The Dem establishment and trans liberation

This post lines up the forks in a Bluesky discussion —

Reflecting on California governor Gavin Newsom taking a turn against trans liberation over bullshit about trans atheletes, Jamelle Bouie observes:

The thing about chasing what you think is public opinion is that if and when things turn you will have made a bunch of statements and taken a bunch of stances that you’ll have to disavow. probably a better strategy just to say what you actually believe and stand by it. anyway, this guy sucks.

John Rodgers underlines:

Interracial marriage did not cross 50% approval in the US until 1996, when I was 30 years old. Good political messaging drives opinion, it doesn’t follow it.

Newsom understands this better than almost every other major pol. His early, vigorous support for same-sex marriage — breaking with the Democratic Party by having San Francisco issue marriage licenses when he was mayor — bucked the conventional wisdom and moved public opinion practically overnight. It makes him especially culpable for his betrayal.

Sharp-eyed journalist David Forbes replied with sage wisdom:

I think an underrated part of this is the degree to which anti-trans bigotry is an elite phenomenon across political parties. That comes out in everything from the New York Times’ anti-trans crusade to, well, Newsom’s actions here.

The gentry leans conservative (also why Newsom and Kirk can chat like this). Cis gays in marriages? Outside the far-right they can go with that. But trans rights are driven by a working class movement that threatens some core status quos around gender and identity, so they're frantic to crush it.

I asked about reading trans liberation as a “working class” movement, since I tend to take elites as fearing trans liberation as an elite movement resisted by non-elites. Forbes continued:

In U.S. especially, elites always think they’re more salt of the earth than they are. Also: see painting rural gentry as working class.

Trans liberation gets painted otherwise, but overwhelmingly comes from poor / working class. On the ground a lot of “how dare they talk back to me” reaction from liberal pols.

Those elites viewed marriage as the concession (perhaps with some toothless non-discrimination laws too) so after that the “gay rights” box was checked. On the ground I see a fair amount of queerphobia from liberal pols around any continuing activism and about queers outside the elite.

One local pol (wealthy her entire life) exemplifies this. In private, contemptuous of trans organizing as “baristas with weird hair and pronouns” and felt that support for marriage a decade ago and a proclamation for pride each year was “more than enough.” Newsom’s turn ain’t all that surprising.

I suspect that part of the thing with marriage is how the Dem establishment were blindsided by how quickly popular opinion turned once Newsom broke the ice. Since they thought it would never fly, they have to rationalize that it burned up all the political capital. Of course all of that is animated by their own queerphobia which they do not want to admit to themselves.

After the war, the dishes

There’s a little memoir I read on the internet ages ago. I have tried in vain to find it again. I find myself thinking about it more and more.

The narrator describes how in the 1970s he and his colleagues would go to lunch at a little restaurant near their office, run by a sweet, graying immigrant couple. They had family pictures all over the walls, memories of the Old Country. They loved talking with the customers.

One day, the memoirist goes out to lunch there with the usual crew, plus a guy in his 60s who was visiting their offices. The new guy is surprisingly interested in the family photos. When the owners drop by their table to talk, the new guy asks them some questions about the photos.

Four or five questions in, the sweet old couple are angry. How dare you ask that?

The usual lunch gang are still baffled. What has gone wrong?

The new guy asks, “Will you tell them, or do I have to?”

Two minutes later they are leaving the restaurant, the little old lady screaming at them. “You don’t understand! You were not there! You don’t know what the Jews did to us!”

Ukraine, NATO, and Russia

I have seen a resurgence of a false account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I have assembled a debunking here. I expect I may add resources over time, if it keeps coming up.

The false thesis goes something like this:

The common assumption in the West (the US & Western Europe) that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects Putin’s imperialism is a dangerous misunderstanding. Rather, the invasion was a predictable response to Western foolishness & aggessiveness toward Russia.

Given Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th, Russians have good reasons to worry about security threats from the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they have said clearly that they would read expansion of NATO toward Russia as an existential threat, so the West promised back in the 1990s not to rouse that concern.

But the West has betrayed that promise with aggressive expansion of NATO, toward the end putting Western troops right on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Mirroring the Soviets creating a buffer of client states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Russia has seized part of eastern Ukraine as a buffer against the West now. Putin is eager to embrace peace with Ukraine, if they simply allow that ethnically-Russian territory to have an independent, Russia-friendly government, but because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an instrument of the West’s dangerous betrayal of Russia he refuses.

I dug down the rabbit hole of this argument a couple of years ago. It is deceitful Russian propaganda.

The biggest hole in this thesis is how Ukraine has not joined NATO! That should end the argument right there.

But but but, they say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was triggered by the security threat presented by a pattern of aggressive NATO expansion pointing to Ukraine eventually joining.

This does not hold water.

Russia invaded Ukraine in the 2020s because the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which share a border with Russia joined NATO … in ’04? Between then and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians sent weapons and troops into Ukraine starting in 2014 while the only addition to NATO was North Macedonia ’20, which does not share a border with Russia. The West made no such promise, and the timeline of Western violations of that supposed promise provoking Russia makes no sense.

But but but, they say, there has been talk of Ukraine joining NATO!

True. That results from Ukranian parliament voting to pursue NATO membership at the end of 2014, reversing their prior disinterest.

Aha oho oho, they counter, Ukraine changed their tune because in 2014 the West created the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in order to get a friendly government which would support NATO expansion.

That reading compounds several absurdities.

It ignores the Ukrainian motivation that earlier in 2014, Russia sent weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea on Ukraine’s southern border.

Yes, Maidan did have Western support, but it was an organic popular movement which did not need the help. Ukrainians have obvious reasons to favor building ties to the (rich & democratic) West over ties to Russia, which is impoverished, ruled by a dictator who denies Ukrainian national legitimacy, and genocided millions of Ukrainians in the 20^th century.

Again, how is the West “pushing” for NATO expansion if a decade after Ukraine made these overtures, it still is not a member? For the last decade, NATO has responded to Ukraine, “yeah, okay, we can offer some support and someday maybe we will let you join”, while some NATO member states remain hesitant over the prospect, since it would commit them to potential war with Russia.

This claim that the West provoked Russia is not just absurd, it is morally repulsive. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, it is a mutual-defense agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all. Sying that Russia had to invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining an alliance which would defending it from invasion is like saying:

“That domestic violence shelter is responsible for provoking Ukraine’s ex-husband to break into her house and beat her again, like he did years ago. They should not have endangered Ukraine by accepting a call to their hotline after he showed up pounding on her door.”

And Zelenskyy? He refuses “peace” because the only “peace” on offer from Russia is seizure of Ukranian territory with zero security guarantees against further Russian aggression. That is not diplomacy, that is a demand of surrender.

References:

• Russian Disinformation on NATO Expansion and the War in Ukraine (2023) — from a US Army analyst
• Exposing the myth of Western betrayal of Russia over NATO’s eastern enlargement (2022) — a succinct analysis from an expert
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO expansion (2025) — a short critique of the thesis, with numerous links to supporting resources
• Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders (2023) — what it says on the tin
• Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today (2022) — contextualizing the thesis in the historical half-truths it relies upon
• Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine (2022) — an interview with the most promiment American proponent of the Russian thesis, in which he cannot answer straightforward questions about his argument
• The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine (2022) — digging into Mearsheimer and other commentators

Trump and war

Capturing nested threads from Bluesky. These are quotes, not me. But for what it’s worth, I agree with Hilzoy.

Ian Leslie

The Fight: Notes on the Oval Office Debacle, Plus a Rattle Bag

[⋯]

Second, and relatedly, I get the feeling that many politicians and commentators haven’t quite grasped the strength of Trump’s aversion to war. It’s one of the things that makes him a very unusual president. This is something that crystalized for me in my excellent conversation with Jemima Kelly. As we’ve just seen, Trump is frequently belligernet, aggressive, and angry in person, and instinctively we expect a leader’s personality to align with their attitude to military engagement. But inside the red-faced hawk is a dove, with an almost physical horror of violence.

[⋯]

Trump is as close to a pacifist as we’ve seen in the White House, more dovish than any US president since Carter. He does not seem interested in the exercise of American military power at all, and is openly cynical about America’s motivations for entering into previous conflicts like Iraq. He is bent on shrinking America’s defence spending. In short, Trump’s attitude to American military power is almost indistinguishable from that of, say, Jeremy Corbyn. Given everything else about him, this has been understandably hard for the rest of the world to get their heads around.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump was literally president for four years during which he wildly escalated drone warfare, tried to provoke a war with Iran, and got into dangerous saber-rattling with North Korea. Now, he is threatening to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force. What is this horseshit?

Why do so many people refuse to grapple with the actually existing Donald Trump!?!?

Judah Grunstein

I think it’s important to distinguish Trump I from what we’re seeing now, but also to tease out where and how Trump I diverged from US militarized foreign policy, and where it didn’t, to understand why some people see him as a “peace” president.

I’ve tried previously, so here goes again.

First, the primary case for Trump I being a warmonger is, as Jamelle Bouie notes, the escalation of the drone war but also the air war against ISIS in Mosul. There was also the initial escalation in Afghanistan.

As I’ve argued in the past, though, these both occurred early in his first term.

And they came in response to demand from the Pentagon on both counts. To my mind, that reflects the way the Department Of Defense tends to roll every inexperienced first-term president to get its wish list early.

That it also satisfied Trump’s penchant for chest-thumping doesn’t necessarily change that.

Later in Trump’s first term, in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, he tried to remove US forces from longstanding deployments. In Syria, he was essentially blocked by the Pentagon from doing so on multiple occasions, and in Afghanistan he was (rightly) criticized for making the rush to the exits that Biden consummated.

I disagree that he tried to start a war with Iran, mainly because on two occasions Trump backed away from one: the airstrike he called back en route after the downed US drone and the decision to deescalate despite US casualties in the Iranian riposte to Soleimani’s assassination.

The Soleimani assassination was certainly reckless, but there, too, I suspect it was pushed by Pompeo and channeled the US military’s longstanding grudge against him, dating back at least to the Iraq occupation and probably further.

Finally, with regard to US alliances, Trump’s hostility to them coded as “restraint” and retrenchment in a way that would in theory reduce US exposure to moral hazard and unintended escalation, even if in practice he didn’t really move the needle much on forward basing or commitments.

Why do I think this is important enough to now on multiple occasions take what is a very unpopular side of a debate no one in the anti-Trump camp (of which I am a part) even wants to have?

For two reasons.

First, Trump targeted legacy wars in ways that he can opportunistically use to portray himself as anti-war. And he targeted US security commitments in ways that allow him to claim he achieved changed behavior of US allies that decades of lectures about freeriding by Bush and Obama had not. So politically, it’s important to recognize that, instead of just reflexively claiming he was a warmonger. Because any US president who really wants a war against a non-nuclear state can get it.

Second, and more importantly, to blame the areas where Trump’s first-term record was bellicose lets the interests behind the militarization of US foreign policy, particularly in the Pentagon, off the hook. And that leaves the militarization of US foreign policy in place.

To be very clear, I think Trump is a bully who now wields the most preponderant military power any individual in the human history ever has. That’s not a good or comforting combination.

I don’t think he’s a pacifist or even anti-war, but neither do I think he’s a warmonger.

We’re all less safe with him in office, especially given his imperialist agenda this time around.

But while Trump is a problem, he is not the only problem with regard to US militarization.

Louis Evans

At the risk of over-simplifying, I think the postwar hegemonic consensus in the US was that the US should fight (only) “Good Wars” — justified by principle and necessity rather than avarice or aggrandizement, restrained in conduct, pursuing a peaceful settlement of self-determination.

This consensus held across parties, across civilian-military, and across both elite and mass sectors, although of course it was interpreted differently in each place.

Proponents of wars went to great length to cast their wars as Good. The primary critical posture was that some war was in fact Bad.

The left wing criticism was that the military establishment systematically misrepresented which wars were Good; the radical critique was that wars are axiomatically Bad.

Donald Trump (and his faction) represent a different position.

Donald Trump is against Good Wars, and in favor of Bad Wars.

He views Goodness as suckerdom. He views Badness as savvy. He is opposed to principle or necessity, and in favor of avarice and aggrandizement. He is against good conduct in wars and in favor of war crimes.

Those who found themselves outside the consensus recognized that Trump, too, was outside.

But they (often) lack imagination as to how many positions are outside the Good Wars consensus, and as to their relative strength.

---

“Good” vs. “bad” is a fuzzy, pejorative, polemical, and basilectal choice here, but I do think it actually points to a core element of Trump’s posture. He is, quite self-consciously, a Heel, and he does international relations as a Heel.

Lots of analysis — pro and con! — embed the idea that he is a Face, but he’s not, and he’s not trying to be.

Adding some final thoughts as this reply helped clarify something I’d been struggling to articulate.

The reason Trump can portray himself and be portrayed as “anti-war” is because he opposed the wars the US historically fought and alliances it formed as part of its global role in the liberal order.

So another way of expressing what Louis Evans says here is that Trump rejects the kinds of wars most people associate with the US because he views the global order and the US role in it as a chump’s game.

But he embraced the use of force in cases that transgressed the traditional US role.

Hilzoy

For my part, I think Trump is neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. Those are the wrong axes. He is a person with the emotional maturity of a three year old who has absolutely no idea of what’s at stake in his decisions and is given to temper tantrums.

If you think he’s a warmonger, it’s probably because he likes to threaten people, and does not draw the line at threatening them with military force; and also because he seems to have no clue what that would mean.

If you think he’s a peacemaker, it’s probably because he sometimes says things to that effect, and also because many of the things that we might have responded to with force before are things that simply do not register with him at all.

He does not react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not only because he likes Putin and hates Zelensky, but because he just does not see — at all — what’s wrong with what Russia did.

But ‘pro-war’ or ‘pro-peace’ is just not the right way to assess him.

Blue lives matter more

Capturing a 2023 Twitter thread by Katie Sponslor:

I have been taught to yell “stop resisting” and “drop your weapon” after firing a gun, because bystanders will remember you said it and their memory will automatically reverse the order of the events to make it make sense. Their testimony will support yours, because of this.

I have been told to “loosen up and have fun, it’s fun! Why are you so serious?” When doing a shoot / don’t shoot scenario training.

I have been told that deescalation techniques will get me and other officers killed and as a smaller LEO [law enforcement officer], I was justified escalating my use of force faster than my colleagues because I was always in danger so I should use it.

I’ve been told my only job is to go home at night.

I’ve been told all of these things in formal, controlled and regulated Police Academies. I have gone through 3. I have heard some of these things more than once.

When I questioned these things in my third academy, and stated that they were inconsistent with the ethics of policing, I was kicked out of the academy on my last day. I had completed and excelled at all the graded tasks, but was told “you aren’t what we want in our force.”

I loved my job. I gave a lot to do it for 5 years. In that time, I never broke leather on my holster. I never fired my taser. I put my hands on an individual twice, both times a simple arm bar hold that immediately caused both individuals to comply. Neither individual was hurt.

I have been in many sticky situations in that time. Faced several armed individuals. I worked in a National Park, yes, but in a high crime area. Being a park ranger, means working alone most of the time. I could not afford to escalate a situation, and I didn’t.

In 4 words, a police academy commander ended my career. “You [don’t] belong here.” After 16 years of federal service without a single complaint or write up, I lost any chance of working the final 4 years I needed for retirement.

With student loan debt, living in a new city, with a teenager, I lost my job, my insurance, and the ability to use the education and experience I had worked so hard to achieve.

I don’t regret it.

I still believe in resource protection, it matters, but I no longer believe the system of policing we have is the way to achieve it.

During my campaign for the HoD I got lambasted by my Republican opponent for saying, “I know cops, I’ve worked with them, trained with them, and some of them are my friends, some are not, and some of them are murderers.” I know it’s not politically expedient, but…

Some. Of. Them. Are. Murderers.

We cannot reform institutions which do this. We can only replace them.

Artificial superintelligence

A start on an index of useful articles:

Wait But Why — The Artificial Intelligence Revolution 1 & 2

A lively and accessible introduction to the Bostrom-ish argument that artificial superintelligence is plausible, and why the prospect is scarier than it might first appear.

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

An argument that the Bostrom-ish vision of superintelligence is a seductive mirage.

What motivates the “tech” right?

To support my index of resources about neoreaction and adjacent far right movements which overlap with “tech” culture, I have taken the liberty of capturing commentaries from other people tucked into Xitter & Facebook. These are not quite the same as my reading, but both are illuminating in exploring how “tech” executive culture itself understands the shift. Emphasis in quotes are the authors’, not mine.

Aaron Bartley

3 February 2025

Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?

I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:

1. The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn’t into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
2. Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
3. Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
4. China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.
5. Lastly, they resent their employees deeply for the political concerns they’ve been raising about climate change and DEI. They blame the “radicalizing” influences of elite institutions and want the government to shut these institutions down or reform them heavily.

(Edited: As Mike Puma and Frits Abell have commented, the over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.)

A couple of supporting links from JK:

• Blockchain in 10 minutes — my no-math primer on the tech behind cryptocurrencies
• The Twin Insurgency — my single favorite examination of What Is Going On, addressing that final point about the plutocrats & criminals trying to hollow out and exploit state capacity

Where did the tech right come from?

Jasmine Sun 30 January 2025

Here’s a 4-part grand theory of the tech right.

“Tech disposition”

First, there is a unique “tech disposition”. David E. Broockman and Neil Malhotra surveyed 700 founders:

1. they’re more liberal than most Dems on social issues + taxes, but very conservative on regulation + labor (even outside of tech)
2. pro-market values trace to adolescence & cannot be explained by demographics or economics
3. these beliefs do not resemble other economic elites

First, technology entrepreneurs are far from monolithically conservative; rather, they overwhelmingly support Democrats. This is not an artifact of our survey sample: campaign contributions from technology industry employees and ultra-wealthy technology entrepreneurs to Democrats have long exceeded those to Republicans. Although it is not surprising that individual wealthy Democrats exist, we show that the wealthy in an entire industry support the party pushing for higher taxes, deviating from the norm among the wealthy at large.

However, our findings are not so simple as that most technology entrepreneurs are liberals. Our second group of findings is that most technology entrepreneurs share a particular set of views across policy domains; that this set is conservative on many issues; and that this set is distinctive to technology entrepreneurs, being rare among other wealthy individuals, other Democrats, and other wealthy Democrats. In particular, on issues related to economic redistribution, globalization, and social issues, technology entrepreneurs are typically as or more liberal than Democratic citizens, Democratic wealthy individuals, and Democratic donors; they are also more liberal on all these issues than millionaires in the mass public. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs indicate support for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes. However, technology entrepreneurs are very skeptical of government regulation. Indeed, technology entrepreneurs’ views on regulation closely resemble those of Republican donors, and are more conservative from those of other millionaires in the mass public, Democratic citizens, and wealthy Democrats. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs also think the government should make it easier to fire workers. These large differences persist even between technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats and other Democratic constituencies.

This finding is surprising in light of popular accounts that describe technology entrepreneurs as falling within categories familiar in American politics: as typically liberal, typically conservative, or typically libertarian. However, we show that most technology entrepreneurs have a pattern of views that does not fit in any of these categories, has not been seen elsewhere, and is not predicted by prior work: a majority of technology entrepreneurs explicitly describe their views as supporting redistribution of wealth but opposing regulation of business, approximately double the share as in any other group of citizens, donors, or wealthy individuals we surveyed.

Our third set of findings concerns suggestive evidence for the theoretical mechanisms we posit for why technology entrepreneurs have this unique pattern of views. Our theoretical argument, elaborated below, is that the wealthy from a particular industry may have a unique set of political views because of the distinctive set of political predispositions of the individuals who select into each industry, and further, the experiences they will tend to have working in it. Consistent with this argument, we show that technology entrepreneurs share a distinct pattern of values and predispositions that correspond with their views in related policy domains. For example, with a series of pre-registered comparisons and survey experiments, we show that it appears technology entrepreneurs’ opposition to government regulation can be traced to positive predispositions towards markets and entrepreneurship. We also cast doubt on alternative explanations for their views related to demographics, geography, and pure self-interest.

[ Sun’s thread includes screencaps from what appears to be a slightly different version of the linked paper; I have quoted the corresponding section of the paper I have access to — JK ]

Mark Andreessen’s recent [New York Times] interview with Ross Douhat is very illuminating. Andreessen describes this exact disposition: “pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was the implicit deal of the Clinton-Gore era:

As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.

The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.

Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.

Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.

Social justice

Second, social justice fused with labor, nonprofits, & the state — fueling a wave of employee activism and speech / DEI / climate requirements. Structural issues demanded process solutions. Tech’s hatred of bureaucracy trumped their support for social justice.

See again the Douhat interview with Andreessen:

Andreessen

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat

But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen

Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

See comments from Paul Graham:

For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word “inclusion” in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an “inclusive language guide.”

This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence. But these bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used these statements as the initial filter and only even considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You’re not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.

Dem pivot

Third, Dems started to pivot away from key Clintonite ideas:

1. neoliberal economics would be good for america
2. digital tech would spread good liberal values

Henry Farrell calls this the collapse of both the “neoliberal” and “Palo Alto consensus”:

If that has changed, it is not simply because progressives have moved away from Silicon Valley. It is because both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions.

A lot of attention has been paid to the intellectual and political collapse of neoliberalism. This really got going thanks to Trump, but it transformed the organizing ideas of the Democratic coalition too. During the Trump era, card-carrying Clintonites like Jake Sullivan became convinced that old ideas about minimally regulated markets and trade didn’t make much sense any more. Domestically, they believed that the “China shock” had hollowed out America’s industrial heartland, opening the way for Trump style populism. Reviving U.S. manufacturing and construction might be facilitated through a “Green New Deal” that would both allow the U.S. to respond effectively to climate change, and revive the physical economy. Internationally, they believed that China was a direct threat to U.S. national security, as it caught up with the U.S. on technology, industrial capacity and ability to project military force. Finally, they believed that U.S. elites had become much too supine about economic power, allowing the U.S. economy to become dominated by powerful monopolies. New approaches to antitrust were needed to restrain platform companies which had gotten out of control. Unions would be Democrats’ most crucial ally in bringing back the working class.

Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems, which were built on the cheap and not designed to deal with a complex world where people could do horrible things in hundreds of languages. And there are now a lot of people who think that Silicon Valley platforms are bad for stability in places like the U.S. and Western Europe where democracy was supposed to be consolidated.

My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.

I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.

The Biden admin was far more pro-unions, tech regulation & antitrust. Dems probably needed to adjust (neoliberalism isn’t popular), but this broke the tech / liberal coalition — they were seen as abandoning business to back the activist class.

Douhat

So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?

Andreessen

They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

Trump

Fourth, tech found a home in Trump’s less ideological, more deal-friendly Republican party. Traditional conservatives were a poor fit, but Trump runs the country as a cult of personality — institutions be damned. and isn’t that what “founder mode” is? From Pirate Wires:

As President Trump begins his second term, he has the support of many business leaders, especially the entrepreneurs and founders who make up the ascendant ‘tech right.’ Why did this faction emerge and rally behind the president? Some point to policy issues such as regulation, taxation, government contracting, and antitrust. Others note that self-interest and perhaps self-preservation motivate its members as much as principle or policy.

But sincere converts to the tech right share at least one thing in common: a belief in founders — change agents capable of upending stale industries — taking on Goliaths, and reaching into the future to unite it to the present. The tech right sees founders, and the qualities they embody and inspire in others, as the key to company success. Conversely, founder-less institutions don’t work, like a body without a head — or perhaps, without a soul.

With its support of Trump, the tech right is just applying this model to politics, the ultimate stale industry, and Washington, D.C., the ultimate Goliath. In Donald Trump, the tech right and the American people see a leader. More to the point, we see a founder.

Other factors

There were other contributing factors: post-2016 techlash, defense money, mean journalists, COVID, plain old opportunism in the new Trump admin. Vocal Trump support from Andreessen, Sacks, Musk ignited a preference cascade.

But I maintain that SV elites’ deepest commitment is not right or left, but to unfettered innovation (& the wealth / growth that results). It’s the spirit of “get out of my way & let me cook” — they’ll align with whichever party makes that possible.

My overall thought on the sort of cultural versus material debate is like, the left liberal camp still underrates the cultural stuff. I think you're right that considering the counterfactual, would Zuckerberg be being like, “Meta is too feminine now” if Kamala won — obviously no. At the same time, when I read PG’s essay, I was like, oh, this is a complaint about bureaucracy as much as it’s a complaint about politics.

It's this cultural thing of builders in, prigs out. There are all these memes like “high agency” or “founder mode” or “live players” or “you can just do things.” My friend Clara, who edits Asterisk Magazine, was telling me about some conference where someone called it “Robert Moses libertarianism.” What does that even mean? And I think this is incoherent, except for that Moses was really going founder mode. He was a high agency guy. He’s very effective, right? And there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who’s super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.

That relates to why I see progress as like the primary coalition rather than like left or right. Or as Lonsdale calls it, the “builder class.” There is economic self-interest, obviously, but it’s also an aesthetic preference.

Another consequence is that this is causing real rifts between maga right and tech right — most notably over H1-B, but IMO that’s a sign of more fights to come.

The more traditional conservatives — not Hanania, that is — go on to express skepticism about the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort); its willingness to endure short-term social harms for long-term economic gains; and its overall bias toward disruption — whatever chaos may come. They’re suspicious of tech’s talk about “human capital” and its flirtations with fascism. The essays read like a warning to fellow reactionaries: Can the tech titans be trusted to preserve American values? Or are they riding the Trump train on the way to a robot-ruled transhumanist utopia? Take slogans like Accelerate or die! — there’s nothing “conservative” about it.

GURPS Lux

My friend Zed Lopez has bravely attempted to create a clarified introduction to Steve Jackson’s tabletop roleplaying game GURPS — “the generic universal roleplaying system”. (Cue joke based on Voltaire’s famous snarky comment about the Holy Roman Empire.)

This is a tutorial for GURPS 4^th edition. If you have basic familiarity with tabletop RPGs but are new to GURPS, this is for you. I hope it will provide the basic GURPS literacy [⋯] to convey GURPS’ concepts, but ultimately won’t present a playable game. [⋯]

We’ll begin with an extremely barebone set of rules and then add things a few at a time. In service of simplicity, I’ll say a few things I’ll take back or qualify later. A lot of things I’ll qualify later, but I’ll keep to a minimum the things I take back altogether.

Lengthy, carefully-considered, and headings are nicely witty where opportunity presents.

Chidi

Over on Bluesky, my internet friendquaintance Dr. Damien P. Williams snarked a reference to the TV series The Good Place:

Current position on the Chidi Anagonye Anxiety Brain Scale:

“The Sound that a Fork Makes in the Garbage Disposal”

It inspired me to make a silly meme image:

I am proud of my little creation. Assembling it and seeing the two ends of the scale gave me an unnervingly useful realization.

If you don’t know the show, it is one of the best TV series ever made.

An invitation to Buffy

It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.

Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.

The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.

So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.

I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.

If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:

• S04E10 “Hush” — a nifty formal experiment (it is almost a silent movie) and one of the scariest things ever put on broadcast televison
• S03E06 “Band Candy” — a mostly-comedic personal favorite
• S02E07 “Lie To Me” — a perfect “basic” episode of the show, with a poignant ending which gives me an allergy attack every time
• S04E04 “Fear Itself” — a showcase for the show’s mix-of-tones trick

Feminist propaganda to men

A friend of mine, a cis woman I admire, posted this meme image.

With all due respect, its caption is a crock of shit.

Forgive me for sounding harsh. But … c’mon.

Men are rewarded, not punished, for violating gendered behavior norms? Really?

All men could do what a handsome movie star with professional-grade dance training & talent did? Really?

I live my life joyfully violating “traditional” masculinity in numerous ways. I strongly advocate other fellas doing the same, both for the world’s sake and their own. But that has had costs. I have experienced how belief in dogma is far from the only thing holding men back. I have experienced how that dogma itself is far from fragile.

My friend knows she lacks direct lived experience of how people assigned male at birth experience The Patriarchy, but I know for a fact that she has significant indirect experience of how vigorously The Patriarchy enforces gendered norms on us. I think that if she had reflected for a moment, she would have realized that the meme was saying something absurd. But feminist-informed social justice advocacy culture is irresponsibly sloppy in the way we talk about this stuff.

(I say “we” because I myself am guilty of this all too often.)

When we say these kinds of things to men, all too often this discredits our entire movements. Consider how commentary like that meme lands for the very men we should most try to address, fellas chafing against the masculine norms projected by The Patriarchy without language to describe their frustrations. Not only don’t we know what the heck we are talking about, our misunderstanding is so perversely wrong that we implicitly cast blame on individual men for responding to the pressures of The Patriarchy. We assert that men are delusional about those pressures!

It is doubly galling for women to make these claims about mens’ experiences and conditions. Feminist women should know better than to make that mistake.

We must keep in mind that men bear moral responsibility to overthrow The Patriarchy without women having to lift a finger. But pragmatically, we know that men need help. Too often feminist culture does the opposite. Fergawdsake let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

And let’s not deny Mr. Holland credit for doing something gutsy and difficult.

American fascist strongman style

This isn’t me; it’s a capture of most of a snarky but instructive 2020 Twitter thread from Elizabeth “Neoreaction: A Basilisk” Sandifer

I have heard it suggested that Tom Cotton might be the next charismatic Republican leader, and I think y’all have some serious misunderstandings about the aesthetics of fascism.

It’s gonna be Josh Hawley. He always looks like he’s about to bust out into a chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”

Guys no.

The fascist aesthetic is not “interchangeable scrawny white guy in a suit.” Where’s the perversity in your appeal?

Do I have to spell out the aesthetic? The fash strongman has to embody masculinity, but not in a way that offers an unobtainable ideal. So: not too pretty/athletic. Maybe once in his prime, but if so, definitely gone to pasture a bit. Can’t quite be a dweeb, which is why Carlson had to put on weight before he could play the part and why Ted Cruz needs to lose that ridiculous Roger Delgado beard. You want manly, but not actually attractive. Slightly unkempt is good for this.

Again, what’s important is a perverse appeal. Fugly, as the kids used to say. A charisma that stubbornly defies observable reality.

This [Dan Crenshaw] is a damn fascist strongman.

Tucker [Carlson] absolutely has the it. You’d have crowds of angry screaming men wearing bowties. Matt Smith would be the new Pepe. Genuinely nightmarish.

Women have a hard time with the fash aesthetic, which is too misogynistic for them to thrive at the top. [Sarah] Palin came closest because, again, perversity.

Dan Bongino is probably the one figure that i’d be most alarmed to hear was mounting an exploratory committee.

Dark horse, but … Yeah, that’s the look.

Re: Trump Jr, nah. Can’t make lightning strike twice.

Peter Theil or Elon Musk?

Good lord no.

the Hillbilly Elegy guy [JD Vance]

Maaaaybe. But I doubt it. Too much “it’s ok, sometimes puberty is just really late” energy. (As distinct from Carlson, which is “look, puberty doesn’t work out for everyone and that’s OK.” Which works. Fascist masculinity is a subtle beast.)

Oh Well, no Carl of Swindon candidate on the cards then. What about The Rock though? He’s known as a republican right? I couldn’t see him as fash himself but maybe as an easy backdoor useful idiot for a fash establishment?

This overcorrects into “too attractive.” Men need to idolize but also plausibly aspire to.

The “completely made up set of medals” thing is 💯💯💯 — [Sheriff David] Clarke has the exact right fragile masculinity for fascism, which is to say one that is utterly oblivious to its fragility.

Someone said Matt Walsh, and guys, you cannot simply beard your way out of dweebhood.

Ben Sasse … I see where you’re going but I don’t think you’re quite there.

Weev demonstrates that there is such a thing as overdoing it.

Superman music

I am seduced by hype for James Gunn’s forthcoming Superman film and want to capture a thought about the music.

If you have seen any of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, you know that he is shameless and effective in using music.

This week, to hype the movie, first they released a “motion poster”, which is ordinarily a hokey marketing thing.

I was among the nerds surprised to have feelings about it, because of something very cunning going on the music. Moviebob, my favorite pop-geekculture media commentator, said earnestly:

This particular filmmaker understands what he’s been handed with this character at this moment, to do something very special and transcendent and important.

For a slightly-animated image with one minute of music?

Well, the music starts with the barest hint of Hans Zimmer’s Superman theme from Zach Snyder’s Superman films, featuring Henry Cavill as Superman.

Snyder’s films have some charms — that score among them — but I am among those who deeply hate them as misunderstanding what Superman is about. They even got Superman’s hair wrong, which sounds like a small thing but I think it is actually important. Snyder give us a “gritty”, pessimistic Superman, which is just plain wrong.

So I heard a Message from Gunn in how after that whisper of Zimmer, it turns to a new arrangement of John Williams’ Superman March from the films featuring Christopher Reeve as Superman.

Hope. Joy. Fun. Sunshine.

That’s what hooked me, and Moviebob, and plenty of other nerds.

And then, because everything is marketing decadence, the following day there was … not a proper trailer, not even a teaser trailer, but a teaser for the teaser trailer. It did the same thing with the music again! And the theme sure as heck was hope, with the tagline “look up”.

I am a sentimental nerd and I watched this a lot of times. And I noticed a second thing about the music, which reminded me of another John Williams theme dear to my nerdy heart: the Force theme from Williams’ opera cycle Star Wars, which I think is the best work of Williams’ amazing career as a film composer.

I think that part of the secret of the Force theme is that Williams never completes it. It always just drifts off, unresolved, producing a feeling of longing, most apparent in its use with young Luke gazing into Tattooine’s binary sunset in the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The music for both the Superman poster and the teaser-teaser did that same thing, not quite finishing the Superman March.

So I made a prediction. We know that Gunn’s movie will not just re-use Williams’ score and themes; Gunn has described his excitement at the original score that composer John Murphy has created. But I think the use of Williams’ theme is not just for this marketing material. I expect the score for the new film to sprinkle it in at key places … and every time it will tug at our heartstrings by not completing it. After the teaser-teaser, I imagined that Gunn might even defer completing the Williams’ “Superman March” to a later film.

But then we got the full teaser trailer, including yet another new arrangement of Williams’ theme.

And I am a sentimental nerd and watched that a lot of times. If you want to see a bunch of nerdy adults feeling like kids again, YouTube is full of people recording themselves watching it. Music is not the only thing hooking us — there is a lot going on in two almost-wordless minutes — but it plays a big part.

It seems at first that this trailer completes the Williams theme, but it actually stops just short of that, hiding what it is doing under a crescendo echoing Superman whistling in the middle of the trailer. Given the context, that delivers all the warmth and hope one could ask for. But. It is not quite the same thing as closing the theme.

This makes me pretty sure that I was right about the forthcoming film toying with us by using Williams’ March without completing it.

I’m going to place a marker on an even more specific prediction. We will finally get the March completed over the last shot of Gunn’s film, when the story has earned it. Then the closing titles will start, and just as the 1978 Superman film opened with a proper overture over the titles, turning from the horns of the March to strings and such playing out all of the musical leitmotifs (starting at 2:15 in this capture of those titles), so too the closing titles of Gunn’s 2025 Superman will transition smoothly to all that film’s themes. I bet there will even be a bit more of Williams in there.

I also predict that Gunn’s Superman is going to make me cry like a baby. He understands the assignment.

Fashy flags

Capturing a long-running Twitter thread about weird flags flown by the far right in the US.

This started when I needed a flag image for another long thread of mine about American fascist iconography more broadly —

We should not pretend that we do not know what these signify.

Führerprinzip

This flag started my quest, because I had seen it obliquely in photos of a pro-Trump street action. What, precisely, do Trump and police “keep America safe” from? Fascism promises to rescue the nation from corrupting influences. Followers don’t need to say who.

The personality cult of Trump inclines toward fascism. He is the nation.

A fantasy of Trump as hyper-masculine hyper-violent warlord, in defiance of democratic institutions.

Trump as a Totenkopf symbol of a literal supervillain, representing ruthless vigilante violence against those he sees as corrupting society. This is also, perversely, reflective of support for police violence, as police have embraced the Punisher skull.

The anti-democratic impulse laid bare. Note that the rifle-bearing knights which flank King Trump evoke the Crusades, an image favored by the far right to reflect the need for war for “Western values” …

Christian nationalism

To much of the far right, the truth behind the nation is revealed to be Christianity, as manifested specifically with American Evangelical imagery. The claim that the fundamental truth of the nation is Christianity is fascist Christian Nationalism.

The Hospitallers’ Cross reflects the far right’s fascination with symbols of the Crusades, hunger to “defend” with violence “the West” against foreign corruption encroaching on what they claim to be their territory. Para-fascist sentiments again.

An aside about kitsch

It is tempting to laugh at a variation on that theme like this and dismiss it, but it is important to recognize a pattern here. Not all kitsch is fascist, but one should recognize how the fascist sensibility is attracted to kitschy & schmaltzy over-sentimental imagery, and they enjoy how the leftish intellectuals they hate dislike it.

The thin blue flag

A lot of these flags include a reference to the Thin Blue Line flag, representing “support for police” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests — an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s — but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.

As Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Harper’s has a (paywalled) article about the developing symbolism of the Thin Blue flag from the indispensible Jeff Sharlet. Antifascist leftist Gwen Snyder wrote a Twitter thread outlining the cultural politics well:

So the blue line has always been a combination of funereal and problematic.

It’s Friday night and I’m going off memory and a little wikipedia for this, so don’t take this thread as high-level research, but here’s the deal in broad strokes.

To understand why the thin blue line is problematic, you kinda have to grok why American policing is problematic.

American police forces essentially have their roots in a combination of slave patrols and, to a lesser extent, strikebreaking forces.

Policing was an institution designed to violently enforce inequity on behalf of capital. As #blm made clear again, that dynamic that persists.

The imagery of the blue line comes from a 1911 poem praising the blue-uniformed police as holding down a “thin blue line” between order and chaos.

An awful lot of the “chaos” the police were suppressing in 1911 had to do with black folks resisting lynching & demanding dignity.

An awful lot of the “chaos” police forces were used to surpress right then were black folks who, ahem, “didn’t know their place” and also pesky workers who kept insisting that they shouldn’t be locked into firetraps and perish in sweatshop infernos.

It wasn’t a high point.

Still, the blue line became a go-to verbal and visual symbol for police in general, and that symbol entered police mourning culture, as epitomized by the blue line armband.

So the blue line came to represent two things simultaneously: the broad and deeply problematic institution of modern American policing, but also — quite viscerally for the families & colleagues of fallen officers — the loss of a loved one.

So, there’s always been a tension.

When #BlackLivesMatter hit, right wing opportunists who didn’t give a fuck about anything except maintaining class division responded with “all lives matter,” pretending as though saying that black lives matter implied that white lives didn’t.

“All lives matter” was a white kneejerk response to “black lives matter.”

This is my favorite cartoon on the subject. Black kids were getting shot over bags of skittles and their community was like, our kids’ lives aren’t worthless.

What #blm means is, “our lives matter, too“

All houses matter, but you emergency-address the one on fire.

And black lives were being burned on the pyre of white supremacy.

As they always have been in America.

A sub-category of the “all lives matter” reactionary response to #blm was, “blue lives matter.” The right wing media-promoted premise was, well, if we’re talking about people getting killed, cops get killed a lot, too. Why aren’t we talking about that?

And a few hardcore folks might disagree with me here, but I think even on the kinda far left, consensus tends to be, no one wants anyone to die, including cops.

But, becoming a cop means deliberately assuming a certain amount of risk voluntarily and getting compensated for it.

Black folks don’t voluntarily assume the extremely heightened risk of getting murdered by paid agents of the government (cops) for being black. They can’t opt out. They don’t get a middle class, family sustaining wage for it, or a pension.

They just get to die.

The reactionary “blue lives matter” movement adopted the thin blue line, and the blue line flag, as their symbol.

And, it also continued to represent individual officers’ loss of life outside the “all lives matter”/”black lives matter”/”blue lives matter” discursive battles.

So there are folks who see and understand the blue line flag as specifically a solemn reminder of lost loved ones. But in the wake of #blm especially, it was also a symbol externally (and, let’s be real, internally) leveraged against black communities’ demands for basic respect.

American fascism often presents superficially as anti-authoritarian, but the embrace of a police state is telling.

Here we get our themes combined: nation defined by guns for vigilante violence, support of the state’s agents of violence, Maximum Leader. Which opens another theme …

Gun fetishism

The naming of weapons as central to the soul of the nation is enthusiasm for violence.

Often literally just guns

More explicitly fascist sensibilities

Far right use of “We the People” bends the democratic sentiment to hint that they are the only true American people. The nation is white conservatives and their instruments of violence. A para-fascist sentiment.

This flag brings our themes together to tell us that the True American People are defined by their adherence to true religion plus their enthusiasm for violence, which is necessary because they face unnamed threats. This is a fascist sentiment.

This flag combines far right symbols with only a hint of the US flag remaining. The “III” is a reference to Three Percenters, far right paramilitary gun nuts who say that only 3% of Americans who took up arms for the Revolution against England.

This variant is not simply a claim of popular support. It is a threat.

Additional flag vocabulary

This inversion of normal US flag symbolizes the sovereign citizen movement, a far right conspiracy theory which holds that the US government is illegitimate. If you have ever had someone rant about gold fringe on a US flag and admiralty law, you have encountered them.

This is the “no quarter” flag symbolizing a fascist desire to mass murder their political enemies.

This flag from the Whiskey Rebellion — y’know, the one that was put down when President Washington personally rode to Pennsylvania at the head of an army — has been turning up a bit, reflecting a sentiment of violently rebelling against the Federal government in rejection of its legitimate right to tax citizens.

Two symbols for the same thing appear on this flag. The “Hawai’ian” floral print evokes a “big luau”, which rhymes with both “big igloo” and “boogaloo”, reflecting the far right militias eager to fight in “Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo”.

More on fashy American aesthetics

I eventually need to capture this post’s sister thread on Twitter. For now, I’ll just add the single best thing in it, a link to Nate Powell’s sophisticated meditation on American masculinity and far right aesthetics, About Face.

And I’ll end with this flag, which has it all. If you don’t recognize the Greek, it means “come and take them”, a reference to the right’s fantasy that the Government Will Come Take Our Guns.