With JD Vance and all the fake populism, and now this. I don't see any other path than the fascist one. Might be best to start looking at options to flee this hellhole.
UPDATE: They now have on a member of the Steamfitters union who is a "lifelong Democrat"... Yeah it's pretty much over
i think things are just starting to get cool
some kind of defensive planning and preparation is a good idea, we've seen quite a bit of stochastic right-wing terror, and we should expect that to continue to become more common
Do you actually believe that America was fascist from 2016-2020 like Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy? Or just a nationwide version of red states like Florida? I know it's fun to exaggerate but no. Biden has been much worse than trump in terms of number of deaths of civilians (Palestine, Donbas).
The U.S. basically formed the inspiration for Nazi Germany and has always been at least proto-fascist.
Its hard to imagine trump would be any better once hes in office
That's my point though. Things will continue to suck but we're not at fascism yet.
You don't need fascism when there is absolutely NO socialist movement
The reactionaries in the US keep trying to force fascism but (so far) capital isn't really on board because... why would they be? It's not yet necessary for them to team up with the dinguses shitting their pants daily over rainbow stickers sold at Target. We'll remain in this hell world, worst of all worlds, until something actually threatens the capitalist status quo.
it's america, if you don't like one party you are obligated to vote for the other one.
I know we are just a small group of shitposters but what have we done at all to even try to sway public opinion even gently? We can say electoralism doesn't work for the Dems or leftism but does it work for the Republicans? Is there maybe a way we try to normalize the narrative that Trump's own chaoticness contributed to why he got shot (which is what 38% of those polled already believe) just so that we can at least say we tried something before throwing our hands up and resigning ourselves to fascism?
This place should be a way to connect and exchange but it shouldn't be a stand in for regular irl action and implication in different communities and causes. I expect most of us are already trying to counter the narratives in our social circles but it's difficult to counter the biggest propaganda machine in history.
I think that one thing that makes countering narratives more effective is if we didn't all make different scattered arguments, and try to challenge things only as they come up in our circles like whack-a-mole, if we actually unified around a set of the same points that people see everywhere. I mean how many people have you heard from that "the left is now illiberal?" That was a concerted push of a singular collectively workshopped message until it took hold in the public consciousness. Bush and Frank Luntz workshopped a way to remove rich people's inheritance taxes by polling pejorative names for it until they hit gold with "the death tax."
I am not saying the propaganda machines against us aren't powerful, but I am saying that we are not even at the most power we ourselves can be, aren't even trying to approximate a DIY version of that machine.
I've been visibly communist in normal online communities and tried to get liberals to engage with anything non-electoral when they complain about panicking "every four years" but I'm just as isolated from those dweebs as I am from all of you so
Yeah but see, they will write you off the moment they see some words that code as communist. But the folk singer Woodie Guthrie was an open communist, and incepted communist-friendly ideas many Americans still subconsciously hold because he had deliberately crafted and normie-resonant lyrics. I mean, they're still teaching "This Land is Your Land" in kid's classrooms!
That's why something as seemingly trivial as just word choice might determine whether some idea is palatable, and why people pay millions to PR strategists. The getting together and work shopping some talking points that travels is best done by the empire but can at least be done in some small scale and gain virality the left doesn't currently have enough of. The conservatives know that their ideas are not popular and so they fight tooth and nail to soften them while generating reflexive negative feeling toward words associated with the left. But we can thread the needle and grandfather into the public mind leftist ideas that are already popular but saddled with unpopular terms.
I mean, they're still teaching "This Land is Your Land" in kid's classrooms!
They do, but they leave out the verse about how private property is bullshit
Not everywhere, in the children's book my school used they retained that verse and even had complementary illustrations. I am sure some school boards have successfully gotten it removed, but it there are a not insignificant number of schools that keep the verse in.
♪ By the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
By the welfare office
I found my people
As they stood there hungry
I stood there whistling
This land was made for you and me ♪
♪ This land is your land
But it once was my land
Before we sold you
Manhattan Island
You pushed our nations
To the reservations
This land was stole by you from me ♪
There's some really banger stuff in some versions of that song.
and why people pay millions to PR strategists.
That's because PR strategists are PMC ghouls who use nepotism to get paid seven figures to write power points that explain some fucking psychology 101 crap that's often straight up wrong.
Crafting propaganda is actually quite easy, look how lazy Israel's propaganda is but settlers still lap it up like dehydrated hogs. Real issue is your message needs an audience who's in the right place to hear it. The most intelligent and charismatic communist in the world will be out performed by a nebbish, creepy, reactionary dunce if the crown they're speaking to are a bunch of petite-bourgeois and labor aristocrats.
I mean there's ton of grifting in the industry but there are two kinds of messaging, the kind that consolidates your existing adherents and the kind that gets the neutral politically uninvolved people to listen. The reason Amerifats hate public transport and slavishly promote deregulation--to the point of even saying universal device charging port requirements are government overreach--is because insanely effective propaganda ghouls workshopped and had a strategy for disseminating to people who initially didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other.
Israel itself was previously so skilled at propaganda targeting Americans who had little knowledge about the mid-east that the average left-wing view on the Levant even about 7 years ago was "there are two equally bad aggressors." During the War on Terror era Israel would make these stories and news dramatizations about pretty white women getting blown up in clubs, and astroturf the online New Atheists with anti-Muslim rhetoric, and people left and right took it as gospel that Israel was our secular and unfairly besieged sympatico country in the Middle East. These were no make-work jobs, even tens of millions in PR fees for this work paid for themselves in spades, because it facilitated decades of unprotested billion-dollar weapons exchanges.
Even though today's Israeli propaganda is dogshit because of the nepo incompetent descendants of the hasbara masters, and misspend of excess funds you mention, and even though it's now mostly effective only on rousing their existing supporters, for decades skilled torrential PR was what made us turn a blind eye to how horrific the IDF and Israeli government were. The grifting opportunities in PR came to the field because the past value it brought to people in power justified millions in cash influxes.
And to your point about the message needing people in a place to hear them, there is an untapped group of people who know the Dems are cowards who don't do enough but don't feel like they can criticize them too harshly, the overperformance of Bernie proved that.
The best I’ve seen of that has been PSL and because it’s an outgrowth of their organizing, not a preemptor
Give it a try and see how it goes.
We don't have to resign to fascism, resistance remains possible under much worse circumstances than ours (for example, invasion by Nazi Germany, pre-internet, etc.) If you want exacts, figure out how to support your community right now. Mutual aid groups, community gardens, food not bombs, IWW/union drives etc. If the plan is just tell people that Trump is bad... that's kind of just resignation to fascism isn't it? I mean, so long as that's the beginning and end of what you wanna do. Obviously doing that + actual resistance is totally different.
You can try to change the GOP from the inside but they have ideological guardrails just as strong as the dems do against socialism and against actual democracy. You just aren't aware of them necessarily cause presumably you were never brought up in that culture.
No it is not just telling people Trump is bad, it is things we haven't gone far enough to do such as actively campaign to devalue Trump's fist pumping image rather than circlejerk ourselves over it being iconic and for the textbooks already. What about outright incepting the idea into the non-MAGAs about how this shooting was Trump's fault, which 38 percent of voters already believe it is? What if what we do now to contextualize that "iconic" moment turns its caption in the history books to "The last gasp of life for the extinct MAGA movement?"
We love making fun of libs here for how they are too scared to do anything mask off that might actually be electorally effective. Well, leftists aren't restricted by that, and it's only us who have the power to make that more potent flavor of rhetoric that gives words to what the Dem base actually wants to say publicly and can win through. The chud Nazis are self-serious and when they are not in total executive power yet they lose soft power when made into subjects of piercing ridicule. When we undercut every post they make honoring the racist shooting victim by mentioning he was a bloodthirsty Zionist whose death was kinda funny, they actually become more demoralized than they are galvanized.
Only leftists can make the kind of propaganda that liberals crave viscerally but are too married to their self-perceptions as "the adults in the room" to make. The mutual aid groups we build will be a reaction to the fascist harms we can no longer avoid. What I am talking about is a pro-action to impactfully wound the Nazis as they attempt to rise that only leftists have the wherewithal to do.
Libs don’t crave that message. They believe violence is wrong no matter what and that being a victim is synonymous with being a hero. Dying to protect your family wipes away all sins in the liberal mind. Libs want to preach civility when someone acts rationally against the enemy they’ve said is an existential threat to their democracy. They joke that he can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes which if taken seriously means they’re suggesting he’d wipe cities off the face of the earth but they still think the future of millions of people in whatever cities he would target must only be decided by a vote in November. They will talk up January 6 and insist the enemy will take power by any underhanded means but then handicap themselves with high minded values. Let the whole world go down with the ship if it means they upheld their philosophical values.
We can give Dems more potent words, like all the left academia terms they absorbed and disarmed on the summer of 2020. This is what happens when we trying to win the spectacle on their terms; be it “the news” or social media. Those mediums are totalized by capital and cannot be won by an anti capitalist faction.
Not sure what the winning play is but I think it necessarily is some kind of sustained direct action that creates friction in a world of frictionless spectacle. Some sort of denial of treats and entertainment or easily digested narratives… it has to be totally divorced from the forces that determine success in the spectacle. Whatever it is, it will be incredibly unpopular due to the disruption, it will probably be illegal or be later made illegal by reactionaries… so it can’t be planned online.
(lol I got into a little bit of a rant mode. This is not intended to be overly confrontational, libs are just so damn disappointing.)
Based on polling the lib voters are actually a lot less addicted to that victim-as-hero image than their representatives are. The problem is that the message the Democrats sell to their voters from the top-down has consciously been chosen to be the "when they go low, we go high" message. But letting their voters cast themselves as the hall monitors of democracy and decency is just the form of appeal the top Dems consciously crafted to be most advantageous to them in their simultaneous pursuit of rewards from capital and everyday voters--who have the potential to become far more radicalized.
People will go toward whichever mainstream and widely publicized figure/party that agrees most with their views, just like how most people choose to go see studio movies over Indies because that's what has the ad spend. So Dem voters choose which leaders to follow and let themselves be guided by based on who they're putting on the TV, but what the popular Dem politicians and pundits espouse do not represent the fixed baseline average for what their voters already believe, just the fixed baseline for what their voters feel free to say at the current moment. Looking at an example from the other side, Republicans were terrified to call out Iraq for being a disaster until Trump called it out in a debate and opened the floodgates overnight.
The Dem voter-politician split on Gaza, Medicare 4 All, etc. is so stark, and while Biden is pulls his anti-Trump ads out of decorum the liberal voters online, especially on black Twitter are like "I don't give a fuck if he got popped." The message their voters crave has no mainstream figure to articulate for them yet.
I'm all for resisting fascism. The question is to what end, what exactly does delegitimizing the center right democratic party's opposition accomplish when they have a demonstrated willingness to target and sacrifice marginal groups in the pursuit of compromise with the fascists? Labour just won an astonishing victory in the UK. Unforced by opposition they are going after trans people, trans people who presumably helped give them that historic win.
By all means we should stop fascism where we can. But I'm not convinced doing it in this context, primarily as a messaging and PR win that will, let's be honest, only benefit Democrats, really moves the ball.
Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Feels ominous here lately.
While the Democrats deserve no help, this original post is about how we should resign ourselves to fascism because the Teamsters are at the RNC. Doesn't that imply that we at least prefer they not be there, even if it means being at the DNC? We should focus on moving the needle toward what we want. The Dems may stand to benefit and piggyback off us for power, but what other option is there really at the point. If we genuinely believed that Trump and fascism have won and the only option is mutual aid groups for when he is in power, Hexbear would be filled with posts on mutual aid groups building. But we clearly don't believe in that deep down yet or at least have some residual hope of something different, and we can work chasing that feeling.
You're talking yourself into opportunism. It's a bad sign that Teamsters are at the RNC, but that doesn't mean we should be trying to get them to go to the DNC (and they are anyway, I think). We should be pulling them, and everyone else, towards communism, not just a slightly less barbaric neoliberalism.
Agitating directly for the destruction of the imperialist, capitalist state.
Posting can be good for raising consciousness in a diffuse way but it is nothing compared to doing IRL organizing. I recommend that anyone concerned about this stuff should join an org and begin building the tried and true power structures of the left. Also, follow good infosec in all things.
I think this community is at its best when it's actively agitating in other communities, but that is notoriously one of the most divisive issues in the community (i.e. "should we do that or not?") and I've personally been really busy lately, so I haven't had a good opportunity to advocate for it. There's already a specter haunting the fediverse, so we might as well make it real.
but what have we done at all to even try to sway public opinion even gently?
I have an answer to your question.
we are just a small group of shitposters
Yes and we either shitpost as doomers or as agitators
There's nothing to agitate, we are alone here. This is a entertainment space for a fringe political minority.
I know we are just a small group of shitposters but what have we done at all to even try to sway public opinion even gently?
I post on .world 🫡
But seriously, lmao.
"They were mean to me so I became a fascist!"
That is the liberal belief, but there is no historical proof that that will be exactly how things unfold, it's just conjecture. In fact 38% of people polled already believe it was his fault, is it really impossible to get maybe 13% more people to also believe it?
Liberals have completely lost faith in the art of persuasion, and don't think vividly enough when they try to game strategies out. How we say that it is his fault matters just as much, and if we say the Dems had policies which could have prevented the shooter from getting his gun, that we are just worried about whether the chaos of that rally will reflect the chaos of his presidency, these are the types of approaches that can make an on the fence voter go, "huh, that kinda makes sense, I never thought of it like that."
It of course has a chance of backfiring but it also has a chance of cutting down the polling bump he gets from being shot.
Trump is not uniquely fascist, but it's totally his fault that he got shot, whatever contrarians feel about that fact. If he wanted to be safe, he could have just taken his first loss on the chin and retired, or better yet never run for President. The Presidency is a dangerous job, all the more so when you openly threaten people from many different walks of life.
Who is he openly threatening? And people have a right to run for office. What you claim makes no sense at all. Riding in a car can be dangerous. That doesn't mean that it's your fault if some drunk runs a red light and kills you.
I don't really care what the law says someone can do, when you threaten immigrants, queer people, and so on, you shouldn't be surprised if someone fights in their self-defense. The fact that the state says that its violence is legal and other violence is illegal has no bearing on that.
Of course, that isn't what happened, the shooter was a dumb kid with no clear motive since he had mixed political affiliation, but we're just speaking in hypotheticals here.
Who is he openly threatening?
Sounds like someone belongs in the
