first off, i nominate this for the greatest image of 2021: https://twitter.com/reezels/status/1351732376632586240
TLDR: Warren-voting blue checkmark accounts are mad about people doing Marxist science and not simply saying “qanon are evil because of their essential nature”. These smarmy anti-dirtbags did cultural appropriation of comrade dril’s tweets to mock the idea of looking at how our environment shapes our ideology and worldviews. Libs who think covid denial is evil are doing capitalist denial by obscuring the material base of alienation which generated the mental superstructure which qanon parrots.
https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1351705165485641730
This guy from Dissent ("if I was your editor" if I was your Red Guard, your cringe ass nerd account would be deleted) agrees with the Warren libs that historical materialism is not worth talking about. Very weird to see someone reduce their cognitive dissonance by getting aggro and shrieking that something "doesn't matter!!!" and "isn't important!!!".
Perhaps these 2 Woke 2 Empathy radlibs want to obscure the material effects of capitalism because they are privileged PMC class traitors? In any case, they're actually in the same category as Qanon: they lack a scientific explanation of political economic history. Which is why they desperately need to reaffirm their idealistic worldview by demanding certain groups of others to suffer because they’re "bad people" (racists, conspiracy theorists, Amber):
https://twitter.com/AlbertTappman/status/1351682508484702210
Idealists believe cultural issues matter more than our material struggle to survive under late capitalism. Marxism is a “bad analysis” because it doesn’t simply categorize people with childish superhero movie labels.
https://twitter.com/dbessner/status/1351692059812352001
These progressive Warren voters need to differentiate themselves from "evil unscientific fascists" because they believe themselves to be good people (their Reaganite politics are, like qanon, claiming to be "saving the children" despite destroying the American family unit for profit). Apparently you’re antifa if you never say such "embarrassing" things like talking about Jeffrey Epstein's friends and bourgeois business partners. Talking about the endemic sexual abuse in the ruling class is apparently a tenet of fascism to these anti-dirtbags. That's why Obama let his daughter intern with that Hollywood rapist, it would be impolite and rude not too!
Honestly, that was a pretty milquetoast article. It's essentially "we interviewed Will Sommer a few times on CTH and turned it into an article".
Given that it's Amber, yes, it's excessively materialistic - obviously there's an element to Qanon that supplies spiritual needs, and pretending all spiritual needs are just misdirected anger at the 08-09 crash is very :amber:. They definitely cherry picked the few "I left Qanon" narratives to find any that seemed to do with materialist concerns. Interestingly, the most common refrain from folks who've lost people to Qanon is "sure, dad was always into conspiracies, but he's gone too far", and I've not seen a single "I left Qanon" story from someone like that.
Also, to be pedantic: Q is the folks behind the Q account, Qanon (s) are the follower. Them repeatedly using Q when they mean Qanon(s) is like calling all Marxists "Marx".
Also, watching blue checks suddenly develop a concern without understanding of Qanon is deeply funny.
The problem with this shit is people keep using material analysis when they are sympathetic and then reverting back to moralizing when it's someone they don't like. If we want to put on the serious marxist cap then don't revert back to screeching about radlibs, wokescolds or whatever because people are rightly identifying the double standard. This is a side effect of the dirtbag left being posters first and foremost and using marxism as a club to swing at other media competitors and their fandoms rather than for any serious people's movment.
Radlibs material motivations are extremely obvious. They mostly work at NGOs or media. Their jobs rely on Progressivism existing as a business to lobby the government to provide "solutions" aka grants for them. It's a necessity for them to attack anything outside of their Whig view of history because that might make people think there's alternatives to "give my NGO money to do something..." Or they might think that beating "the threat posed by the Right" has a solution other than "vote Blue"
They mostly work at NGOs or media.
I'm sure some do, but do most? That just sounds like saying that all marxists are in academia.
The Radlib political economy is built around those industries, though.
Radlibs are ultimately just a sub-wing of liberal democracy. People who believe in the spectacle of liberal democracy pick their "tribe" based on more or less random factors. The Radlib sub-wing has a gravitational pull towards NGOs, media, some academia.
this is an ok article. as usual with left examinations of the right, it's written from the perspective of a white person to address white liberals moralizing about Q and seems kind of irrelevant to my pov, as a black leftist....it also doesnt really address what i really care about and what i think is really the most important: the consequences of Q / the threat and harm it causes to marginalized people....
it would be way more interesting to have a poc do material analysis of Q supporters, where their racism or internalized racism (if theyre a Qanon-er or color) is examined alongside the economic conditions of poc in this country but that's jacobin and amber for ya, one note as fuck
amber also is a racist person so IMO it is hard to take this analysis (lets focus on material conditions of Q and stop moralizing about them being WRONG and RACIST) with any type of seriousness by virtue that it's her saying it even though i think what she's saying here is mostly true
also lol at them using a felix chapo quote to underscore their idea, what felix said is right and true but its just funny to see someone quote themselves/their podcast like that
she'd be the first dumbasss to be murdered in the night of the long knives.
I don't actually listen to chapo at all (citations needed is better). What has Amber done to out herself as racist?
She supports Blue Labour.
The previous episode she referred to Republicans as 'we'.
She's reliably on every episode where they have anti-idpol topics.
She's a secondary Red Scare host. In one of them she referred to a black man upset about getting the cops called on him as a karen.
She said not all cops. In fact, she pretty much said 'cops are good, actually"
These might seem like small things but you pick up on it after a while and you can tell there's something off.
EDIT: I don't want to say that she is a racist, though, especially not a whole lot more than other people. She's just really really stubborn about certain facets of her political thought that give way to typical reactionary views. She's either a useful idiot for the right or a disgruntled leftist that's just fucking shit up for other people.
It sounds like she's a lefitst edgelord that doesn't know when to turn it off.
Obviously taste is subjective, but pretty much any time I listen to Chapo I find myself feeling like I'm listening to a bunch of nerds trying to find the most obscure pop culture references they can to make really weak in-jokes about. It's extremely boring when I don't know what they're referencing, and even when I do know what they're talking about, it rarely lands for me. I'd rather listen to a podcast with little humor than one with humor I don't enjoy. On the rare occasion that jokes actually do come up on Citations Needed, I think they typically land better. Idk, maybe it's the relative restraint. I also don't care much for the Chapos' tendency to constantly come up with hot takes that are more edge than substance.
As Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman has remarked, “this is why Q is successful. You can have a guy in there who’s thing is, ‘I’m a black guy against affirmative action,’ or you can have a guy in there who’s fully antisemitic, or you can just have some drunk woman.” It’s a true Rainbow Coalition.
Quoting felix seems so funny
This article is hot garbage. She cherry picks accounts of people there to make Qanon look more diverse than it is and suggests that there's a "conspicuous absence of middle class professionals" so they can push this narrative that Qanon is a group of disaffected people acting out of desperation rather than petite-bourgeois protecting their class interests from the working class demanding more. You can't just wave your hands and say "material analysis" when she's purposefully misconstruing what the motivations of these people are.
e: It's a RowPin post, you knew it would be overly long.
Notably, it also ignores the content of QAnon concerns, which I'll separate in to bullet points for readability:
-
General alienation. This is common to all classes, it's simply to the bourgeoisie's benefit (who actually do also suffer from estrangement).
-
Feelings of powerlessness. The middle-class is a legitimately powerless class, as it cannot organize itself like the proletariat can (which tracks with the 'fuzziness' of the middle-class, being bordered by the proles/big-boug). It can only entreat the proletariat to act on its behalf with policies that artificially prop itself up (sometimes aided by the big-boug to provide a bulwark between itself & the working-class; think of how Democratic politicians divert unions), or beg the big-boug for mercy. Moreover, every group of lunatics feels powerless; the liberal in the OP is correct on this.
-
Former voters complaining "democracy has failed." Most non-voters are proletarian; what does that tell you?
-
Anti-Semitism. For a very rudimentary analysis, early Zionist Theodor Herzl noted that capitalist forms of anti-Semitism are rooted in how the Jewish people, once they left their ghettos, came in to direct competition with the other middle-class strata. (Along with pre-existing forms of pre-capitalist anti-Semitism.) This also tracks with modern historical analysis of fascism's base with the middle-class, organized by the big-boug.
-
That QAnon primarily began as a movement of small business owners railing against Big Tech & finance capital.
-
Loneliness: a general human condition.
-
Its current multi-classness; which is a useless demarcation as all movements involve some mingling of classes, it simply matters who is the driving force of it. Moreover, that sections of the proletariat demand something does not make it communist. If they can be "gotten", then the advancement & victories of other sections of the class will suffice to bring them in and not have to involve proselytizing to them in their own insane communities.
All of this isn't even getting in to whether it's worth analyzing as a phenomenon; I don't know if anybody cared about the "class character" of Satanic Panic Evangelicals, or if QAnon radically differs from that in a way we should care beyond surface cultural analysis. The article also implies that somehow a fundamentally religious movement cannot also be political, despite the anti-abortion movement.
However, the actual article itself has a passage where they basically say "hey, but they're right about Epstein". It's a neat rhetorical trick for them to go from the actual QAnon "Satanic-worshipping Democrats eat tens & thousands of children delivered by Jeffrey Epstein" to "don't we ALL feel a little powerless sometimes? =)". Why they would do this is because presumably the authors are the same type of people who listen to TrueAnon; that is, they essentially agree Democrats are children-devouring pedophiles, they just wish that troublesome support of Trump was out of the way.
(As a first aside, to apply the logic of QAnon "having legitimate concerns" about actually-existing elite pedophile cabals, would warrant an article about how TERFs are merely a response to transgender women raping & beating cisgender women -- the abhorrence of which should be obvious.)
(As a second aside, why an elite pedophile cabal would wait until Epstein is jailed to kill him, and that his suicide is somehow evidence of foil play in a nation where the prison suicide rate is 6x the average & the pedophile suicide rate 180x the average, and this cabal conveniently let his victims live & continue to speak out, is, well -- dontcha see that it's what they want you to think?
It's WMD-logic - the evidence of absence means there must be something deeper going on! To say nothing of the tenousness of looking over names on a flight log as evidence of all listed as being pedophiles, or how clear it is most do not care about sex-trafficking & merely wish to have the oldest, easiest cudgel with which to beat their political opponents.)
Lastly, from the article:
Socialists have some big advantages over an anonymous 4chan account; not only do we have explanations and a political program that addresses QAnon-ers’ legitimate concerns, but we also have reality and the honesty and humility to admit that, while we don’t have all the answers, we aspire to build a system that is democratic and just, that is honest, and that cultivates the better angels of our nature, so that our world, and indeed humanity itself, can become Good.
Justice, Democracy, Truth, Honesty, Better Angels Of Our Nature. Could've been the inauguration speech. I'm reminded of that amusing Marx quote where he had to deal with people like this writing out a programme, and said to Engels: "Fortunately, I had these words placed in passages where they could do no harm."
-
Idk, the QAA guys have been showing a lot of people involved with Q throughout their podcast, and it seems that it definitely is a diverse crowd. As opposed to the Trump crowd, of whom Qanon is just a part for whom you can definitely make the argument are very much petit-bougie
could you also link the actual amber/etc article for context? I'm not seeing it when I lazily scroll thru jacobin.
Can't link b/c mobile, but: for the full text and a few takes on it, search amber and sort by new on this here chacha. About 12h down at this point.
Leftist says thing I like: Historical materialism Leftist says thing I don't like: Wokescold alienating class reductionism
I don't understand who or what is going on in any of these screenshots, and I feel happy
😊
Yes, I was seeing this exact sort of sentiment from libs talking about Q/Trump people. Some people are just innately evil and thus drawn to Q/Trump/being a racist I guess
The libs' plan to deal with that part of the populace is presumably just hoping their collective disdain will cause them to turn to dust like in the Adventures
"Some people are just innately evil" is an overgeneralization, but it does seem like a lot of conservative thinking stems from not caring about others. This is where "fuck you, I got mine" comes from, this is where "there must be groups the law protects but does not bind, and groups the law binds but does not protect" comes from. You see this type of intense selfishness in people from all walks of life, too, so some element of it is independent of one's material conditions.
"I can't teach you how to care about other people", essentially. The defining trait I find is empathy, and a lack thereof. Aka the "now that it has happened to me or someone close to me, I understand why lack of healthcare/parental leave/handicap access is bad".
What's interesting is Qanon takes the look of empathy, "think of the children", and transfers it into the fictional realm. It's virtue signaling of the rankest kind. But, that look of empathy is what draws in the crystal & yoga people.
You see this type of intense selfishness in people from all walks of life, too, so some element of it is independent of one’s material conditions.
Agre with first part, disagre with the italics. A lot of the PMC resistance to Sanders or any kind of re-distributive policy comes from an animal instinct to protect one's position in the hierarchy. A family friend is a successful attorney, has horses, owns a few properties, but was so turned off by the idea of a tax increase potentially threatening a lifestyle change that they outright refused to even entertain the idea of voting for Sanders.
The idea of financial precarity and backsliding financially is a huge barrier to even SocDem type policies, let alone a complete overthrow of capitalism. I don't think you can ever remove material conditions from analysis of Q/PMCs/racists. There is a slice of population that is irredeemably reactionary, but there's no doubt that a chunk of Q are just like my wealthy family friend and motivated almost entirely by the concept of a loss of financial security.
It’s because if the phrase “You can’t rely on anybody but yourself” is a materially true statement in the context of your own life, then in what way does any kind of call to solidarity even make conceptual sense, let alone look like something that’s practicable?
Good point. I think this is a partial explanation, though, not a complete one.
For instance, there's no shortage of conservative failsons who owe much of what they have to their family. Materially, "you can't rely on anybody but yourself" couldn't be farther from the truth in the context of their own lives. So why are they so intensely selfish? I don't think it's solely attributable to what their parents taught them, because you also have woke lib failsons who superficially recognize their own privilege (i.e., the extent to which they rely on benefits they didn't earn) but don't connect that to stuff like "everyone should have a roof over their heads, whatever the cost." There's still that enormous apathy towards vast swaths of the population.
Not gonna lie, I think even in a perfect communist utopia, while people would be generally less aggressively shit to each other cuz they’d have little material incentive to, you’d probably still have plenty of petty, nasty, dumb and insensitive people. I don’t think it’s genetic I think it’s more that some people are just lazy and being an empathetic human takes work.
Nice thing about FALGSC is you could give all these asshats and apartment with a food replicator and a holodeck and they can fuck off while the rest of just go join StarFleet or something.
they can fuck off
Or just be disproportionately represented in the positions of power, as it usually happens.
Yeah, I saw that one. Makes me really happy I don't use twitter.
people doing Marxist science
Jeez they're just a bunch of podcast hosts just writing their opinion on something from a left wing perspective, it's not "marxist science", such a low bar...
Libs who think covid denial is evil are doing capitalist denial
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean lol
Besides your argument kinda borders on "haha imagine thinking fascism is evil when actually it's just a result of the material foundation that underpins society!".
Akchually everyone is cool and good because they're a product of their environment.
Okay, so where does fascism come from then? It's not like a bunch of people just sponaneously got together one day and decided to do a fascism. As Marxists, we have to look beyond individual actors and address the conditions that led to fascism taking root in the first place. A material analysis doesn't justify their behavior or keep us from punishing them, but it does help us find ways to stop the disease of fascism from spreading. Wouldn't you agree that this should be our first priority?
The whole point of what I said is that it IS where fascism generally comes from but it's not a good argument.
A lot of people are doing super lazy analyses that basically boil down to "well these people are just angry at the 2008 crash or something" which overlook many aspects of ideology, and they're not scientific because they have to cherry pick examples to make it fit their narrative. But when you look at qanon, it's overwhelmingly white boomers who are usually retired and not struggling financially. There's many reasons why these theories gain so much steam in a declining America but you're not gonna find them by just going "oh, it must be because they're mad at the recession and struggling" or whatever because it's just not where these people are coming from usually. It's not material analysis, it's just a shortcut to "explain" more complex issues.
It's also kinda silly how people confuse different forms of fascism and think they must come from the same place just because they are broadly "fascism". The rise of fascism in Italy is much different from the fascist regimes in Latin America, and these are much different to qanon, they're not the same phenomenon.
I haven't read the article yet; but i've noticed that whenever i see these arguments about the origin of fascism they tend to leave out the elephant in the room: That America was from it's conception a system that thrived in oppression and that little fact hasn't changed throughout its history. With this in mind it's natural to think that a fundamentally fascist system will create fascist subjects.
In this case both the argument that Q-anon are fundamentally evil and the argument that they are poor victims of material circumstances feel like they are trying to ignore this fact on purpose. It's easy to punish or try to rehabilitate the individual, but it' is a far larger task to recognize the oppression inherent in the system and fundamentally change it.
All people are shaped to one or the other degree by material circumstances, it doesn't make someone more or less evil. But most qanon people are bigoted and reactionary as fuck. Most were already kinda like that, some of them had their brains broken by the internet. The question is why so many of them are so susceptible to that sort of thing, and yes, it does have to do with the fact that the US used to be segregated, it has to do with the prevalent ideology in the US and the values that are promoted, it has to do with religious fundamentalism, it has to do with growing mistrust of institutions as the empire is declining, all sorts of things. All these things have a material basis and origin but it's not so simple as "oh it's poor people blaming their problems on something else/they're mad at the recession" or whatever. It's just simplistic economism and it shouldn't pass as "marxist science" because it isn't very helpful or convincing.
Like, the article was talking about how you will find people with all sorts of backgrounds in qanon. Yeah, if you look hard enough, you will find SOME people from every kind of background. But just look at any random shot of the people storming the capitol, it's a mayo fest.
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. This is basically the point I was struggling to put into words.
If you get a puppy and you kick it, starve it, lock it up in a tiny cage or leave it out all winter in the cold, there's not a chance it's going to develop into a well-adjusted dog. Nobody blames the dog for biting someone, though, even if we're forced to put the dog down for the sake of public safety. We blame the owners for the conditions it was raised in.
Nearly everyone understands this, so how can any one of us deny that we could have become the worst people we know given the wrong conditions? The level of nearly religious mental gymnastics you'd have to go through to argue in order to avoid confronting this fact is wild to me.
The article's not that great, but the pants-shitting at the acknowledgement that there are a lot of pedophiles in the American elite and that QAnon could be seen as a response to the actual corruption of the elite is something to behold. NOOO NOT MY PRECIOUS HECKIN' MILLIONAIRES. HOW DARE YOU! YOU CAN'T JUST ACKNOWLEDGE EPSTEIN'S FLIGHT LOGS.
