Are we able to face the reality of American fascism?

In front of us, something is unfolding that we don’t want to properly see, but that we subconsciously recognize. The warning signs for a fascist crackdown in America have been here for years, if not decades. It’s now that they’ve become too big for much of this country’s complacent left to ignore. We’re accelerating towards a level of direness which people living under fascism so often can’t perceive at first, until the reality of their situation has finished creeping up onto them. By George Jackson’s definition of fascism, which is when capitalism forcibly maintains itself through reform, we’ve already been living under fascism for generations. With the Supreme Court’s decision and its ramifications, this is becoming more visible to more people.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, snipers were set up on top of the Supreme Court building. The premises were surrounded by a tall fence and armed guards, like our government was admitting that it had just done something against the wishes of the popular majority. Police have been reacting to the protests with another wave of state-sanctioned violence, beating peaceful demonstrators and clearly identified journalists. Reactionary vigilantes have been carrying out these kinds of atrocities in tandem with law enforcement. As was the case during the state’s counterinsurgency against the George Floyd protests, the state is manufacturing narratives to justify waging war against dissent, with officials issuing warnings about “extremism” from abortion supporters. Far-right lawmakers are establishing systems for citizens to inform on each other, providing financial rewards to those who report women who try to get abortions. Immediately following the Roe ruling, the Court decided to let Christian teachers pressure students into praying. This supports the idea that LGBT rights, free expression rights for non-Christians, and even racial equality laws will come under attack due to the precedent that this ruling has set.

This is the cycle that the United States is going through amid its decline. As Washington loses its global primacy, and the foundations of capitalism weaken, the ruling class is reacting by allying itself with our society’s most extreme reactionary forces. Rights get stripped away as these extremists gain power, and use our deteriorating conditions to rally support for their cause from their reactionary base. When the people fight back, the state meets them with state and vigilante violence, the perpetrators growing more bold and brutal every time. The definition of a “terrorist” or “extremist” keeps expanding when it comes to those fighting for human rights, while growing more lenient when it comes to fascist terrorists like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Since the 2008 economic crash, the country has been in one long depression, currently worsening with the pandemic and the Russia sanctions blowback. The ruling class has long known that our institutions are breaking down in their ability to provide for the basic needs of the people, and that the U.S. is descending into failed state status. These measures are the reaction from religious fanatics who see our crisis as a mandate for waging war against perceived sinners, and who are increasingly enabled by our political system due to the repressive role they fulfill.

Trump, the president who appointed the justices which made this decision possible, did the bidding of the Christian fascists out of opportunism. The obsessive efforts by fundamentalists to gain control over the country’s institutions, where they’d systematically campaigned to reshape the courts, the schools, and the legislatures in their image, had already made the Republican Party synonymous with their agenda. They were the ones headed to take full control over the decaying imperialist state, so Trump surrounded himself with them and carried them to their current victory. All they had to do was climb the structure of a declining bourgeois “democracy” that’s gotten more vulnerable to anti-democratic takeovers the more its supporting economic structures have weakened. It’s not like the Democrats would stop them, and it’s not like our hypocritical settler-colonial constitution would either. They’ve been able to rip through our political system with ease.

Hitler and Mussolini came to power in the equivalent ways. Not by overthrowing their governments, but simply by making themselves visible to the bourgeoisie as a fighting wing for capital, capable of repressing the communists and preventing revolution. In Italy, there was a conspiracy between the monarchy, the army, the landowners, the industrialists, and the Catholic Church to let the fascists seize power, so scared these forces were of the communists winning. Using fascism’s historic social base in the petty bourgeoisie, Mussolini fulfilled this mandate by the propertied classes and the traditional authorities to defend the existing social order by any means necessary. Hitler did so as well upon being appointed chancellor, which happened after backroom negotiations between Germany’s industrialists and their partnered governmental officials. He and his paramilitary forces then eliminated the communists and minorities who the racist ruling class, which included the many U.S. industrialists aiding the Nazis, saw as threats to be expended.

As the American fascists continue to construct their Christian nationalist surveillance state, incentivizing neighbors to sell each other out to law enforcement for violating the new lifestyle code, fascism’s apologists will claim it’s absurd to be alarmed by any of this. They’ll use variations of the “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” rationale, and portray the violence from police and vigilantes as in response to exaggerated or fabricated pro-abortion violence. All the while, the range of people targeted by this repressive religious campaign will grow. If people can get bounties for sending mortally ill women to prison for seeking medical care, perhaps the rewards will then be expanded to those who report undocumented people. If tech companies aren’t saying whether they’ll start giving law enforcement data on people’s private plans for abortions, they’ll no doubt begin lending a powerful hand to this project for catching those who defy the Christian fascist agenda. Big tech has helped the government carry out repressive campaigns like the Russiagate censorship, so they’ll fold when it comes to this. 

Next these forces will go after protesters, and organizers, and anyone who voices opposition to the new abortion paradigm. The LGBT community, journalists, anti-imperialists, and others targeted by our government will be part of this list as well. The fascist paramilitaries will be deputized to go after these groups, with communists being among the first to be violently confronted as they were during past fascist purges. When another mask-off fascist gets into power in 2024, such repression will become not just plausible, but to a certain extent inevitable. The War on Terror showed that the U.S. is capable of abandoning its constitutional liberties, such as privacy, and rationalizing everything from extrajudicial imprisonment to torture. Our current liberal government, discredited, paralyzed, and ineffectual, will soon give way to one that seeks an active acceleration of these trends. 

The state is more vulnerable than it’s ever been, its “democracy” more corrupted than ever by corporate influence. It’s on the verge of fully revealing itself as a fascist entity, as a parasitic presence which will do whatever it can to keep the bourgeoisie in power. The people from oppressed nations have long recognized this as such, because they’ve been living under something indistinguishable from fascism since the beginning of colonialism. Now colonialism’s violence is intensifying, and getting expanded to an ever growing range of the population.

This is what it looks like when an empire cannibalizes itself. Our society is unable to face the reality of its unfolding collapse, of Washington’s international loss of respect and influence, of our government’s utter failure to fight the pandemic, of our gargantuan decline in living standards. It’s embracing delusion, turning to conspiracies about foreign subversion plots and imagining that a return to traditional values will solve our crises. The left is embracing its own delusions in turn, positioning itself as the vanguard of the world revolution even though it has everything to learn from the successful liberation movements on the imperial periphery. Virtually every faction that supposedly opposes the fascists is undermining any actual anti-fascist movement, exploiting our human rights crisis for donations, engaging in sectarian attacks, and downplaying the threat we’re facing. Fascism can only be defeated by a principled, dedicated revolutionary network, capable of defending our communities and building support among the masses for the state’s overthrow.

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Addressing the contradictions in the U.S. will require combating right opportunism

In What is to be Done, Lenin wrote that “Revolutionary theory is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.” This is crucial for communists in the United States to understand. A revolution has never before happened in a core imperialist settler-colonial country, and the theory which defines the revolution here will therefore have to be unprecedented in nature.

Apartheid South Africa’s anti-colonial revolt is perhaps the closest example one can think of to the revolt from the colonized nations that will unfold in America. East Germany’s revolution following German imperialism and the Holocaust is another comparable instance. But it’s in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that there are the combined contradictions of settler-colonialism and imperialist extraction. And in these countries, the colonial genocide has been so successful that whites have come to make up the majority of the population. We’re facing a particular set of conditions that no successful revolution has ever so far overcome. All of the existing socialist countries, as well as the USSR, have come about from revolutions to overthrow colonial occupiers, or (as in the case of the Soviets) that have had to dismantle an internal empire. But our conditions can’t be equated to those of these other places. In the United States especially, as it’s the central arbiter of imperialist violence, we within the imperialist settler colonies are fighting against contradictions more severe than those from any past revolution.

I say this not because I believe the U.S. masses face more severe poverty and exploitation than those within the colonized countries. I say this because they’re provided with the relative global privileges which citizenship in the imperial center grants them. As Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz writes in Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler-Colonialism, White Supremacy, & a History of Erasure and Exclusion, this intertwines with settler-colonialism to make especially the white masses statistically less open to revolutionary education than the masses in most other places:

Union workers in most countries are considered a progressive if not left-wing force. But the US working class is different. [Activist and historian] Mike Davis offers three main reasons. First, by the mid-nineteenth century, workers’ geographic mobility in the United States substituted for collective action; that is, if working conditions or poor pay created intolerable conditions, the worker could move on. British settler colonialism was based on attracting settlers to free land, property; so, as Friedrich Engels observed, US culture was the “purest bourgeois culture.” Second, Davis cites the cultural division of the US working class, writing that the most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish immigrants…The third divisive force Davis identifies in the US working class was and is white supremacy, which Irish immigrants to the United States inherited. Davis writes, “American democracy [“democracy” being not truly applicable to the U.S.] was, after all, the most spectacularly successful case of settler-colonialism and the correlative condition of ‘free land, free labor’ was the genocidal removal of the indigenous population.”

The assimilation of the Irish and the other formerly oppressed European nationalities into whiteness only served to deepen this worker division. Today, the immigrant population that the bourgeoisie uses to divide workers is the continentally indigenous Brown people from south of the border. And throughout all of U.S. history, African and Native people have been used as the scapegoat for the white proletariat’s struggles, with Asians being targeted in this way as well. The benefits of U.S. imperialism have mostly dried up for the U.S. masses since neoliberalism was implemented half a century ago, and wealth inequality became intensified to a wild degree. But white supremacy, and its ideology of the settlers having a right to treat this land as if it’s their own, are as big of an obstacle to class consciousness as ever. And if reactionary propaganda succeeds, these racist ideas will largely radicalize the white masses towards further embracing this anti-worker mindset, and fighting alongside the bourgeoisie so that the whites can keep their position as settlers.

White supremacist ideology has already succeeded in this to an extent, as a large minority of the population has embraced proto-fascist narratives like that Kyle Rittenhouse was defending himself or that the police should be supported no matter what. This development was predictable, and it’s having the consequence of rising right-wing vigilante violence. But what’s not inevitable is that the fascists will succeed at terrorizing the masses into submission, or that the masses won’t be brought into the decolonial socialist struggle. 

To defeat the forces of reaction, we must not act like the theory which will characterize the revolution here is already figured out before the revolution has even begun. We must apply what theory from previous revolutions has to teach us of course, but do so while developing a particular theoretical model suited to our particular conditions. We can’t engage in theoretical stagnation by copy-pasting the approaches of other revolutions, or prematurely make up a new theoretical framework that we assume will perfectly fit into future events. The only way we’ll fully develop the theory we need for our conditions is by addressing the needs of the masses, overthrowing the capitalist state in the way our circumstances show to be practical, and building socialism in the way our circumstances demand. As the contradictions are addressed, knowledge is gained, and we become better able to further address contradictions.

This is why when right opportunist Marxists argue for limiting the Native land sovereignty movement by rhetorically asking “but what exactly will abolishing the United States look like,” or “but what exactly will full jurisdiction for the tribes look like,” they’re not engaging in the kind of materialist analysis they believe they are. They’re actually engaging in an idealist analysis. By ignoring the settler question, and by immediately claiming it’s futile to try to rectify land relations in the wake of colonialism, they’re assuming revolutionary theory on this continent doesn’t need any further innovation, and that history will vindicate their vision for a “USSA.” This isn’t dialectics, it’s dogmatism. Rejecting the idea of properly addressing the colonial contradiction because we don’t yet know precisely what this will look like upon completion is rejecting the core basis of dialectical materialism, which demands that we analyze contradictions in order to find their solutions. 

If we were in pre-revolutionary Russia, these same people would be saying it’s pointless to talk of dismantling the Russian empire because we don’t yet have a perfect picture of what will replace the empire. There’s even a historical equivalent from then and there that we can identify: the Mensheviks, who Lenin described as “narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, and petty-bourgeoise ‘labour aristocracy’, imperialist-minded and imperialist-corrupted.” In other words, right opportunists, self-interested actors who sought to gain power by not challenging the existing cultural and social order. They purposely limited their own imaginations to rationalize not opposing the Russian empire, like how our own right opportunists purposely limit theirs to rationalize dismissing a decolonial analysis.

We can make educated guesses about what the arrangement on this land will look like after the settler state is abolished. History tells us that balkanization leaves socialist projects vulnerable to reactionary attacks, so the post-colonial nations will need to unite to some capacity from a practical perspective. Because communists seek the liberation of the entire proletariat, we know that working people of all colors and backgrounds will be equally able to participate in proletarian democracy. It’s possible that the Black and Brown communities will try to negotiate the establishment of their own sovereign territories with the tribes. And from what I’ve heard described by Native communists, all non-indigenous residents will be eligible for citizenship within the nations they live in. I don’t pretend to have all the answers though, and no one should. We haven’t yet gone through the revolutionary process that Lenin observed is necessary for the full development of theory. And even after we have, our theory will require updates and corrections, as humanity’s conditions are constantly in flux and demanding of innovations to solve new problems.

We shouldn’t fear having to figure out these kinds of innovations, as the right opportunists do. Figuring them out is unavoidable, as the USA is a prison of nations which must be not just supplanted, but have its legacy dismantled via an end to its colonial land relations structure. The details this process will involve aren’t too much to handle for a communist leadership that takes its job seriously. We must take example from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and forge a theoretical path outside the existing social order. Not embrace a theoretical framework that upholds this social order, like the Mensheviks did.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

4Chan, mass shootings, & the bloodshed of a society in decline

As I’ve written about, there’s extensive evidence that American history’s most famous true crime horror stories, from the Manson murders to Son of Sam to the Unabombings, have been products of government mind control. The readily apparent connections that many of these incidents have, such as the Manson and Son of Sam cults being traceable to the same Satanic spiritual network, lend credibility to the idea that they’re products of a deeper trend. As well as to the idea that MK ULTRA was a relevant factor behind them, supported by bizarre connections like the Manson Family’s relationship to CIA drug experiments or the Unabomber’s trauma at the hands of CIA psychological manipulation. There are numerous other such cases, detailed in David McGowan’s book Programmed to Kill.

Yet the idea that all of the horrific violence we’re seeing in the news has been coordinated by the feds isn’t realistic. Since my writings on the MK ULTRA serial killer links, the U.S. has seen a massive wave of mass shootings. And in trying to explain this newest series of American horrors, I don’t seek to make a conspiratorial analysis, but a materialist analysis.

A materialist analysis takes into account the possibilities of deliberately manufactured violence by the intelligence agencies, but it also considers the socioeconomic and cultural factors which work to produce violence organically. Our society is collapsing, undergoing an accelerating decline in living standards, a breakdown in the faculties of a functioning state, and a consequential rise in militarization and paranoia. People are confused and angry about the increasing chaos of their conditions, and out of this mass distress is sure to come individuals who are eager to inflict brutality. These individuals, and those who’ve had a hand in pushing them beyond the brink, are feeding into the kind of destabilization which the state desires. Understanding who they are, and what their ideas are, can help us find how to end the madness which is America’s mass shooting epidemic. The picture gained from this is one of rising social factors that have the potential to produce violence, and that are being exploited by forces which have something to gain from proliferating violence.

The surface level: 4Chan, crypto trolling, & mass fascist radicalization

If you’ve paid attention to the headlines, you no doubt have a basic sense of the connection between the “Chan” sites and violence: angry young men have been getting their anger validated by unmoderated online communities, and in many cases successfully encouraged to take out that anger by hurting others. Yet the media’s analysis of this issue is lacking. It doesn’t sufficiently comprehend the intricate, and often subtle, nature of the propaganda that these hate communities have engineered.

For example, the media, politicians, and celebrities have failed to recognize the Nazi psyop which is the NFT trend. The Bored Ape Yacht Club, the NFT collection that’s associated the cryptocurrency with the image of an ugly cartoon ape, was created by a company that’s taken every opportunity to insert crypto-Nazi propaganda into its language and iconography. An hour-long documentary recently came out examining the fascist symbolism that Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC, has carefully woven into every aspect of the project. From ciphers designed to lead to Nazi references, to bananas in the company’s video game that are shaped like swastikas, to inside jokes about infamous colonial atrocities, to character design traits that symbolize Nazi Germany’s allies and historical predecessors, to a logo that’s directly inspired by the graphic design of the Nazi SS, all of the red flags are there for the company’s focus on apes being a callback to the dehumanizing simian racist caricatures of antiquity. 

What does this have to do with mass shootings? It shows how in the 4Chan era, violent racist propaganda can gain massive cultural influence without the well-intentioned liberals who promote it being the least bit aware that they’re propagating racism. The figures behind all of the Nazi NFT symbolism show every sign of being products of 4Chan culture, with the biggest indicator being that they’ve pushed their agenda through means of covert trolling. Disguising extremist ideas through irony is one of the 4Chan white supremacist tactics that the media has long caught on to. With this NFT trolling operation, 4Chan has successfully fooled the media into assisting in the proliferation of these ideas.

When a prank is done to spread this kind of agenda, and has the platform for its hidden meaning to potentially become detected by millions of people, it feeds into the dynamic known as stochastic terrorism. This is the phenomenon where hateful ideas get spread to a mass audience, then some members of that audience get motivated to commit crimes, all while those responsible for the propaganda campaign can claim innocence. We’ve seen many times how the memetic racism of 4Chan and 8Chan, which has presented itself as jokes that you’d have to be a fool to take seriously, has helped indoctrinate the last decade’s white supremacist mass shooters. We’ve seen how the manifestos of modern shooters include meme references, no doubt designed to bring others into the pipeline. By dropping this gargantuan bomb of crypto-Nazism into popular culture, the Bored Ape Yacht Club trolls have made a major contribution towards stoking future attacks.

It’s appropriate that cryptocurrency is the cultural angle they’ve used to gain this platform. Crypto is being sold to the young men who’ve been suffering under late-stage capitalism as a route towards prosperity, capable of bringing them into a glorious new future. The reality that crypto is as unsustainable as the rest of capitalism will hit this generation of 4Chan-influenced “doomers” hard, and will provoke many of them into embracing the narratives which lead to “normies” getting radicalized. NFTs, which are designed to replicate the financial bubble conditions that led to the 2008 economic crash, are no exception. 

In 1995, Umberto Eco assessed that “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” What 4Chan has done is take a false savior from the present economic crisis, and use it as a tool for reaching the audience Eco talked about. When NFTs and the rest of crypto are revealed to be scams, many of the frustrated men who’ve bought into them will be able to easily access the propaganda necessary for radicalization. It’s displayed right there on the most prominent aspects of our culture.

The NFT psyop is just one part of the story. PragerU is also part of today’s online fascist pipeline, as is Fox News, as are the Chan boards themselves, and so on. What liberal commentators have missed, in addition to the Bored Ape trolling, is that it’s not just these infamous far-right propaganda sources which are helping radicalize the white supremacist shooters of tomorrow. Nazi propaganda is currently being integrated into the narratives put forth by the highest levels of the United States government. Which makes it all the more likely that the explosion of violence we’ve been witnessing is a modern equivalent of those famous 20th century murders, with their suspicious connections to the feds. 

Below the surface: agitprop from our government’s intelligence centers

Washington’s support for the regime in Kiev, which has collaborated with the Nazi Azov Battallion, facilitated marches commemorating Nazi collaborators, and committed war crimes against Russian speakers motivated by Hitler’s Lebensraum ideology, is one giant stochastic terrorism generator. Throughout the U.S. anti-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, American white supremacists have been routinely traveling to the battlefields to gain firsthand combat experience. And now that the conflict has expanded, the probability of this producing domestic blowback in the form of further U.S. racial terrorist attacks is heightened.

The many instances where the U.S. media has directly platformed Ukraine’s Nazis by positively featuring individuals wearing the Azov logo, where cold warriors have promoted a Ukrainian Nazi slogan by declaring “Slava Ukraini,” and where Western leaders have repeated the anti-Russian narratives Kiev uses to justify its atrocities, are all feeding in to the mass radicalization process. When the CIA breeds Nazi terror abroad, you can be sure this will come to extend into the imperial center, whether through a propaganda pipeline or through actual military training for the terrorists.

This echoes back to the incidental nature behind many of the stories of how intelligence activity has contributed to serial murders. The evidence indicates that though the Manson murders were a product of the CIA’s violent mind control conditioning going intentionally right, Ted Kaczynski’s bombing project was not. Whereas the Manson cult members were deliberately primed to be numb to taking lives, the experiments Kaczynski was subjected to as a teenager were intended to break him down into giving up his anti-capitalist convictions. The latter experiments were a Cold War study on how to turn captured Soviet spies into double agents, and they had the side effect of making one boy feel so attacked that he decided to take violent revenge against the system. Whitey Bulger, the gang leader who became a mass murderer after being subjected to traumizing MK ULTRA experiments in prison, is another example. When today’s government engages in psyops, and these psyops lead to people committing terrorism, it has a similar nature: violence as a byproduct of the manipulations the state uses to wage war.

This stochastic terrorism effect is apparent in every aspect of the U.S. empire’s psychological operations. An obvious example, aside from the Ukrainian Nazism pipeline, is the general glorification of violence that comes from our culture’s saturation in military propaganda. For decades, the Pentagon has been regularly influencing the creative decisions of Hollywood film directors and digital game developers. Since 2013 with the repeal of a Cold War domestic propaganda ban, it’s been officially legal for the government to covertly meddle with the content of the news as well. What this media consistently does is make war look good, teaching the masses that violence is always the answer. As Eco continued, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world.”

Combine this with America’s culture of individualism, and the entitlement that’s cultivated by patriarchy and racism, and you get a generation of men who can easily come to see shooting people as the right response to what makes them angry.

The things that make them angry can be class related, as shown by the famous Ted talk by a man who almost became a school shooter after a childhood of abuse from his economically unstable addict parents. No doubt the deterioration of our socioeconomic conditions is making such psychological pressures more severe, and contributing to the country’s steady rise in shootings. But overwhelmingly, the key ingredient behind why these mostly white men commit the attacks is a sense that they’re being denied what they’re owed by a social structure that’s supposed to serve them. This is evidenced not just by how many of the shootings are racially motivated, but by how studies have found great amounts of shooters have engaged in domestic violence. Some of them, like the incel murderers, have carried their hatred of women into the massacres themselves. 

Their attitude that the women in their lives need to be physically forced into submission, combined with a culture that’s conditioned them to turn to weapons, produces a great deal of these instances where they snap. Both their misogynistic abuse and their random atrocities come from their impression that they aren’t getting the respect they deserve. As usual with the violence that U.S. imperialism cultivates, this all comes full circle; one of the veteran white supremacists who went to Ukraine would later use the military equipment from his time in the Army to try to kill his ex-wife. It seems only a matter of time before one of these American Ukraine fighters comes home to do a shooting. We’re already halfway there, with one of the recent shooters having worn a circular Nazi symbol that’s popular among Azov members.

This also applies to QAnon, which has inspired numerous acts of terrorism ranging from the January 6th attack to more minor assaults. The paranoid worldview Q puts forth, where MAGA patriots are struggling against a Satanic blood-drinking cabal determined to destroy America, has been amplified by the intelligence centers. There’s evidence that the original Q activities on 4Chan were perpetrated by feds who sought to pin their agitprop on Russia. And the conspiracy which grew out of this has repeatedly been amplified by the same members of the “deep state” that Q followers believe they’re fighting against. Q has also promoted regime change propaganda against Iran, one of the biggest red flags for a federal op that you can imagine.

As Eco wrote, “at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.” The Q conspiracy’s antisemitic nature, where the followers are told of blood-drinking rituals based on the ancient Blood Libel claim about Jews, makes it fit into this. It also makes Q overlap with the kinds of ideas promoted by the Nazi 4Chan trolls.

Like the white nationalist shooters or the violent misogynists, these Q-inspired attackers are experiencing a collective psychosis in the face of late-stage capitalism. Our ever more chaotic conditions have encouraged them to be paranoid, and this paranoia has been nurtured by a government which bombards them with inciting material. The next layer in this investigation reveals why our government is willing to nurture the mayhem. Namely that mayhem is what lets the ruling class justify suppressing dissent.

Deep down: when the terrorism isn’t stochastic

If the U.S. government has been willing to support neo-Nazis in Ukraine, or death squads in Latin America, or Islamist terrorists in the countries it militarily intervenes within, the equivalent can be true in the country’s own borders. The purpose that such deliberately engineered terrorism serves in the imperial center is twofold: creating a narrative precedent for the expansion of the police state, and frustrating the efforts of liberation movements. It’s part of a counterinsurgency against domestic dissent.

January 6th has enabled the Biden administration to increase funding for law enforcement and the military, opened up social media for more state-backed censorship, and led to an expansion of the surveillance state. Unsurprisingly, much of the attack was plotted out in the open, with the DHS acting apathetic towards the threat until the time came to exploit the ensuing chaos. In parallel, America’s mass shooting paradigm has made for schools to become far more militarized, surveilled, and policed, especially in the impoverished nonwhite communities where law enforcement already amounts to a military occupation. The crime that capitalism perpetuates is used as an excuse for police militarization and mass incarceration. Our society’s drumbeat of violence justifies the violence that the state inflicts upon its people.

Because the state has a vested interest in cultivating a violent society, naturally it does more to create this violence than flooding society with inflammatory propaganda. There’s a school-to-prison pipeline that keeps young people in a lumpenized cycle of incarceration and gang life. There’s also a military-to-shooter pipeline. As David Swanson has written, a conservative estimate shows that at least a third of shooters have been trained by the military:

In reports on individual mass shootings, any mention of involvement with the U.S. military is usually a minor footnote. In many cases, I simply do not know, with my very limited research, whether a mass shooter is a military veteran or not. This is why my figure of 36% could be low. Regarding patterns in mass-shootings, media reports tell us, as well they should, about access to guns, types of guns, criminal records, mental health records, misogyny, racism, age, sex, and other features of shooters’ backgrounds. If mass shooters were at all disproportionately red-headed, homosexual, vegan, left-handed, or basketball fans we would damn well know it. Its relevance would be mysterious, but we’d know it. Yet the fact that well over a third of them, and maybe more, have been professionally trained in killing is unmentionable, despite its obvious relevance and the supposed cultural value of “following the science” wherever it may lead.

This enormous prevalence of military involvement in the shootings is hidden because it reveals the sinister dynamic our government is fostering. When you’re not only providing someone with encouragement to commit violence, but giving them the tools and instructions to do so, that’s more than stochastic terrorism. It’s criminal negligence, if not acting as an accomplice to the crime.

The same applies to the fact that the CIA is behind the domestic distribution of the drugs which gangs depend on to sustain their quasi-military governments. Capitalism is designed to produce social ills, which provide the ideological justification for the existence of the capitalist state. Because these problems exist, it’s assumed that the capitalist state must exist, even though the state is what’s behind the problems. When it comes to producing violent and anti-social individuals, the way the state manufactures evil is a dual process: depriving people of the social outlets that encourage pro-social ways of acting, while providing them with social outlets that encourage violence. The same goes for the information people in our society receive. Our day-to-day media doesn’t have art designed to instill a sense of community, like is largely the case in socialist countries like China or the DPRK. It has military propaganda, which has lately been exploiting our dire socioeconomic situation by promising that enlisting will bring you out of poverty. It probably won’t. More likely it will turn you into the kind of person who goes on a shooting spree. 

Given these factors, it’s unsurprising that shootings have been especially rising during the War on Terror, and even moreso during the escalations of Washington’s hybrid war against China. There’s an intuitive relation between imperialist military training, racist propaganda against groups like Asians, and increased potential for violence. The question is whether the feds have been deliberately and directly coordinating any of these shootings, like how they did with the serial killers in Programmed to Kill. To this I can say that no theory should be accepted as a given without hard evidence, but that we should look at these shootings while considering the many proven instances of the state creating criminals and terrorists in such a way. 

We know that the FBI has sent informants to seek out impoverished and mentally ill individuals, then manipulated those individuals into declaring scripted intentions for terrorism after the agents have supplied them with weapons. This corrupt kind of sting operation has been done by the FBI dozens of times since 9/11, and it reflects the state’s tactic of exploiting the social ills it creates to manufacture excuses for repression. We know that the feds send agent provocateurs into protests to create violence so that social movements can be vilified, and so that the police can crack down on these movements. We know that infiltrators try to earn the trust of organizers, then plant weapons on them before police raids, attempt to persuade them into committing violence to get themselves in trouble, or steer them towards ultra-leftist ideas which lead towards potentially violent leftist infighting. 

These COINTELPRO tactics for destabilizing revolutionary parties tie into the violence the state created during the original serial killer wave, which was created in response to the uprisings of the 1960s and 70s. If these tactics are still being applied, and they’ve been expanded into the War on Terror’s sting operations, how often could they also be involved with the stories behind mass shootings? There’s more substantial evidence for this than the instances where shooters have complained of mind control, though that in itself has a parallel to the MK ULTRA-related murders. This evidence is in the mere fact that COINTELPRO continues to exist during the internet age. 

The feds are constantly working to infiltrate virtually every political community on the internet to achieve maximum narrative control. And when it comes to reactionary communities like 4Chan, this can easily take the form of inciting people to violence. Far more easily than when it comes to the left, because the left is hurt by random acts of violence and therefore has an incentive to avoid them. Like Eco said, fascists are obsessed with violence, making them perfect targets for modern MK ULTRA programming.

With this intelligence-assisted online pipeline for right-wing extremism being so successful at producing violence, it’s no wonder 4Chan is a hotspot for gore content. Sharing real-life murder videos is regarded as shock humor within Chan communities, and it’s easy to find gore threads on the site. This is another way history is repeating itself. During the murder spree that the Son of Sam cult committed, the members filmed the death of one of their victims, and saved it for agitation propaganda purposes. They produced a snuff film in order to prime their recruits to carry on their mission. ISIS has done the same thing with its beheading videos, which are meant to attract those susceptible to Islamic extremist ideology. If the feds have nurtured violent Satanism and violent Islamism, and snuff material has defined both of these strains, the same could apply to the reactionary online communities which traffic in a similar vein.

When you look deep enough, you find historical patterns in every aspect of the horrors America is experiencing. The difference between the Son of Sam era and our era is that those proliferating these destructive ideas now have better technologies, which they’re using to manipulate people on a wider scale. Whether or not the Bored Ape Yacht Club trolling is a federal operation, it has all the characteristics of a psyop. And it should therefore be seen as an example of the kinds of psychological weapons that have produced our current bloodshed. How much of this bloodshed can be traced to actual intelligence operations, and how much of it to random rage outbursts, doesn’t ultimately matter. Both types can be ended by ending the social order that’s behind them.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

Falling living standards, the lies behind our wars, & the downward spiral of capitalism

Something isn’t adding up about what we’re experiencing. About the deterioration of our socioeconomic conditions, and all of the intertwining miseries which this deterioration is making worse. The government and the media say prices are soaring because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. But this narrative feels oversimplistic, even to those who haven’t absorbed the complex knowledge about capitalism and imperialism necessary to fully understand what’s behind the current economic disaster. If it’s all because of Putin, why were we already feeling the economic pinch long before the Ukraine conflict? Will things simply return to normal if Russia is defeated? Blaming it on Russia makes it seem like our situation is temporary, a fluke that will end as soon as the designated “bad actor” gets subdued. Which simply doesn’t seem realistic.

Everything about what we’re being told regarding the origins of our crisis is indeed propaganda, propaganda designed to try to cover up the reality of U.S. imperialism’s decline. Russia did not “invade” Ukraine in the aggressive sense, it intervened to prevent Ukraine’s U.S.-installed fascist regime from carrying out a repeat of the Western aggressions Russia has historically been a victim of. As well as to prevent further Ukrainian ethnic cleansing of Russian speakers in the Donbass. Putin hasn’t exacerbated your economic insecurity, Biden has by imposing sanctions to try to weaken Russia for a geopolitical chessboard maneuver. Your intensified financial precarity won’t go away, because the U.S. intends to continue harming its own people so that this economic war can continue indefinitely.

The Western narrative of a Ukraine that’s sure to recover from its losses and beat Russia is an illusion. All the Kiev regime can do after its loss of Mariupol and its broader defeat in conventional military terms is keep endlessly using up NATO aid, perpetuating a war that the U.S. military-industrial complex will do everything possible to keep going. Ukraine is a defeated imperialist proxy state, its economy practically cut in half in contrast to the surprisingly resilient internal situation of its opponent. Washington intends to continue using the Ukrainian people as human shields in its quest to destabilize Eurasia, a quest that looks increasingly futile. The war is not meant to be won, but to be continuous, whether it takes the form of CIA-backed neo-Nazi guerrilla terrorism or a ceaseless effort by sacrificial troops which will never gain victory.

This war’s victims are not just the thousands dead or the millions of refugees, but the disproportionately marginalized people within the imperial center who are being pummeled by the economic fallout. The U.S. empire’s internal colonies, as well as the impoverished LGBT community which is increasingly targeted by the government, have been suffering the most from the depression the sanctions have exacerbated. The broader poor and working classes are seeing their prospects disappear as well. The great majority of the population has been having its living standards drop for years, if not decades. We’ve been seeing inequality steadily rise since the 70s, we’ve been in a depression since the 2008 crash, and we’ve been in a heightened version of that depression since the pandemic began, with Ukraine only being the event that’s acted as the tipping point for many people. With inflation worsening food insecurity after 38 million are already food insecure, and causing rents to rise after the pandemic has already pushed millions to the brink of homelessness, more people are being faced with the truth about our conditions.

This truth is that our ruling class is seeking to sacrifice our livelihoods, and our survival in the context of climate collapse, to keep profits up. Neoliberalism, the system of consolidated corporate control and eroded workers rights, was adopted in response to capitalism having reached a stage in its decline where it was no longer optimal to have widespread prosperity. Not even in the core of imperialism. The economic crash of the 1970s provoked a panic among the capitalist class, alleviated only by an ongoing campaign to siphon wealth to the top. Now that we’re seeing the worst inflationary crisis since that time, the ruling class is doubling down on this approach of sacrificing those below to keep capital intact.

Faced with this new level of crisis, it’s not like capital can replicate the social welfare policies which worked for it in the past. A New Deal is never happening again, because the bourgeoisie can no longer afford to implement social democracy. The only direction they can take society in, and hope to maintain their decaying system, is a dystopia where the wealth gap never stops getting bigger. This is the recipe for the extinction of a social order, and the elites who run the system can’t confront this fact. They have no option other than to continue the neoliberal downward spiral. The system is being forced to eat itself. 

We’re seeing evidence of this everywhere, from the baby formula shortage, to the rise of all-encompassing monopolies like Amazon and BlackRock, to the government’s refusal to cancel student debt. Wealth and power must become ever more concentrated, and the needs of the people must be neglected, in order for profits not to plummet. Our government has admitted this, with Biden officials stating that the people’s economic hardships can’t be avoided simply for the reason that we live under capitalism. They know that as long as the system which enriches them continues, the rest of us are going to have to pay.

This banal evil of capitalism, where it’s always treated as a given that certain parts of society are going to suffer, is now harder than ever to reconcile with the idea that capitalism represents the best system. If this system is pushing an ever-expanding section of the masses into misery and destitution, how can it possibly be defended on the basis of the collective good? The only way to defend the social order in its present form is by saying it’s necessary for protecting the world from some greater evil. We’re told that U.S. imperialist military adventurism, which springs from capitalism’s demand for global market access, is crucial for fighting against the Russian and Chinese bloc. Washington’s adversaries are portrayed as the “authoritarian” side, conjuring a sensationalist vision of a foreign social order that’s always supposedly worse than our own. Millionaire celebrities tell us that higher prices are the cost of fighting for “freedom,” and expect the average person who’s living paycheck to paycheck to accept this as an explanation for further indignities.

The U.S. war propaganda machine shouts down all voices of skepticism, constantly confronting us with some new atrocity story about the enemy. We’re always being demanded to care more about these stories than anything else, even if they turn out to be false flags. We’re never told it’s alright to be concerned about the egregious things that we’re experiencing, to be angry at the bosses, landlords, and executives who are waging class war against the masses. It’s only alright to be angry at Putin, or at whatever other figure has been cast as the villain during a given moment. 

If we comply with what the cultural hegemony demands, believing geopolitical lies while ignoring the truths about our own situation, we’ll remain in a state of collapse. We’ll be paralyzed, unable to address poverty, mental illness, violence, and the other evils that our social order is multiplying.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

Despite the left’s victories, warning signs of a fascist backlash appear in Colombia & beyond

The decaying colonial regime in Colombia has reached a crisis. Its people, devastated by corporate destruction of their living standards and a corrupt narco regime which has exacted tremendous brutality upon them, has elected a leftist presidential candidate. Not one who represents a radical change, but one who at least represents a break from the fascistic ruling ideology of Uribismo. This could lead to the country being brought out of its misery, and undergoing the kinds of reforms which have uplifted the people of Venezuela and Bolivia. But if the imperialists succeed in their schemes, it could end up provoking an unprecedentedly violent reaction from within Colombia.

An indication of how much leverage the fascists have is that the new leader Gustavo Petro does not have a revolutionary agenda, but a social democratic one. The imperialists at CNN have taken comfort in being able to report that “Colombia's newest president has also spoken of a desire to create a new progressive alliance in South America. This would likely involve Chilean president Gabriel Boric and Argentinian president Alberto Fernandez, rather than the three authoritarian countries of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.” This largely moderate nature of the pink tide that’s been occurring in Colombia and many other Latin American countries, in contrast to the militant anti-imperialism of those governments CNN vilifies, doesn’t mean these progressive leaders should be wholly dismissed. Any victory for the left means a weakening of imperialism. But in Colombia, and in the other Latin American countries Washington is desperate to maintain control over, the violent desperation of late-stage imperialism could still manifest in a full return for Operation Condor. And Petro’s wary attitude towards the region’s most hardline anti-imperialist states is a red flag that the imperialists could use him to disarm dissent.

Petro aims to negotiate the laying down of arms by Colombia’s revolutionary guerrillas, who’ve continued to wage war since the 2016 peace deal due to the regime’s ongoing crimes against the people. Such a process would necessarily entail him implementing substantial improvements in the people’s conditions. There’s no other way they’ll agree to disarm. But should Colombia’s guerrilla movement finally become a thing of the past, it will leave Petro vulnerable to a coup by the military. A coup which the armed forces will absolutely come to itch for should they not be replaced by loyal new personnel. 

What anti-imperialists need to know about Colombia’s military is that it doesn’t just have latent reactionary sympathies, as Latin American militaries have so often had. It’s an entity which is directly led by neo-Nazis. Swastika-displaying Hitlerites guided the armed forces on how to suppress last year’s protests, designing the strategy behind the country’s world-shocking state violence against anti-austerity demonstrators.

This blatantly fascist leading ideology within the military is guided by the concept of the “dissipated molecular revolution,” which calls for treating the general population as enemy combatants so that a future revolution can be preemptively destroyed on a molecular level. This kind of thinking is what’s justified the shooting at civilians from helicopters, the use of paramilitaries to routinely kill off hundreds of political dissidents with no accountability, and the other atrocities Colombia has recently committed against its own people. If given the opportunity, these Nazis within the military will assassinate Petro and his Afro-Colombian vice president, then impose the kind of dictatorship that so many Latin American countries have seen. Colombia’s fascist armed service and law enforcement members hail from the strain of state terror which has defined the country for many decades, and which has carried out a political genocide that’s arguably still ongoing. The fascist paramilitaries are still there, and are still disappearing journalists and human rights activists regularly. 

With Petro having a plan to disarm the left, but no plan to disarm the right-wing extremists in control of the military, disaster could easily strike. And even if no coup happens, when a new fascist gets back into office, the left will find itself without arms to defend from the inevitable reactionary terror. 

As the region’s other major decaying regime in Brazil sees its power threatened, a similar fascist terror campaign could soon happen there as well, building on the one that’s already been unfolding in both countries. The CIA’s chief has told Jair Bolsonaro not to try to overturn the election if he loses, which shows how tenuous imperialism’s grasp over the region is becoming. It appears Washington hopes that if Lula wins, the U.S. will be able to make Lula into a new puppet, as it partially succeeded in doing when it got Lula to occupy Haiti during his time as president. But the Brazilian anti-imperialist movement could still hold Lula’s opportunistic tendencies in check, resulting in a new government for Brazil that resembles the one of Peru’s Pedro Castillo: not as radical as some would expect, but still one which the CIA wishes to overthrow. And since the CIA has failed at a coup in Peru, it could also fail in Brazil. Control over the region is increasingly uncertain for Washington. But it’s so afraid of further instability that it’s instructing its erratic puppet Brazilian leader not to carry out his own January 6th.

What the CIA wants in Brazil is not for democracy to be respected, but for a violent maneuver against the left that Washington can control. With its coups in the region consistently failing, and its broader geopolitical hegemony continuing to wane, the U.S. empire can only prevent Latin America from utterly breaking free by orchestrating massive destruction within the region. Similarly to how it’s succeeded at destabilizing much of the horn of Africa, it aims to sow such chaos within the American hemisphere, targeting both regions with the aim of preemptively stopping a turn towards multi-polarity. This is why the U.S. has backed Bolivia’s right-wing militias, and has so far succeeded at getting these terrorists to seize control over an economic hotspot market in La Paz. The aim is to make this kind of instability and violence spill over into all the other countries that have succeeded, or may succeed, at breaking free from imperialism.

The danger of fascist backlash is real, perhaps right now in Colombia more than anywhere else within the region. But as always with modern U.S. imperialism’s schemes for wreaking sudden, gargantuan havoc upon its enemies, this is only a spiteful hope for vengeance from an empire that’s losing its actual capacity to deal damage. Despite the centrist leanings of Chile’s Boric, he’s delivering on his promises to dismantle neoliberalism. Mexico’s AMLO has nationalized lithium amid his years-long campaign to end the country’s neoliberal paradigm. Bolivia has been building up its sustainable development and its people’s living standards since the reversal of the 2019 coup. This is in addition to the decades of progress that Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are building upon in their quest to construct societies free from imperialism’s influence. Venezuela has gotten so far that it’s come to have the imperialists begging it for oil.

As Mao warned, the imperialists and their running dogs will never put down their knives. They’ll never stop trying to inflict violence upon those who seek to end their rule, not until their rule is ended for good and they’re made extinct. Whatever future violence they carry out across Latin America and beyond, this won’t prevent their downfall, nor the emergence of the new world that the anti-imperialists are building.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.