Nina-Bytes: Framea Thrust

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

In the fall of 2022, the ongoing evolution of American fascism forced me out of my comfort zone as an antifascist analyst in a starkly personal way. Although transphobia and anti-gay persecution have always churned in the undercurrents of modern fascism, the year-long lead up to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections exposed a well-funded, GOP-supported plan to make an anti-trans pogrom a foundational organizing principle for "respectable" fascists in American politics. Predictably, this escalation of trans and LGBTQ persecution in everyday politics worked to unite violent street fascists with Republican fascists in politics, leading to an immediate outbreak of violence and murderous acts of stochastic terrorism.

Unfortunately, even sympathetic media outlets chose to report this phenomenon almost exclusively as it pertained to the (then) upcoming American election. When firing up the trans pogrom failed to produce a Republican "red wave" victory, an already transphobic American establishment quickly lost interest in defending, or even discussing trans rights. As I and many others warned however, an election in which the fascist party seized control of Congress, and numerous transphobes with real political power won re-election, was no sign whatsoever that this latest era of pogrom as politics was now over. Today, just as in Nazi Germany, persecuting trans people, particularly under the guise of protecting children, remains an important skeleton key in the fascist strategy to unlock political power.

How important is transphobia to the American fascist project? Important enough that after attempting to pass a record number of anti-trans bills in 2022, more legislative attacks on trans rights are at the top of the agenda for Republican-controlled state houses here in 2023. For more details, let's turn to this January 7th, 2023 report by Hannah Schoenbaum for AP News:

 

States target transgender health care in first bills of 2023

I chose this article because unlike the overwhelming majority of mainstream news reports about the anti-trans hate campaign motivating American fascists, this piece does an acceptable job of summarizing the facts within the proper context of this coordinated incitement, albeit barely. Even without mentioning the existence of a larger fascist pogrom however, those facts are themselves quite revealing. As Schoenbaum reports, just days into the 2023 legislative season, eleven GOP-controlled states have introduced or pre-filed bills that would severely restrict trans peoples' access to gender affirming healthcare. This is in addition to continued attacks on trans existence in public life that were also the focus of GOP legislatures in 2021, and 2022.

Crucially for our discussion here however, the majority of these bills are clearly designed to attack and intimidate vital medical, community, and even family support for young trans people, as noted by our author:

"Gender-affirming health care providers and parents of trans youths are the primary targets of these bills, many of which seek to criminalize helping a trans child obtain what doctors and psychologists widely consider “medically necessary care.”

As informed observers have noted, there is of course a method to this malfeasance. Criminalizing the support networks trans people rely on, particularly young trans people, is a way of legally enshrining the othering and de-personing of trans identities. This enforced isolation and dehumanization is a necessary precursor step recognized by scholars as part of the process of genocide, or in this case, a culture-war infused pogrom against trans people. Further demonstrating the point that this is about driving trans people out of public existence and not "protecting the children" is the fact that many of these bills actively restrict adult medical choices regarding transition:

"Legislation pre-filed this week in Republican-controlled Oklahoma, which passed restrictions last year on trans participation in sports and school bathroom usage, seeks to ban gender-affirming care for patients under age 26 and block it from being covered under the state’s Medicaid program.

“This is the worst anti-trans bill I have ever seen filed in any state,” [Erin] Reed said, noting that adult medical transition bans were a “hypothetical escalation” until recently.

Another Oklahoma proposal would prohibit distribution of public funds to organizations that provide gender-affirming procedures to patients younger than 21.

“It’s irresponsible for anybody in health care to provide or recommend life-altering surgeries that may later be regretted,” said the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Jim Olsen. “Performing irreversible procedures on young people can do irreparable harm to them mentally and physically later in life.”

A similar bill pre-filed in South Carolina, where Republicans control both chambers, also requires that trans adults older than 21 obtain referrals from their doctor and a licensed psychiatrist before they can begin treatment."

Friends, what we're looking at here is a closed loop of fact-free, fascist fuckery. Under the guise of preventing nonexistent child abuse, Republican lawmakers are seeking to criminalize medically-necessary gender affirming care for trans people well into adulthood, thereby legally enshrining fascist propaganda designed to marginalize, and incite violence towards trans people and the larger LGBTQ+ community. If the law says trans care is child abuse and legally inaccessible, it doesn't matter at all what individual Americans feel or believe. Which brings us back to the horrifying context of a larger fascist campaign to isolate, terrorize, and de-person the entire queer community; from the article:

"Cathy Renna, spokesperson for the National LGBTQ Task Force, said she views these bills as the product of “a permissible climate of hate,” driven by disinformation and fearmongering, that made anti-LGBTQ rhetoric more palatable in the years since former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

“We have politicians, celebrities and just folks in our communities who were given permission under Trump to kind of pick that scab and do and say harmful things without consequence,” Renna said. “It unleashed a nightmare Pandora’s box of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism.”

“When you look at the last few years,” she said of the LGBTQ community, “we feel like we’re under attack in a way that we have not for decades.”

These anti-trans bills are not the first attacks on queer existence in American life, nor will they be the last. The literal erasure of LGBTQ+ identities in our society is not an election ploy designed to win votes; it is a tool which organized fascists dominating American political and cultural life are using to install an objectively fascist order from above. The eradication of queer identities is not only a foundational goal in fascist ideology, but it infamously has a proven track record of empowering fascist domination of nominally liberal democratic societies already. Legalized assaults on trans rights are quite literally the tip of the fascist spear; and latent transphobia in American society is the breach politically empowered nazis are exploiting to seize power.

The simple truth is that you can't beat fascism at the ballot box, you can only slow it down; and anyone who told you otherwise, was probably just looking for your vote. If we're prepared to let fascists criminalize trans people, and drive queer folks out of public life today, there is no limit to who American nazis will target and de-person tomorrow. As a society, we no longer have the luxury of considering trans and queer rights a niche political issue; this isn't about empathy, it's about stopping billionaire-backed fascists from legislating anyone who disagrees with them out of public existence. We will all stand together here, or we will surely die apart; once again I advise you to choose wisely.

 

 

• nina illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Mastodon, Instagram, and Facebook.

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Want more? Subscribe to NIDC to see all my writing today!

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Call and Response

 

Editor’s note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today. 

 

I'm not going to lie to you folks; this isn't an article I've ever wanted to write. As someone who has written repeatedly about the consequences of normalizing eliminationist ideology, and the intimate connections between fascism and stochastic terrorism, the news that a mass shooter targeted an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs, killing five innocent people and wounding many more, did not surprise me; but it did hurt me, and that pain has not subsided yet. When I sat down to write about this horrifying stochastic terror attack yesterday morning, I found myself incapable of putting the event into a meaningful context. Ultimately I decided to focus on the mechanics of messaging and reaction, because that's all I could bear.

In today's edition of Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to stay inside that familiar wheelhouse; both for my own mental health, and because identifying the "call and response" nature of fascist politics, eliminationist propaganda, and stochastic terrorism is a vitally important skill during this political moment in the Pig Empire. The simple truth is, this is unlikely to be the last bloodbath. To help us cross that awful bridge, I'd like to share a couple of articles this time; starting with this November 21st, 2022 piece written by Melissa Gira Grant, and published on The New Republic:

The Massacre at Club Q Should Not Have Felt Inevitable

This was certainly not an easy one to read; but I will try to summarize. Grant opens this emotionally devastating article by correctly identifying the November 20th, 2022 attack as a "massacre" and placing it in the context of the larger LBGTQ community in Colorado Springs. As the author notes, this horrifying hate crime comes on the heels of the widespread mainstreaming of transphobic, eliminationist rhetoric from the reactionary American right; both locally, and in national Amerikkkan politics. To the surprise of precisely no one familiar with the adventures of noted Waffen-Karen Lauren Boebert, Colorado Republicans and prominent hatemongers like Chaya Raichik don't appear to have any regrets.

Crucially however, Grant also takes the time to point out that this deadly act of political violence against LGBTQ people occurred in a climate of broadly-supported transphobic rhetoric in American life; and certainly not just from right wing extremists and quasi-anonymous harassment accounts on social media:

"The steadily spreading political violence against queer and trans communities was not coming from the fringes. It was stoked by prominent Republicans pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation, amplified by media outlets including Fox, and became fodder for campaign ads. Neither was this all coming from the explicitly right, with some Democrats regarding anti-LGBTQ propaganda largely as a Republican-manufactured distraction or divisive talking point undeserving of a response. As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio noted recently, “resistance to anti-trans narratives among progressives and liberals is limited and often altogether absent.” The message sent by this reluctance to engage and defend trans people in particular, as Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote for the Washington Post, has been that trans people should “stand aside,” or else be “blamed for the ascension of conservatism.”

Finally, Grant concludes by addressing the horrifying elephant in the room that I spoke about here on NIDC last week; the fact that liberals seem to think the fight against violent, transphobic fascism in politics is over, even as some of the most anti-LGBTQ fascist politicians in the GOP easily dominated their own elections. In the face of already escalating anti-LGBTQ violence, and the political right's unfolding plans to make depersoning LBGTQ folks a fundamental plank in the ongoing fascist project, it would be utterly naïve to assume a less-bad-than-expected showing for Democrats at the ballot box, or even the political fallout from a mass shooting, will stop the ongoing pogrom on trans and queer people.

Of course, and speaking of naivety, all of this does vaguely presume the mainstream political right in America isn't just trying to suppress, terrorize, and murder LGBTQ people in America. To briefly talk about why that's a bad presumption, let's turn to this November 21st, 2022 article written by Anya Zoledziowski for Vice News:

"This Is the Point": Colorado Shooting Follows Rise in Anti-LGBTQ Vitriol

Primarily built around commentary by activist and researcher Erin Reed, this piece more or less puts anti-LGBTQ terrorism in the context of the right's war on trans and queer identities and states the obvious; the violence is unquestionably the point. Eliminationist rhetoric and fascist conspiracy theories targeting the LGBTQ community have become a persistent feature of reactionary politics in America; with completely predictable consequences:

"For several years, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, including incendiary anti-trans and anti-drag disinformation, has been making the rounds on social media and in state legislatures, pushed by far-right personalities, including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, and LibsofTikTok founder Chaya Raichik. 

In 2022 alone, more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the U.S., according to Human Rights Campaign. Republicans like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio collectively spent at least $50 million on anti-trans ads during the midterms. Meanwhile, far-right pundits and politicians falsely accused transgender folks of being “groomers” and referred to drag queens as “pedophiles.” 

Look folks, whether a seemingly indifferent liberal media wants to acknowledge it or not, we are talking about cause and effect here. Pretending this was an unpredictable tragedy, or the inevitable result of human bigotry is myopic to the point of open collaboration with fascists. These monsters know what they're doing, and they're doing it on purpose This is confirmed by the open relationships between virulent anti-trans bigots on the fringes of the media, fascist billionaires who support the cause, and Republican politicians in government; relationships that are getting more difficult to ignore all the time. 

Speaking frankly, I am simply tired; and I know I'm not alone. I'm tired of reading eulogies for innocent marginalized people who've been murdered by fascists. I'm tired of being told I need to vote for Democrats to stop fascism while the fascist murders continue and rich liberals argue about whether or not something can even be transphobic if it's printed in the New York Times. Most of all however, I'm tired of playing footsie with collaborators who give fascist politicians every benefit of the doubt, while those same people organize against my very existence in the open. I can only speak for myself as one single trans woman, but I'd ask that you please save your prayers liberals; I can already tell we're not in your thoughts.

I don't have a message for the fascists riding transphobia to power over the dead bodies of my community; at least not one I could print here. 

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Things Left Unsaid

 

Editor’s note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today. 

 

Well folks; with a few notable exceptions in boutique liberal, or left-wing media, I think it's safe to say that these past U.S. Midterm elections haven't produced a resplendent bounty of quality political analysis in Pig Empire media. I've tried my best to fill in the blanks by talking about what these results mean for antifascists, and trans people facing down a pogrom in progress, but in the face of precisely a billion corporate talking heads declaring this a resounding victory for "liberal democracy" it really does feel like pissing into a hurricane. Like many of you, I'm just about ready to move on from this moment because the fascists sure don't seem to have given up the ghost.

Unfortunately however, it remains impossible to say we've fully explored what the US midterm elections mean, until we talk a little bit about what they don't mean. How can we figure that out? By exploring the existential threats to our society that were not campaign issues at all. While the media warned folks that democracy, abortion, and trans rights were on the ballot with various degrees of proficiency, the same certainly can't be said for climate crisis or the still ongoing covid pandemic. In today's edition of Nina-Bytes then, we're going to look at two short articles about the surprising issues this campaign wasn't about; one for each crisis.

Let's start with climate crisis, and this pre-election November 2022 article by Ricardo Gomez over at Jacobin:

No One Is Talking About Climate in the Midterms

Well it's hardly Shakespeare, but you have to give Gomez some credit for getting right to the point; which is included in the subtitle of this article. In the lead up to the election, less than one percent of all televised campaign ads for House and Senate midterm races focused on climate crisis; with little difference between Democrat and Republican candidates. This is despite overwhelming evidence that America is already in the throes of the climate apocalypse, and numerous public polls demonstrating voters actually do care about not being boiled to death on an uninhabitable planet for corporate profits.

To put it bluntly, this is terrible politics; especially for Democrats. As our author notes however, just because politicians are choosing to ignore climate crisis, doesn't mean everyone is choosing to ignore the situation. Oil companies for example, remain quite invested in the issue:

"Although 80 percent of voters support a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies — a way of recuperating money by taxing surging profits — candidates are not running on holding fossil fuel companies accountable. Instead they are ceding the narrative on environment and climate change to oil and gas companies that have gone on the offensive — spending enormously and pouring millions into campaigns up and down the ballot to protect their profits."

Please keep in mind that none of this was a secret; when both activists and data nerds are telling Democrats to run on climate crisis mitigation policies, the decision to cede the field to oil companies is an active one. Keep a pin in that thought, we'll come back to it in the conclusion.

In the meantime, let's move on to our next article; this November 9th, 2022 piece written by Abdul El-Sayed for The New Republic:

It’s Weird that Neither Party Talked about Health Care in a Pandemic

This is another short and to the point read, albeit from a far more mainstream liberal perspective. After noting that the covid pandemic isn't over, and healthcare policy discussions dominated both the 2018, and 2020 US election seasons, El-Sayed asks how it's possible neither party wanted to talk about political solutions to America’s profound health crisis in 2022? He then breaks down a few possible answers; inflation discourse, watered-down health care reforms that Democrats can't pitch as a policy success, and general apathy from a Republican Party that would rather talk about pedophiles and white nationalist conspiracy theories.

While this is all pretty standard political class chatter, El-Sayed's article is relevant primarily because he keeps bringing it back to the larger, inexplicably unspoked issue of a raging pandemic that has killed millions already; and who benefits from that silence:

"So, two and a half years into the pandemic, that leaves us in a paradox. No single issue has so fundamentally altered American life as has the pandemic—an issue that is squarely about America’s approach to public health and health care. And despite a vigorous public debate about how to address America’s clearly failing public health and health care systems going into the pandemic, the conversation about how to fix them has all been snuffed out as we emerge from it … even though we have done next to nothing about them. The health care industry is breathing a sigh of relief after vigorously fighting any effort for reform in the last two elections."

Let's be real here for a moment, alright? You don't need me to tell you why the GOP didn't want to talk about climate crisis, or healthcare policy during the midterm elections. We're talking about a hyper-capitalist, reactionary political party wholly in the pocket of the medical insurance lobby and Big Oil. Given that the Republican response to both global warming and covid-19 pretty much consisted of pretending they aren't real and threatening anyone who disagrees, their midterm strategy wasn't much of a surprise.

Explaining the Democratic Party's failure to run on broadly popular issues of vital importance to bolster their electoral chances in an election against literal fascists however, requires more examination; especially in light of their perceived weakness on economic policy issues. Promoting policy-based solutions to problems like burgeoning medical debt, pandemic relief policies, safer energy, and green sector jobs would have been a win-win situation for Democrats; forcing the GOP to talk about something they don't want to talk about, while reeling in voters who support those policies. This isn't a question of Monday morning quarterbacking either; the Democratic Party lost control off the House this election, and even a narrow defeat will now have disastrous consequences in American life.

So what's the deal then? Well, corporate media can blow sunshine up my ass all they like, but the obvious conclusion here is that as a whole, the Democratic Party is also a hyper-capitalist, reactionary political party wholly in the pocket of the medical insurance lobby and Big Oil. If you've read any of my analysis about the Biden administration's objectively genocidal climate policies so far, you know that these folks honestly do not give a damn about anyone but rich donors, and corporate capital. Once you've decided that capitalist support outweighs the lives of billions, including millions of your own people, you've also pretty much decided that a little thing like "potentially losing power to fascists" doesn't rate either.

And in the long run, that's why you can't entrust anything as important as "stopping a fascist takeover of society" to the Democratic Party, and rich liberals in general. At the end of the day, capitalist realism demands the subordination of all other concerns to capital; including civil rights, and human lives. When push comes to shove, acolytes of the free market will always be willing to sacrifice everything, especially the poors, for a sufficiently appealing price. There is no such thing as an effective antifascism, that isn't also anticapitalist, and as such any antifascist alliance with liberal capitalists cannot help but be temporary in nature.

Let the liberal establishment bask in the warm afterglow of a less-bad-than-expected loss to clown shoes fascists, but don't join them. We've got a class war to fight; and literally everything depends on a victory for the common people, against genocidal capitalists. With any luck, they won't even see us coming.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

 

 

Nina-Bytes: The Impending Rule of Unreality

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Yesterday on my Facebook Journal, I published several discussions that touched on what it means when fascist lies, fantasies, and conspiracy theories acquire the force of law, and with it real power to distort our supposedly democratic society. Today then, let's look at a couple of articles that demonstrate what fascists weaponizing "unreality" in the political process actually looks like, and why that's a very ominous sign in a Pig Empire actively falling under overt fascist rule. 

First up, let's take a look at this October 24th, 2022 article about the Pennsylvania GOP's most recent attempt to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, written by Akela Lacy over on the Intercept:

Larry Krasner Impeachment Committee Relies on Widely Panned Journal Study

Frankly I don't want to wade too deeply into the left wing side of the debate about the so-called "progressive prosecutor" movement here; you can be certain that American fascists aren't tossing their cookies about guys like Krasner because of his insufficient commitment to prison abolition. As the article notes, what we're really talking about here is an establishment Republican (and conservative Democrat) attempt to remove a marginally progressive official they loathe, explicitly against the will of his constituents; who surprise, surprise, aren't affluent white fascists:

"Monday’s report is the latest step in a series of yearslong efforts to curb Krasner’s power or remove him from office entirely — despite the fact that the progressive DA was overwhelmingly reelected a year ago. Krasner’s attempts to implement criminal justice reforms and address the underlying causes of mass incarceration have made him a target of lawmakers from both parties since his election in 2017. As removal efforts built steam among Republicans, state House Democrats joined the opposing party last month in voting to hold Krasner in contempt for his refusal to comply with a subpoena in the impeachment efforts."

While this all looks very official, the twist here is that almost every accusation against Krasner is pure nonsense. The arguments being used to impeach Krasner are based on fascist election propaganda about crime, conspiracy theories, and a politically-motivated study that's been widely debunked by data scientists. It's not just about Larry Krasner either, research shows that there is literally no evidence linking progressive prosecutors to rising crime rates in cities anywhere; which exposes a lie that underpins the entire unhinged fascist attack on any prosecutor that so much as utters the words "bail reform." Bonus points if you guessed that this "moral panic about crime as politics" operation is secretly about race; because it is.

In other words reactionary politicians are transforming lies, into the force of law, for the purposes of actively violating the democratic will of Philadelphia voters; which is precisely what legally and politically-empowered fascism in progress looks like. Why is that bad news even if you don't live in Philly? Because as this October 25th, 2002 article by Kaleigh Rogers at FiveThirtyEight points out, fascist fantasy as the law of the land seems poised to strike well beyond the mean streets of Pennsylvania: 

Most Candidates Who Think 2020 Was Rigged Are Probably Going To Win In November

If you've read my writing, you know I loathe "horse race" political coverage as much as anyone reading this does, so let's not waste too much time on this piece of fluff. The important point we need to take from this article is that over a hundred Republicans pushing the objectively fascist "Big Lie" about the 2020 election, are about to take real political power in Amerikkkan society;

"Luna is one of well over a hundred of candidates running this fall who have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election and have a strong chance of winning their race. Of the 185 Republican candidates running for House, Senate and governor’s seats who have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, 124 — or 67 percent — are in races our forecast currently pins at “Solid R,” meaning they have a 95-in-100 or better chance of winning. Overall, a bigger share of election deniers are running in Solid R races than Republican candidates in general: Of the 496 Republican candidates running for House, Senate and governor, 225 — or 45 percent — are in Solid R races."

As you can see, this problem isn't really about Democrats versus Republicans, but rather a Republican Party happily nominating fascist conspiracy theorists in safe seats, over pretty much every other type of reactionary on offer. This is not only evidence that the party as a whole has embraced fascism, but also a deadly perilous moment in American history. Fascists stand on the verge of legally declaring their reactionary propaganda and conspiracy theories the understood law of the land, and no amount of "respecting the standards and norms" is going to protect us from that kind of nightmare.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Rigging America In The Open

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘disturbing’ quest to radically rewrite the US constitution

Recently on Twitter, I devoted a few pithy words to mentioning that fascists in American society were "tapping every possible route to power that they can and hoping one hits." I know this because I've been writing about these efforts to override what passes for our "liberal democracy" for several years now; whether they occur by legalist means, or through highly illegal acts of terror and politicized violence. Given this, I think that it's probably saying something when I note that this October 19th, 2022 article by Ed Pilkington over in The Guardian made my blood run cold. 

While I strongly advise you to read the entire article, "the too long didn't read" here is that noted fascist strategist Steve Bannon is using his trash fire podcast to push a highly-plausible right wing conspiracy to re-write the constitution pretty much any way they please. The tactic involves using a thirty-four state conservative majority, to hold a Constitutional Convention. Given that this is a fascist movement that is currently denying the results of the last Presidential election, attempting to rig elections going forward, and organizing a pogrom against trans people, all out in the open, that prospect should be quite concerning to you. As the piece itself makes clear:

 

"Mark Meckler, a founder of the Tea Party who now leads one of the largest groups advocating for the tactic, the Convention of States Action (Cosa), spelled out some of the prime objectives on Bannon’s show. “We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’,” he said.

Meckler went on to divulge the anti-democratic nature of the state convention movement when he said a main aim was to prevent progressive policies being advanced through presidential elections. “The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains. So you do the structural fix.”

The “structural fix” involves Republican state legislatures pushing conservative amendments to America’s foundational document. By cementing the policies into the US constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge."

 

So how plausible is this really? Well this is where things get terrifying because we're talking about an extremely well-funded project with support across the broader mainstream right; this isn't one of Bannon's fascist fantasies, this project is on the wish list of powerful lobby groups and billionaires like the Mercer family and groups run by Leonard Leo. Furthermore, and as this article makes clear - these guys are making progress:

 

"Under Article V, 34 states would have to call for a constitutional convention to reach the two-thirds requirement. Cosa has so far succeeded in getting 19 states to sign up, with a further six in active consideration.

ALEC, which sets a narrower remit for a convention focused on its balanced budget amendment, has gone further with 28 states on board.

Either way, there is a shortfall. To address it, constitutional convention leaders have invented increasingly exotic mathematical formulas for attaining the magic number, 34."

 

Please keep in mind that due to aggressive gerrymandering and a concerted effort to control state legislatures by the Republican Party, the GOP currently controls thirty-one states and only needs thirty-four; even if not all of those state legislatures are currently on board with this plan, there's nothing to suggest that will remain true as the GOP continues to slide further into open fascist politics. Once that happens, all bets are off; and that's even setting aside the fact that a GOP Congress could simply decide to fudge the numbers.

All of which leaves only one obvious question; is it still "ridiculous" to call political movement actively working to eliminate democratic rights and permanently lock the destruction of all life on Earth into the constitution on behalf of fossil fuel capital, fascist? Asking for about seven billion friends who aren't part of the capitalist ruling class.

 

 

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Stochastically Yours in Weimar America

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Rep. Paul Gosar shared an anime video of himself killing AOC. This was her response.

As a socialist writer trapped in a capitalist dystopia, I spend a lot of my time pointing out the links between the study of political economy, and events occurring in the news of the day; you might call it an educational commitment to exploring both theory, and praxis. Earlier today on Instagram, I published a Pinko Postcard discussion that briefly touched on the organized efforts of American fascists to mainstream reactionary ideology and political practices. Here on Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to explore what this normalization and weaponization of fascist political techniques looks like in real time; with an assist from everyone's favorite coup plotter and white supremacist in Congress, Paul Gosar. 

Given the uniformly atrocious coverage this event has garnered in the mainstream media, I decided to use this November 9th, 2021 post by Rachel Treisman on npr.org as our primary anchor because while it still misses the mark, she at least provides some context on the reactionary nature of Gosar's actions. In case you missed it, Congressman Gosar published an explicitly fascist anti-immigration video that featured modified anime footage of himself murdering Congresswoman, and noted target of reactionary ire, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While much of the media has inexplicably chosen to cover this event as inter-personal drama between rival factions on the Hill, students of fascist propaganda techniques will recognize immediately that this is no laughing matter. Let's fill in that context, shall we?

The first thing you need to remember is that Paul Gosar is absolutely a fascist; you can call him a Trumpist if you prefer, but because the terms are largely synonymous, it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference. He's spoken at white nationalist conferences, raised money with fascist influencers, and oh yeah, there's that small matter of Gosar's intimate involvement with the January 6th fascist coup plot to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election; which reportedly included the Congressman promising blanket pardons to participants in the event of a successful coup. Even this guy's own family says he's a white supremacist.

The second bit of largely-missing context here, comes from the nature of the video Gosar shared, and how it has been edited. The video explicitly employs fascist political propaganda about an "attack of immigrants" and shows multiple elected GOP nazis committing acts of outrageous violence in response, through edited anime clips. Furthermore, given the fact that the anime chosen, Attack on Titan, has strong fascist overtones and has already been coopted by reactionary extremists in the Pig Empire, I don't think the stench of neonazism involved here is any sort of accident. In other words, even if Gosar's staff hadn't depicted him slashing AOC's throat, this would still be a fascist video tweeted out by a sitting Congressman in America. 

Finally of course, there's the context of the violence depicted in its own right, and Gosar's predictable keyboard reactionary response to being criticized for it. While crackers and collaborators absurdly pretend that folks are accusing Gosar of literally threatening to cut Ocasio-Cortez's head off with a sword, the specter of stochastic terrorism and the usefulness (for the fascists) of injecting the threat of violence into standard political discourse, is largely ignored. Even the bizarre insistence from the Congressman's office that folks "relax" because it's just "a cartoon" echoes the standard playbook of f*ckboi "ironic" nazis online. 

Frankly the truly alarming thing about this story is that we as a society, and mainstream American media as an institution, already know all of this because we've collectively seen it all before. Sara Palin taught the media that right wing politicians are fine with stochastic terrorism as long as their rhetoric fires up the base. Andrew Anglin's leaked style guide for the Daily Stormer makes it clear that nazis are actively trying to mainstream fascist ideology every waking moment of the day. We know ironic nazism, is really just nazism. And as of last week, we can no longer deny the fact that these folks are fascists, actively plotting an authoritarian takeover of America, and the larger Pig empire.

It would be nice if an American media establishment that claims to be defending democracy from the fascist creep, deemed all that worth mentioning in between blow by blow coverage of the back and forth between Gosar and the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it's just not in their nature.

 

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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