m going to make a few predictions based on my above thesis: 1) democrats will cave to the GOP on replacing RBG before the election.  their justification will be something along the lines of “not wanting to divide the nation during an election year” or some other such horseshit. 2) biden will lose the election, in one of two ways:  - decisive trump victory: the biden “strategy” is like a rehash of Clinton 2016, but worse: he’s not doing any campaigning at all and the democratic party message is, you guessed it, “well, he’s not the other guy!”  the political messaging in support of biden isn’t pointing to anything he’s actually accomplished or will try to accomplish if in office, just that he’s a “fundamentally decent man” who has “endured unimaginable hardships” - close-ish election where biden has a small lead on election night but when trump inevitably throws a fit and contests the results, biden concedes.  the reason will again be something like “not wanting to divide the nation” which will be more plausible because folks... - there’s gonna be election-related social unrest no matter what happens anyway, don’t forget to vote for biden! because after all, technically he’s the better candidate.

[zigdirty]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trumperdammerung-is-a-fitting-end-to-2020

Pasting the story by Susan B. Glasser, posted today, below, if you don't want all the ads and page loads on the New Yorker website:

As the awful year of 2020 and the awful tenure of Donald Trump both come to an end, the President has partied with the unmasked in Palm Beach and taken credit for a vaccine against a virus that he once counselled could be beaten with bleach. He has pardoned mercenary child-killers and Paul Manafort. He has golfed. He has raged. He has vetoed the annual defense bill and threatened to shut down the government over the holidays. He has turned against even some of his most loyal henchmen, and some, in turn, have finally flipped on him. “Mr. President . . . STOP THE INSANITY,” the New York Post blared on Monday, after four years of relentless cheerleading.

But, of course, the President did not, and he will not. He continues to refuse to accept his defeat in the election, and just the other day he retweeted a claim that “treason” kept him from winning. Injecting still more political drama into the most ministerial of constitutional processes, Trump and his most fanatical supporters now want Congress to refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6th—which is both pointless, in that it will not happen, and incredibly destructive. Meanwhile, more than a hundred thousand Americans have died of the coronavirus just since the election, and only two million Americans—not the hundred million he once promised—have so far received the vaccine.

The Trümperdämmerung is finally here, and it is every bit the raging dumpster fire that we, the unlucky audience for this drama, have come to expect. Is there anyone left who is surprised that the President is careening through the last days of his Administration with a reckless disdain that simply has no precedent in American public life? Still, the hardest thing to accept is that 2020 is not merely the year that Donald Trump’s luck ran out but that with it the country’s did, too. Sadly and yet inevitably, this terrible, wretchedly toxic year of pandemic death and economic distress, of partisan hatred and national protest, is the culmination of all that Trump has wrought and all that he is.

Now that 2020 is finally almost over, I find that I don’t want to remember it at all. (Though you should read Lawrence Wright’s definitive account of this Plague Year in this week’s New Yorker.) Perhaps this is simply because Trump has remained so defiantly and obnoxiously unrepentant, continuing his antics all the way to the end. He does not want to let go, to cede the spotlight, to renounce his outsized claim on our collective consciousness. It is my protest, our protest, to want so desperately to do so.

As it is, we are still in 2020, and I can barely summon the concerns and controversies of a year ago, when the most pressing political question in Washington was whether Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton would have to testify in the impeachment trial of the President. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t, though he would eventually call Trump unfit for office in a book whose contents he did not share with the United States Senate and the American public when it mattered most.) Now that the election and all the other mayhem associated with it have happened, it’s hard to recall that 2020 began with me wondering whether Biden still had a chance in the upcoming Democratic primaries, and pondering why the promising Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris had flamed out so quickly, before a single vote was cast. This was back when Trumpian outrages seemed less threatening to the literal health of the nation.

How much worse was 2020? Well, NBC’s list of the President’s ten biggest lies in 2019 included Trump perennials like the idea that windmills, because of their noise, “cause cancer,” and “people are flushing toilets ten times, fifteen times,” and the U.S. will “be going to Mars very soon.” All are bad, absurd, and embarrassing coming from a President, but would not even rate in this year’s far deadlier, more consequential tally. Trump was not just a circus this year; he was an actual catastrophe.

Which is why the before times are so hard to conjure now, nine months into the pandemic and nearly two months after an election whose aftermath has challenged the very foundation of American democracy. I can remember, sort of, Nancy Pelosi ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech, and the drama of Mitt Romney becoming the only senator in history to vote to convict an impeached President of his own party. I can recall, sort of, the anxiety that followed the U.S. assassination of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qassem Suleimani, and the drama of Biden’s remarkable comeback in the Democratic Presidential race.

In reality, though, the year really began for me, for us, in February—on February 24th, to be precise, when Trump tweeted, “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” We already knew that this wasn’t true. I had spent the previous weekend haranguing my visiting parents about the virus and begging them to purchase N95 masks before it was too late. But somehow I did not fully recognize until that moment that Trump was going to approach the biggest public-health emergency of our lifetimes with a strategy of outright denial. The Big Lie of 2020 had begun. So many more followed that it’s hard to remember the breathtaking simplicity of this first untruth, the foundational lie from which so many deadly consequences would flow.

“Just stay calm. It will go away,” Trump said on March 10th, when thirty-one Americans were dead. “It’s going to go away,” he said on August 31st, by which point nearly two hundred thousand had died. “It’s going to disappear,” he said on October 10th. “It is disappearing.” He said that the coronavirus was a Chinese plot and that concern over it was a Democratic hoax, that he knew how to treat it better than the doctors did, that it was just like the flu, and that, if you got it, you would get better, as he eventually did in October. “That’s all I hear about now. . . . covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said before the election. “By the way, on November 4th, you won’t hear about it anymore.” But that wasn’t true, either, and, since then, millions of Americans have been infected with the disease, and December has been by far our deadliest month yet.

To be sure, there are many, many other Trumpisms from 2020 that would have been mind-blowing in another context, in any other year. That’s the thing about historic, world-changing times; so much happens that you can’t remember it all. Still, I am quite certain that, even amid the firehose of 2020 awfulness, the Worst Photo-Op in American History and the Worst Debate in American History and the Worst Case of Sore-Loserism in American History will rate a mention.

Thinking back through the year, I realize, too, that there is much that we will not only forget but may not even believe actually happened. Trump pressing his Attorney General to prosecute his opponent weeks before the election? Trump holding rallies with thousands of unmasked followers during a deadly pandemic, including a superspreader White House event at which he introduced a Supreme Court nominee whom Republican senators hurriedly confirmed just days before Trump was defeated? “Person, woman, man, camera, TV”? “Obamagate,” which was supposedly “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA”? It’s just all too insane.

When I Googled “craziest shit Trump did in 2020,” a column I wrote in September, on “Twenty Other Disturbing, Awful Things That Trump Has Said This Month,” popped up. Although it was published just a few months ago, I realized that I did not remember many of the examples cited in it—the “super-duper” new “hydrosonic” missile that does not actually exist; Trump’s accusation that Biden got a “big fat shot in the ass” of some unknown drug; Trump’s admission that he was getting his information about the uselessness of mask-wearing from “waiters.” This, as George W. Bush was reported to have said about Trump’s ominous Inaugural Address, was some weird shit indeed.

Remembering all of this is already both hard and painful. There is still much more to learn about the disastrous events of the past four years in Trump’s Washington and on his watch. But I recognize that there are powerful forces—in human nature, in the politics of both the right and the left—that will push us toward forgetting. The urge to move on from Trump is understandable, and potentially very, very dangerous. As of noon on January 20th, no matter what other madness comes between now and then, America will start to move on anyway.

Out of all the books I read this year—and I read many, stuck at home during 2020’s endless quarantine—the one that resonated perhaps the most was “Those Who Forget,” an account by the French-German author Géraldine Schwarz of postwar Europe’s, and her own family’s, not entirely successful effort to reckon with the crimes of the Second World War. It made the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be. I still don’t want to remember, but I know that forgetting is not an option, either.

This has been a terrifying and sobering year, and presidency, to be sure. Sadly the consequences of it won't dissipate any time soon, or possibly at all.

[theliterateape]

Election 2020: Swimming in Sewage Toward a Different Kind of More Hopeful Cesspool

by Don Hall

8:00 a.m.

I wake up a few hours ago. Slept like the dead. I read through the same bullshit with poll numbers and predictions with the same combination of hope, certainty, uncertainty, and boredom as I did yesterday and the day before. Yeah. Trump is a full-blown dickhead. Biden is a truly nice guy. Will Texas go blue? Do I even know anyone from Texas anymore?

My wife wakes up. She’s helping friends move to North Carolina by helping them drive their shit for the next week as if today is not anything big. She gives me a blowjob and gets a bagel.

I’m not worried about the results of today. I truly am confident that the nation will tip back into some semblance of rationality and dump Trump. I’m more interested to see how it all unfolds and if the deposed Mad King will take a shit on the desk in the Oval as a parting gesture in three months.

I have this image of he and his whole skeleton crew, fully repudiated by a massive and historic blue wave, sitting in the White House like squatters, selling off pieces of our national history on Ebay and hiding from His Majesty as he stomps through the hallways screaming at portraits of presidents past about the unfairness of it all.

In tandem is the image of the cultural left sharpening their knives to go in full attack once Biden is sworn in to remake the country into some bizarre Maoist Shangri-La doing what the Left always does — cannibalize it’s own — while the defeated Republicans pretend they were never in league with Trump but held hostage by him like the rest of us.

Fuck me. This is going to be a long day, isn’t it?

10:00 a.m.

I’m not terribly worried that Trump & Co. will steal the election.

I remember years ago a prominent Chicago poet who dressed and spoke like a rap star telling me “It ain’t the n****rs who talk about shit you have to worry about. They’re all bark and no bite. It’s the quiet ones you need to keep an eye on.”

Trump has been barking about stealing the election for months now and I’m pretty certain a man so overwhelmingly incompetent as the one who completely blew both his debate appearances and fucked up a national response to an epic pandemic so horribly that a retarded child could’ve done better is not going to suddenly reveal that he is an evil genius capable of stealing one of the most televised elections in history.

I’m likewise less concerned about the rabid, angry Trumpers wreaking havoc on the country. They were never in this for a long campaign. They couldn’t even take COVID seriously enough to wear masks. They’ll make some noise, get into some melees for a few days and then slink home and grouse just like their hero.

I wonder what the Antifa crowd will do once Trump is deposed? Start an emo band? Go back to working at Starbucks and REI? I hope they decide to occupy Kentucky and reign terror on Mitch McConnell. It’s a terrible thing to say but the party I’ll throw in my semi-quarantined apartment when Trump loses tonight (this week? Next month?) will be nothing when compared to the full-on Mardi Gras parade I’ll throw when the Evil Senator from Kentucky dies. I’m known to say that I can’t hate someone unless I’ve met them but I fucking hate Mitch.

I read a weird op-ed online that essentially thanks Trump for giving us four years reprieve from the cultural warriors of the Far Left. I wish I read it in a paper so I could wipe my ass with it because an iPad makes for an uncomfortable symbolic gesture.

I shower and get dressed. I’m on shift tonight at the casino so I’ll be dealing with the regular crowd while history unfolds like a soiled sheet and you can’t quite tell if that’s a bloodstain or merely ketchup. 

For our sixth anniversary, Dana got me my eleventh tattoo. She came up with a cool design concept: a Chicago tattoo for my right back shoulder that included the baby in the clamshell from the City of Chicago flag, a light blue background and three of the red six-point stars of Chicago, each representing one of my three decades there. She booked an artist in a very chic studio who happened to be a great trace artist but not so much with the original design thing.

As it stands, it’s a fine tattoo with some elements that look like a child drew them with a Sharpie. Not great but growing on me. But the odd thing is that it being being on back, I don’t see it so I forget it’s there. Reminds me that as Americans we tend to dwell on history but not what is directly behind us. We’ll send Trump packing and immediately forget how embarrassing he was and set into attacking the new administration because it isn’t as brazenly Marxist as we fought for (I use ‘we’ although I actually voted for Biden’s moderation).

12:00 p.m.

Dropped Dana off for her trip. Ran some stuff home. I’m now actively avoiding anything news related. I receive an email that our division of casinos is not putting the election coverage on the screens in our Sportsbooks and I’m relieved.

2:00 p.m.

At the casino now. It’s pretty empty and I’m unsurprised. I’m informed that the larger properties and on the Strip there are special task force groups of LVMPD set up at every location to stem any bad partisan behavior in the casinos. For our property, I’m the task force.

I recall clearly the night four years ago when so many of us were so certain Hillary had it in the bag only to be gut-punched around 9:00 p.m. with the news that Trump had won the thing. Unlike so many, I accepted the result regardless of fact that she won the popular vote. Until we sack up and remove the Electoral College, that’s a legitimate win.

5:25 p.m.

I checked. I couldn’t help myself. The only thing that pisses me off is that Mitch won Kentucky, that sour, putrid fuckface.

Yeah. I really want the Dems to sweep this up. The question I’m asking myself is if we repeat 2016, why? The answer so many gravitate to is that half the country is racist but I’m not buying that reductive bullshit. If I had to guess, half the country doesn’t buy into the identity politic of the Far Left.

Alright. Enough. Optimism. Fucking optimism.

7:30 p.m.

At this point I have to remind myself that Dems voted overwhelmingly early and so many of those votes are still to be counted. I’ll admit, I’m surprised that Trump is even competitive but given my disdain for the Wokesters I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. If I can’t take them someone from the rural side of Texas probably hates them as much as I hate Mitch.

I was hoping for a blow-out but it’s looking more and more like this thing will get decided in the courts over mail-in votes.

On the floor, no one is talking about the history unfolding. By now, the place is about half-full and people are far more concerned with getting their comp drinks and hitting payouts. I overhear a couple of guys at the blackjack table. They think the Dems are going down. One thinks it’s because of Kamala Harris. I walk away without saying a word.

If there’s anything we should have learned from 2000 is that, under no circumstances should the Blue concede until every last vote is counted. Every last fucking vote.

I’m finding a bit of Zen. We aren’t going to know who won tonight. In some ways this is a good thing. It means Trump will be wrapped up battling the process rather than losing and tearing shit apart out of petulance. We still have a raging pandemic and our economy is shredded.

The divide in this country is not one of race or racism. The divide is between city mice and country mice. As the picture emerges, the urban centers of almost every state skews left in statewide seas of rural red. It also demonstrates how deeply unpopular the extremes are with the opposing sides. The racial identity politics of the Far Left — you know, the folks who flatly state that all white people are racist — and the strident authoritarianism of the Far Right — you know, the ones who love the police and lotsa guns — are so toxic that equal measures of citizens will vote with little more than a passionate hatred for one or the other despite a host of rational reasons to vote the other way.

9:40 p.m.

We won’t know until later in the week. 

Votes are still uncounted in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. We wanted a decisive repudiation of Trump and, once again, half the country (and much closer to half than four years ago) took that away.

From one angle, this is the best outcome. Uncertainty as to who won means all those businesses boarded up can breathe a sigh of relief. With no clear winner so far, there isn’t a reason to riot in the streets. A couple weeks of legal battles and ballot counting and the assholes on both sides will get bored. 

I was humbled in 2016. I thought I knew how it would go because I was so certain my worldview was so obviously right that how could anyone not see it so? I’ve been ready for this. Like so many, I felt the surge of certainty once again with the polls and how incredibly monstrous Trump became in the last days of his campaign. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe Biden will be our president on January 21st, 2021. I just wish it had been an easier road.

[afrosocialism]

7 Reasons why the Left is dead in America.

As we know, the left is in serious life support in America. It wasn’t what it was then in the 60s and 70s or the era of the Industrial Revolution. There are many reasons for its downfall, but I’m gonna give seven. 

#7: Internal in-fighting between ideologies and sectarianism. 

One of the major problem that befell the left is the constant antagonism between state and libertarian socialists esp. in the case of MLs/communists and anarchists/ancoms. We are fighting over what ideology is right and wrong, ideas from this revolutionary will set us free, which leader is better, what is or what is not socialism, and all that jazz. Both anarchism and communism have its problems, but we need to realize this: they’re both tenants of socialism that is made to fight against the capitalist state. We have no connection with each other just squabbling. Despite that, there are groups that are cult-like or secretarian that think their ideas are better and others aren’t. Avoid em. Anyway, look at the left in Latin America, as it consists of different ideologies working to fight against capitalism and imperialism.

#6: Over reliance on old leftist theorists and a cult of personality. 

I see this a lot in leftists and it annoys me that we still got people who are over dependent on works from leftist theorists like Bakunin, Marx, Kropotkin, and Lenin. They are so optimistic that if we just keep following their ideas, we’ll be free rather than adapting to the reality of now and see we need more than that to survive. Anarchist Panther Ashanti Alston Omowale said that anarchism is pitiful if it relies on the work of its European figureheads, rather than the experience of actual struggle and revolution. That can apply that to forms of socialism. If we rely on leftist dogma, we ain’t gonna progress. Another thing is that a lotta leftists wanna create a cult of personality around their favorite theorists than learn from their ideas and flaws. We refuse to adapt to the situation that capitalism created. Look at Communalism. It’s based off of experiences of revolutionary organizing and action. It was made for how to create self governed municipalities to survive from the vampiric nature of capitalism. We need to learn from recent experiences of revolution and struggle and the ever changing nature of capitalism. 

#5: How it treats anti-oppression and intersectional politics.  One problem with the left is that it refuses or fully adapt anti oppression and/or intersectional politics. Some of them may claim that they are anti-racist/sexist/transphobic etc. but don’t do nothing with it. Sometimes they make their opposition towards oppressive behaviors about themselves or invade marginalized folx spaces and police them. On the other hand, there are some that dismiss them as identity politics and call them divisive and believe that they are a distraction in fighting class conflict. The revolution will be intersectional or it will not be a revolution. What they don’t understand that these identities intersect with class and that class itself is an identity. Also, there are those that practice oppressive behaviors in their spaces (I’ll get into that more) and resist to understand how they benefit off of whiteness. 

#4 Over reliance on electoral politics and entrance to the state. 

The left believes that to succeed is to elect people into state politics. Even though this been a long practice with limited success, but those leftists groups also had revolutionary organizing. Here’s the thing: we ain’t got that now. We’re so fixated in putting our ideas to the state, that we forget the necessity to organize. At this point we should see the reality of electoral politics by these facts: 

A. The state is essentially capitalist as it is a system ran by the ruling class.

B. Electoral politics are controlled and operated by the state. 

C. Electoral politics are centered around an elephant and a jackass. 

D. Any chance that the radical left getting elected into state politics is slim. 

E. In order to succeed into the state, you must soften your views or assimilate into their political thinking. 

I may sound anarchist saying this, but I know that there are state socialists who agree that compromises with the state is surrender. That’s how Bernie Sanders was made. He came out left, but when he worked with the state, he didn’t bother to oppose the capitalist state, worked with the Dems and stood by or be silent of their atrocities, spoke nebulously for milquetoast reforms, and appealed to middle class white millennials than the working class and poor he claimed he’s standing for. We should never sell out to the state because the state will never be for our interests. 

#3: Engaging in a lotta pacifism. 

I know people that are nonviolent, and I’m like okay, but I think we really need to transcend from that. Pacifism has a lot of problems, mostly that the only way to fight against institutionalized violence and corruption is to be nonviolent and it implants that idea towards oppressed folx. It is ignorant  towards the history that this country (and many other settler nations) was founded by violence, that nonviolence alone is futile without armed wing to back it, and that it’s necessary to retaliate with violence against an illegitimate state. A lotta leftists have completely abandoned armed resistance and rejected violence as a tactic to fight against capitalism and oppression. They won’t even bother to fight the right, believing that they’ll change through debate and compassion. However, they don’t know that the right can and will exert violence on whom they hate. Many believe that nonviolence will produce better change, not realizing that the state has a monopoly on violence and can exert it at their own will. Also, pacifism is toxic as fuck as it tells us that we shouldn’t fight back while our oppressors plot our destruction.

#2: Too many liberals (and some reactionaries) in our movement.

One major issue why the Left is struggling because liberals (and some reactionaries) has invaded and flooded our movement. Main reasons for most of the aforementioned reasons are because liberalism is infecting our movement. They’re the main reason for why we won’t fight fascists/bigots as they humanize em, defend their actions as free speech, justify their existence. When the right gets stronger, they'll come out their doldrums and defend their existence, and let them kill us. Liberals push pacifism and electoral politics on leftists and claim that these ideas are radical. They distort the fuck outta history and the true meaning of socialism, into their view and pandering to the right's dismissive view of it. I see a lot of so called leftists engaging in liberalism rather than radicalism, that they’re deserving of questioning. I also see that a lotta liberals call them leftists and claim that they are the standard bearers of leftism and make leftism about being anti-conservative, yet pro liberal and liking leftist figures without even understanding their principles. They also flood the movement with conspiracy theories, something that isn't leftist. Let’s be honest, liberals aren’t our friends and not even left because they have a history of destroying and crushing leftist movements and leaders. Most of them are working with the Democrats and are double agents of the state as they exist dilute radical ideas and movements and assimilate them to the capitalist state. These people wants to push the left into the capitalist state and the Democrats. These people justify or be silent on neoliberalism and imperialism as long it’s a Democrat. These people also encourage or even gaslight other leftists to engage into shitty liberal beliefs. Most of them also engage in oppressive behaviors (mostly transphobia, racism, classism, sexism, and ableism). Speaking of that, reactionaries have also taken over the left, mostly in Facebook groups. They engage in the aforementioned behavior just as worst as the liberals and defend it as left. These are what I call the "alt left". The main reason why the left is dying too many damn people with reactionary or revisionist mindsets coming in infecting our movement with their shit.

And #1: AMERICA.

What could be at fault than any of the other reasons for the left's demise? Simple. It's America. Many people like to blame the left dying because the right going strong, identity politics, or being too soft, but they refuse to look at how much America fucked up the left. America (with occasional help from other Western nations) has spent years in dismantling, weakening, and suppressing leftist ideals, movements, leaders, and nations through the Red Scare, McCarthyism, espionage acts, police, imperialism, violence, propaganda, the FBI, CIA, NATO, unjust laws, betrayal, coups, neo-colonialism, installing puppet leaders, and war. America is the greatest enemy of the left, and will make sure we die a slow or fast death. America will never adapt to leftism because it is a white imperialist capitalist settler nation that was founded by the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of Africans. America is capitalist and will not give up its capitalist state without fight. You know why the left is dying here? Because America has killed it. America will do anything to destroy the left in here and in other nations.

Even though I said the left is in struggle in the USA, It has been slowing recovering with the election of President Donald Trump and the concurrent rise of fascism in this nation. However, the left got stronger in some nations of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

[anarchistettin]

the charge i’ve been jailed for the most often is ‘obstruction of justice’

in the 80s there weren’t cell phones, but people would still stand around mutely in shock when cops pulled off public assault torture & kidnap on their (black) target du jour. I’d get in their faces and yell about their badge numbers and beg sideliners to do something - they’d usually respond by frowning at me; one or two would croak “this isn’t helping” (though twice I helped a person escape custody so… I didn’t believe em). Other than a couple of cannabis nabs and a fake (dismissed) DUI in south carolina, that’s all I’ve ever gotten time in jail for. Saying “NO” to the police. Looking back, I think of how I could have been smarter about it but honestly? I’m way, way more pissed off about shit these days, and I’ve got nothing to lose. All the shit my heart adored back in the 20th century is dead now, or in prison, or has morphed into an officer of plutocracy (or worse, as in the case of the Childhood Friend who’s Now A DHS Agent Jesus Fucking Christ, B, wtlf).

thinking about the day the filth piled up on Dread Sam, one cop per limb and another for his chest, and then Hippie Andrea, whom everyone pitied, got taken down for saying “stop” “don’t hurt him” - all the Fellini’s / L5P culture-colonists say there mutely, not knowing what to feel - noting that only “street kids” ever got bad attention from the police -

Sam did get away & his lawyer sawed his cuffs off. They sent choppers looking for him; they buzzed back and forth over Candler Park (ha) for hours. THE CHARGE: suspected weed sling. No ‘drugs’ recovered. No weapons recovered. THE CRIME: five klansmen were allowed to maraud with impunity, violently assaulting two young people, kidnapping them after beating them severely, in broad daylight / under the approving gaze of all the ‘liberals’ in the city. Two years later those same onlookers had priced out all the kids they seemed to enjoy watching be battered.

It was well-known in them days that officers Frank Lizzie and Terry McPharland were straight up white supremacists. It is still widely considered obvious, among the disintegrating punks and sage lefties of that generation, that McPharland personally murdered at least two of us. He certainly tortured, terrorized, & framed plenty of us. In my case he assaulted me repeatedly and vigorously while I was in handcuffs, planted drugs on me (quite overtly as other cops watched), whispered really disturbing shit into my ear, then attempted (unsuccessfully) to use perjury and procedural manipulation to sway my court case.

Today’s reality makes all my rage and frustration - with the uselessness & corruption of courts, the unrestrained lust of the filth, the mindless smiles of the supposed liberals that didn’t just watch dumbly but paid for the spectacle - seem so innocent and small. What still does have the power to enrage me is watching the children of the boomers embrace that neolib psychopathy but now add their sneering hauteur and stupid childish self-regard to their defense of it. Today��s ‘adult’ is a powerful education to me: I really thought that moronic Victorian narcissism and blatantly unselfconscious tyranny of the bourgeoise was dying. Apparently, it was just taking a breath. I really did think, for a second there, that y’all were going to be so much better than yr ‘rents. I guess that’s why it stings so much, why I type this, on day 3 of neoliberal Chickamauga with all but 1 responses this blog gets coming from … ugh. ‘People’ who pretend to be things like socialists, ‘thinkers’ (jesus!), ‘leftists’ using the Slur Thesaurus to make their cases, missing the point, cheering on the unelected state’s assassins, the military, praising Obama and now W?!?!? with their whole hearts, egregiously perverse in their weird belief that they’re “very left” - deliberately? I don’t know if it’s better if it’s genuinely ignorant. I’m pretty sure the fooled liberal is a zillion times more toxic and destructive than the world’s most competent out-nazi. Circus Peanut wouldn’t exist except for Clinton. It’s one thing to insist they don’t ‘see it that way’ - IE so incredibly stupid that it’s better if it’s a lie - but then to double down on this dumb bullshit, fully 2 years since there was any possible excuse for still being hoodwinked by the dem failure-fundraiser engine?

It was tough, in the 80s, when there were 1000 boomers for each kid - now? it’s triple. And climbing. The boomers and their soulless horde of children now form a neoliberal-defense-bloc that, by the terms of the “system” they claim will save us all, simply insurmountable. Forget electoral pageants and just think ‘buying power’. They won’t stop. They won’t curb their ravening, not for anything. The sum of discourse I’m seeing - outrageously high numbers of fresh new unselfconscious neoliberal agents, flat-affected lecturing from people who truly believe their phones give them life experience, bewildering pride at being so malleable to their masters - seems to be “it is worse than your worst most far-flung prophecies of how bad it would get”. That’s alarming because I was certain, then, that life on earth for us apes would become impossible within a few hundred years. It’s been about 20 since my worst imaginings were codified (i’m nutty) and everything has gone to shit about 5x ahead of what I imagined.

???

Biosphere dying is a shitty way to go. There was a very recent time when I had a positive feeling about this crop of USAns. It seemed like they understood that not rioting was a fault they’d been indulging in, a bad habit of childhood. Nope. Just like their parents, they worship appearance and decorum above all. They’ve made a culture - one they’re not just proud of but viciously defensive over - from standing on the side, wide-eyed and hungry, enjoying the spectacle of us getting assaulted, beaten, tied, and taken away in broad daylight. They love watching the earth die. They make their heroes and gods from the worst criminals.

Blocs, voting, “awareness” - nope. 

It’s not going to work out that way. Our hope comes from forming communities, intelligent action, and planning for a future. Ordering our efforts toward a world to live in now. USA, its officers & legerdemain & vigorous passionate young people with a vision - there’s no good shit coming out of there. No revolution, no evolution, no sanity, no freedom. They’ll offer up ‘liberty’ - license granted by Master, with gorgeous packaging and tiered rewards - like a Good American Should, but they will not stop. The terrible reality is that most mothers feed their children right into the machine, first chance they get, because they believe it is the only hope.