Editor's note: with Facebook continuing to threaten anarchist content, so I've been forced to move my weekly pinko film session posts here, to Media Madness.
This post originally appeared on my Facebook Page on December 6th, 2020.
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Quite frankly, I'm in the middle of a blog post that won't let me finish and I've had a maddeningly unproductive week that also didn't leave a whole lot of time for watching Youtube. So today I'm going to go back to Cody Johnson and Some More News to share one of the few videos I did watch this week, entitled "Jim Crow, Neoliberalism, And The Current Fascist Backlash Against Civil Rights Movements."
Now keeping in mind that this video was published on October 24th of this year, and thus some of the commentary on the (then) upcoming US election is slightly out of date, it's also fairly clear that Johnson recorded the material assuming that Joe Biden would in fact win the election - which due to the screwed up way the American electoral college works, and Trump's temper tantrum "chicken coup," was a little touch and go for way longer than it should have been, but ultimately did turn out to be the correct assumption.
With that noted however, the reason I'm sharing this video here today is because I'm tired, and after taking a tremendous amount of abuse for calling a fascist Trump administration, well, fascist, both over the past four years and astoundingly, even quite recently on social media from black helicopter leftists who read a lot of Ben Beanwald - someone sent me this video to remind me that I wasn't the only one who saw Trump and Trumpism for what they really were; I was just perhaps among the first.
In this thirty-nine minute feature, Cody Johnston manages to humorously examine vast swathes of American history to expose the triangle between capitalist exploitation, codified white supremacy, and the fascist backlash against any social progress by the marginalized, particularly African Americans. Johnston draws clear parallels between Jim Crow era America, and the modern fascist movement that solidified in American politics as Trumpism, while simultaneously demonstrating the role neoliberalism has had in creating the conditions necessary to produce fascism in the first place. It's funny, it's informative, and most importantly Cody is correct; which is a consistent feature of Some More News videos about American fascism.
Although it's not the entire focus of this episode, and Johnson's examination of the role of Jim Crow laws in particular (instead of general white supremacy and the doctrine of white nationalism, as I had) are crucial to the production, I can also say that Cody managed to fit about 90% of the things I wrote about the Pork Reich and all-American fascism into roughly half of a 40 minute video. Just about the only thing I wished he'd spent more time on here is the role of tech bro fascist billionaires in backstopping and funding this whole sh*tshow.
In the end, realizing that folks like Johnston were also seeing what I'd seen, was just the antidote I needed to get over being gaslit by crypto-reactionaries, who aren't even anti-capitalists, claiming to be "the real left" online - including many popular influencers like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and others.
I'll place some related links in the comments, including another short video by the Gravel Institute on why the Electoral College is bullsh*t, for added value. But yeah, I told you so; and if you're smart, you'll listen when I tell you that beating swine emperor Trump doesn't mean we've beaten fascism - these guys aren't going anywhere.
Jim Crow, Neoliberalism, And The Current Fascist Backlash Against Civil Rights Movements
Additional Resources
- nina illingworth
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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
Lol; so when I original move this over from Facebook I forgot to include the promised link in the comments here on Media Madness. So here is Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara explaining "How the Electoral College Breaks Democracy" on behalf of the Gravel Institute:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/-lk1kVd0eW0