The Conspiracy Theory

In an important sense, there are not conspiracy theories, plural; there is only one conspiracy theory, singular. I confess to borrowing from (and reversing) this witty joke:

Enough! Don’t listen to this guy. Everything’s conspiracies with him.

Not conspiracies. Conspiracy. Singular. Reaching back to Ancient Egypt, there’s been a single cabal of powerful individuals directing the course of human history. But the common man prefers to believe they don’t exist. Which aids their success.

Global warming? Military upheavals in the third world? Actors elected to public office? The spread of coffee bars? Germs outpacing antibiotics? And boy bands? Come on! Who would gain from all this?

Who indeed?

The particular terms of The Conspiracy Theory are endlessly mutable, but the basic story is the same whether it is QAnon or the New World Order or the Illuminati or whatever:

• a small homogeneous group, Them, secretly control the world to nefarious purpose
• simultaneously They are
• pervasive and hidden
• seductive and repulsive
• vulnerable enough to need to act through guile and capable enough to control almost everything
• They are sexually perverse, including personally abusing children out of cruelty and literal thirst for their blood
• wars and social breakdown come from Their deliberate efforts, simultaneously
• to profit materially
• to make people at large easier for Them to control
• to satisfy a perverse desire to destroy everything good (which may feed the inhuman source of Their power)
• most seemingly powerful leaders in politics, business, et cetera are puppets whom They manipulate through Their direct control of
  • banks
  • popular art & media
  • universities

This should sound familiar.

The Conspiracy Theory is a cognitohazard: a seductive, simplistic funhouse mirror version of how power works. By collapsing the frustratingly diffuse mix of people and institutions which enable systemic processes of power into a far less unruly package — an imagined small coördinated circle of villains of pure malice, Them — The Conspiracy Theory offers a paradoxically comforting nightmare. Someone is in control of All This. The world can be made right, simply, by eliminating Them. The quip “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” alludes to this: antisemitism says that our troubles come not the system of capitalism, but from The Jews.

One cannot avoid addressing antisemitism when thinking about The Conspiracy Theory, because the first perfected form of it was published as propaganda in a tsarist disinformation campaign at the dawn of the 20^th century: Протоколы собраний ученых сионских мудрецов — the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which cast The Jews as Them.

The Conspiracy Theory tends to feed fascism, in a way that illuminates how fascism works and what it really is. Fascism is not simply authoritarianism, but a way of thinking about politics and society which says We Must Use Violence To Destroy Those Who Have Corrupted The Natural Greatness Of The True People Of The Nation. Since Nazis put The Jews at the top of the list of Those Who Corrupt, drawing on the Protocols and its decendants, it is tempting to imagine that antisemitism is part of the definition of fascism.

But neither fascism nor The Conspiracy Theory are always or simply antisemitic.

One popular variant of The Conspiracy Theory says that They are shapeshifting space lizards.

Many contemporary fascists cast trans people as Them, a frightening and frighteningly effective innovation, since in amplifying fascism’s anxieties about masculinity, in being a small-yet-pervasive population, in and many other ways trans people fulfill the function of Them in fascism and The Conspiracy Theory even better than Jews do. This is not an entirely new development, nor does it entirely displace antisemitism: transphobia & antisemtism were deeply entangled in the Nazis’ eyes, of course, much as they are now.

Since the Protocols cast a long shadow, people who fall deep into any version of The Conspiracy Theory have a tendency to find their way into antisemitism, or at least into alliance with people who do cast The Jews as Them. (This is a good place to point to Reb Danya Ruttenberg’s Antisemitism Post™ as a useful touchstone.)

Since The Conspiracy Theory is a cognitohazard, its gets into everything, including a lot of things I love like The X-Files and Blade and They Live. That does not mean one has to walk away from them.

The Conspiracy Theory has been integral to American politics for a long time. From The Paranoid Style In American Politics, written by Richard Hofstadter in 1964, which feels as fresh as yesterday in too many ways:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons — later, Negroes and Jews — have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Learn the scent.

Build up intellectual defenses.

Dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must

On Twitter, Julian Sanchez offers a news clip featuring video (starting at 5:08) of Roger Stone dictating a Trump campaign memo two days before the 2020 election:

Starting at 5:08, Stone says:

Although state officials in all fifty states must ultimately certify the results of the voting in their state, the final decision as to who the state legislatures authorize be sent to the Electoral College is a decision made solely by the legislature. Any legislative body may decide, on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud, to send electors to the Electoral College who accurately reflect the President’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud.
[⋯]
We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures by personal contact, and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in the their state — in each state — that this may need to happen.

Sanchez says:

So they were plotting to cry “fraud” and attempt to steal the White House even before the election.

Stating the obvious and all, but this seems relevant to the question of whether Trump believed what he was saying. They’d decided on this course before any of the specious “evidence of fraud” had even been fabricated.

Obviously I remember Trump planting the “if I lose they cheated” seed well in advance, once it was apparent he was likely to lose. But I hadn’t realized the whole scheme of pressuring state legislatures to throw out the results was being actively planned so early.

John Holbo expands:

[ deep breath ]

It’s worse. It’s so, so bad — so much worse even than that — that it’s hard to keep the big picture in view. But let’s try.

Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as “dangerous” and “fraudulent” as early as April, 2020. So they were plotting to cry “fraud” and attempt to steal the White House even before the election. In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless.

But let’s just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many Republicans’s have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.

Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat — to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by Democrats. To repeat (this is so incredible but it’s true): he was so invested in stealing the election, even as early as April, 2020, that he calculated that it was worthwhile to sacrifice his chances of winning the election honestly, to increase his chances of winning dishonestly.

Can I really crawl inside his head and know this was his plan, not just his moment-by-moment instinct? Isn’t he just a guy who always screams ‘fraud?’ It’s like breathing? Yes. Even so. His Machiavellian mind, or lizard brain, as you like it, was enacting the plan by April. By April, he was putting an awful lot of chips on this:

Election night, Trump is ahead in at least some key states, and then we get up the next morning and he’s behind. Then he screams fraud. Then there’s total chaos, and Trump hopes to emerge holding the vote bag — somehow.

This has been his modus operandi in business for decades. Profit in the chaos of collapse. Trump is the guy who convinced me Gary Gygax was right. There is such a thing as “chaotic” as a stable alignment. Trump wants to do it the chaos way. He feels he’s strongest then.

I’ll say it one last time and move on to my next point: expending political capital, diminishing one’s own strength, to invest in capacity to convincingly allege fraud, based on nothing, shows intent to falsely allege fraud.

We want what we are willing to spend to get. Trump spent.

Next point: what are we forgetting about election 2020? What has faded in the rearview? And what are we forgetting about January 6, as well? What common denominator of both events - that seem so seared into our brains - has sort of slipped away?

Answer: the ex ante likelihood of way more confusion than there turned out to be, in the event. Epistemic chaos. The day before the election, it seemed so, so likely that there would be at least a few places in which the results would be legitimately disputed, after the fact. Maybe there would be violence on the day. But at least there would be nailbiters, jurisdictions in which something goes wrong, at least looks bad. Trump was planning on that. If there is any epistemic chaos, he can scream ‘fraud!’ and provoke a constitutional crisis.

Then it’s a jump ball and he figures Republicans are going to be more ruthless than Democrats in that sort of environment. (Probably right.) Plus there’s a Republican majority on the Supreme Court.

The fact is: there wasn’t any ‘epistemic chaos’ whatsoever. The election results were very clear, and no credible allegations of fraud emerged. Fox called it for Biden in Arizona on election night. 2000 mules is silly. The Kraken ain’t even a shrimp.

And yet, even with that level of crystal clarity, here we are, in 2023, and the 2024 Republican Prez nomination is all about Trump still trying to retroactively gaslight us about 2020. Imagine if he had had anything to work with. Anything at all, beside the pillow guy’s nonsense?

That is to say:

• Trump was planning on chaos.
• chaos seemed awfully likely.
• if there had been chaos, he might have pulled it off. It came shockingly close to working with no chaos.

Which brings us to January 6. What went wrong on January 6 for Trump? The same damn thing that went wrong on election day: no chaos. Of course there was plenty of chaos on January 6, but no epistemic chaos. No real uncertainty about what happened or who was at fault.

Trump was bargaining on some clash that was more ambiguous. Imagine if there had been some Antifa there. Imagine if anyone on the left had done anything wrong - even one thing that even looked sus - on that day? Imagine if the left had not been pure as Caesar’s wife on Jan 6?

But in fact it was totally clear that it was Trump’s fault. It’s all on damn film. There aren’t any real doubts. And still Trump has convinced his followers and he leads the Republican Party. Imagine if there had been actual moral confusion — as opposed to just violence — on the day?

Trump was planning all along to leverage reasonable doubt, on election day, on January 6, to steal the election. He figured he could make doubts break his way. And I think he was probably right.

Because there turned out to be no doubt. And he’s still making a show of it, with absolutely nothing to work with. No one even has a theory anymore about how 2020 was stolen. People at least think they have a blurry snapshot of Bigfoot. So, to conclude this thread: yeah, they were planning to cry ‘fraud!’ and steal the White House as early as early November. Trump was demonstrably planning it as early as April. Heck, he was probably vaguely planning it from November 7, 2016.

But who knows? Maybe, after he won that first time, he planned to ‘go straight’ for a change. Maybe victory went to his head and he dreamed of being a great President by non-fraudulent means. I’m willing to believe he dreamed of that for a day or a week. I’m not such a cynic!

Independence Day

This is a deep revision of my old Independence Day post. (And I sharpened it up here in 2023.)

On this day, arriving in a dire moment in American life, I want to celebrate how our national holiday commemorates neither a military victory nor founding an institution, but rather people signing a statement of principles: the Declaration Of Independence.

Some of the principles the Founders asserted 246 years ago are superb. Frankly, many of them are … not so much. And we have failed to live up to the best of those principles.

But celebrating the nation by pointing to its defining principles — not land or blood or history or institutions, but principles — is good. So every year I re-read the Declaration on Indpendence Day.

I offer reflections on my favorite parts.

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them

I could do without the implicit sexism, but taking care to name your reasons for your politics is good.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

Being clear about which key points one takes as axiomatic — points where one refuses to even enter into an argument about them — is good. I recently learned that Benjamin Franklin suggested that bit, telling Jefferson that his initial draft “sacred and undeniable” was not strong enough.

that all men are created equal [⋯] with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

As Heather Cox “How The South Won The Civil War”Richardson observes …

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

… so this is good stuff.

And I love how the Declaration says “among these” rights. We have a lot of rights. We have too many rights to list. This is just a start, naming some of the key big ones. Especially delightful to me is naming “pursuit of happiness” in that top tier of rights. A frank admission that we cannot demand happiness, combined with the insistence that we are entitled to the things we need to have in order try for happiness. Again the expansive implications of not enumerating the particulars, as there are too many and the principle runs deeper any examples could encompass.

to secure these rights, governments are instituted

Our rights do not bind and limit government. Our rights do not come from government. Our rights exist prior to government. Our rights are what government is for.

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

When people do not accept their government’s legitimacy, it renders that government inherently unjust. We have a word for this principle: “democracy”.

whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it the right of the people to alter or to abolish it

Again, government is our instrument. If it does not secure our rights, it has failed and we can fix it.

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security

Duty.

These are instructions.

in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury

The first step in political change is to name the problems, to open the possibility of a correction.

we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor

For political change we must act in solidarity, backed by all we are and all we possess.

Every year on Independence Day I also re-read a speech by the greatest American, Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Douglass underlines the paradox that the very people who declared these principles held other people in the bondage of slavery, as profound a betrayal of humanity and equality and rights as one could imagine, persisting among those founders’ children and grandchildren.

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States …

Though we ended the slavery of his time, I humbly submit that we continue to fail too much, too often, in too many ways. Our nation still merits Douglass’ scathing words.

When I read these two great documents, I revisit those American principles. I ask myself what my principles are and how I may fulfill my principles better. I keep returning to the same statement of my most fundamental politics, my version of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”:

all people are equal in rights, dignity, and moral claim to the fruits of this world

all people

ALL people

ALL PEOPLE

And rights are necessary but not sufficient. Our moral equality extends to our essential value, to respect, to our material needs.

I hold those truths to be self-evident

My nation was born from slavery & genocide, the greatest injustices I can imagine. It perpetuates both, and their consequences, to this very day. But our national holiday reminds us how the USA came with a manual which counters those by getting some very important things very right.

1. We start from principles
2. Those principles hold that government — the public’s instrument for explicitly shaping society — has no legitimacy if it does not ensure liberty & equality for all
3. We are not simply entitled to direct the nation to liberty & equality for all; we have an obligation to correct every failure in that purpose

The founding crimes of slavery & genocide rendered the entire system which supported them illegitimate on its own terms. So do our ongoing crimes. Every American bears an obligation to stand up for aligning our nation with its highest principles.

The important issues

For perspective, I consider these the most important issues in the world:

1. Ensuring the material sustainability of human civilization is more important than everything else put together. This includes not just climate change but also resource exhaustion, ecosystem breakdown, nuclear & biotech weapons, and so forth.
2. Global poverty is more important than the sum of everything other than the the material sustainability of human civilization. About a billion human beings will go to bed hungry tonight. About another billion are poor enough that they do not have shoes. The next billion are not doing so great, either: they suffer with easily preventable diseases, backbreaking substistance labor, and other fundamental privations.

I cannot name the ^#3 problem in the world; the next tier has several problems which are tough to rank:

• Millions live in slavery
• We have ongoing slow genocides and outbreaks of acute genocide
• Billions live under authoritarian states, and the liberal democracies all have authoritarian movements growing in strength
• Preventable diseases — easily preventable, even trivially preventable — kill millions each year, and severely disable millions more
• We have constant bloody wars

We should be working harder on the big problems.

My contribution is not necessarily special, but I really should be working harder on this stuff. Partly this is my own failure. Partly this results from living in a society in which one must kick & scratch hard to get to work on the big problems. Which is itself a big problem.

Media

I was moved to post this because I was just asked, “Do you feel that you, your interests or your community are represented in the media? Why or why not? What do you wish people knew?” That is not quite the same question, but obviously it is related. My answer to that was:

1. The climate crisis and general breakdown of the material sustainability of human civilization is not just the most important thing, it is more important than everything else put together. On the one hand, I am frustrated that this is not central to all news & political reporting; on the other hand, everything to say has been said. That this is barely reflected at all in news & political media is maddening.
2. The threat of fascism and the broader far right as a driving force in US politics — both in our political culture and in its hold on political institutions — is not just the most important political story in the US, it is more important than every other political story put together. In this instance there is a lot left to say, including that every political story needs to be informed by this ongoing issue.
3. The US is in the grip of institutional breakdown across all institutions, public and private, with decades-deep taproots. Few Americans can name this pervasive problem, and many cannot even conceive of effective institutions. This underlying problem drives both our inability to address the climate crisis and also our susceptibility to the anti-politics transformative fantasies of the far right.
4. The ongoing crises above produce and are supported by a failure of American political and policy imagination. Without the ability to imagine big changes to make things better, we cannot address their challenges. Political media — especially accessible progressive political media — need to put big ideas on the table as plausible to consider and to enact.
5. All of these connect to the issue on which I am an obsessed crank: the built environment of American life created through decades of suburbanizing housing and transit policy making the material fundamentals of living resource-intensive, expensive, soul-deadening, and corrosive of social cohesion. Most Americans cannot imagine the world with less economic and logistical pressure and stronger communities which we could have that also dramatically reduces pressures on the climate and ecosystems.

This American moment of reälignment

A Twitter thread from Thomas Zimmer describes very well my own read of the mechanics of the dangerous fecklessness of the Democratic Party in this moment. Here’s a taste:

The fundamental asymmetry of American politics is captured precisely by the fact that Pelosi won’t stop with the “strong GOP” nostalgia while no one on the Republican side would even consider saying something like this about the Democratic Party. It’s so bizarre.

[⋯]

One important explanatory factor is age: People like Pelosi came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress — and they are longing for a return to the days of amity across party lines.

Additionally, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an “Un-American” faction by most Republicans has deeper ideological roots.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing. (I archived it at the bottom of this post, in case Twitter fails.) And it got me ranting on Twitter, which I have refined here.

Geezer Democrats’ confused nostalgia for Working With Republicans is driven by memories reaching all of the way back to the Nixon era, misunderstanding the history of major American political reälignments. So we have to talk about that history to understand the dynamics on the right side of the aisle which brought us here.

FDR created a political era shaped by the New Deal and its legacy of the regulatory and social insurance state. The Democratic Party became the party of New Deal liberalism; Republicans became the party of Sure, But Slow Down There Bucko.

Through the long middle of the 20^th century, the parties were ideologically incoherent in today’s terms. The Democrats were the more liberal side but their coalition included the racist whites of the South who still refused to vote for Lincoln’s party, which is why many New Deal policies set terms for “universal” benefits which in practice excluded Black people. The Republicans largely opposed Democrats’ liberal social insurance policies, but had to respond to those policies’ popularity. These ideological coalitions shaped by the popularity of New Deal policy explain why Republican Presidents Eisenhower & Nixon seem oddly liberal on policy to contemporary eyes.

Nixon started the process of breaking the New Deal political order with his Southern Strategy of appealing to racist whites in the South. Reagan secured that shift, bringing millions of former Democratic voters into a new Republican coalition which would become the new lodestar of US politics replacing the New Deal: movement conservatism.

Movement conservatism bound together pseudo-libertarian neoliberalism dedicated to tearing down the regulatory and social insurance state of the New Deal (for the benefit of corporations aka rich people) with “social conservatism” of racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism. This coalition does not really make sense, but Reagan figured out how to say that New Deal universal social insurance and public goods are bad because they benefit undeserving (Black) people without it sounding harsh or nonsensical, which is why conservatives still revere him.

Reagan made movement conservatism the new lodestar of US politics, just as FDR had done with the New Deal. The Democrats became the party of Sure, But Slow Down There Bucko.

Geezer Democrats like Biden & Pelosi learned to do politics during Reagan’s administration as this new US politics took shape. New Deal liberalism was bleeding but not yet dead, so Democrats held enough power to force Republicans in Congress to work with them for a while. Though the neoliberal turn by the Dems had its organic element — in retrospect we can see Carter as a proto-neolib — since movement conservatism crushed Democrats in elections time and time again when they tried the old New Deal playbook, the neolibs were the last Democrats standing, and Clinton’s administration secured their hold on the Party. The long Reagan moment, in which there was politics to do be done by slowly capitulating to movement conservatism as the new center of US politics, is the lost Arcadia which Pelosi describes yearning to return to. Her cohort came to understand the Slow Down There Bucko moves of WJC & BHO — NAFTA, balancing the budget, financial de-regulation, welfare “reform”, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan — as how effective operators win elections and pass legislation. In their experience, any other moves are dangerously naïve, a loser at the ballot. They had an intense formative experience in the last quarter of the 20^th century which taught them that working the playbook progressives advocate would be catastrophic, leaving Democrats with nothing.

As Zimmer’s Twitter thread shows, though, those geezer Democrats have not registered how Republican politics came to work under the long reign of movement conservatism. The True Believers of the movement conservative coalition are the “social conservatives” who think that they are the only Real Americans. The nihilists of the coalition just care about winning for their corporate friends, rather than about good governance … or democracy. Both parts of this electoral crew framed Democrats not merely as political opponents who were wrong — since that would have required arguing against liberal policy on the merits, which is hard — but rather framed Democrats as entirely illegitimate.

Many liberals draw an unwholesome comfort from believing that the Republican denial of Democrats’ legitimacy reflects a racist rejection of BHO and a sexist rejection of HRC and nothing else. I have talked about that before with respect to HRC’s Presidential candidacy:

If the Republican candidate for President in 2016 had been a movement conservative — Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or one of those guys — she would have crushed him like a bug.

But that was not the race we got.

The vitriol HRC & BHO faced from conservatives certainly was full of sexism & racism … but it was also there from Republican press and politicians during Bill Clinton’s Presidency. He faced endless absurd bullshit extending to the Wall Street Journal editorial page crediting crackpot nonsense routinely. As did Al Gore. As did John Kerry. As did Howard Dean. As does Joe Biden. The vast rightwing conspiracy has been working the refs for so long that a blizzard of nonsense for anyone left of the center of the Republican Party is baked in.

This refusal to actually engage with Democrats was the core strategy of the Gingrich cohort of Republicans in Congress elected in ’94, and conservatives and the Republican Party extended this denial of legitimacy to any small-d democratic institutions which denied them power in the fight over the 2000 Presidential election results. Republicans defied the popular vote, cheated in plain sight, and sacrificed the independence of the Supreme Court … to win against Al Gore of all people, the square white guy whom neolib centrist Bill Clinton picked as his campaign running mate in order to secure his right flank.

Figures like William F. Buckley had purged the far right wackos when they were building movement conservatism in the 1960s, but in the 1990s conservative media brought the nuts back in. Limbaugh and Fox “News” and the rest have skimmed the crazies looking for ideas which stick for the last 30 years now, leading conservative media further and further toward the far right each year.

Conservative media parallels the Republican Party leadership’s weird alliance of True Believer zealots and opportunistic Nihilists. All of these people benefit from denying Democrats’ & liberals’ fundamental legitimacy. The True Believers want Republican voters radicalized this way, because they really do believe that liberals are not Real Americans, while the Nihilists do not care so long as it buys them victories. After a few decades of this, the Republican Party and conservative media have pushed their voters further and further into denying liberals’ legitimacy in governance, or even as citizens.

This puts Republican electeds in a trap of their movement’s own making. If they engage in good faith with Democrats at all, they lose primaries against challengers who will oppose Democrats out of obstinate anti-liberalism. The Republican Party cannot bring back the Arcadia which geezer Democrats dream of, even if they wanted to.

At this point, the original dynamic of movement conservatism has completely reversed. Instead of Nihilist pseudo-libertarian neolibs with corporate money driving Republican policy by coating it in “socially conservative” rhetoric pushed through controlled media to bigoted voters, the Nihilists desperately chase after the True Believers. The tail wags the dog.

The success of DJT’s candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2016 emerged from these dynamics. The Republican Party establishment tried to discredit him, but they no longer called the tune. Even had DJT lost the election, his candidacy would have left movement conservatism as shattered as it is now, since movement conservatism had been barely holding togther, cracked beyond repair. The Republican Party — the entire conservative complex — dreads their nuttiest supporters. Conservative media platforms need the audience, so they feed the crazy; the Party needs the voters, so they pander. True Believers do not control the Republicans — at this moment no one does — but more and more of them now hold elected office.

One can miss how big this shift was because Trump’s disinterest in any actual governance kept the movement conservative policy zombie on its feet; rich sponsors of the destruction of the regulatory state still got their legislative victories. But the True Believers no longer need the Nihilists’ institutional support and thus no longer need to follow their lead on policy.

With this implosion and reversal, the Republican Party currently undergoing an internal reälignment as profound as the emergences of the New Deal and movement conservatism — and since the Democrats settled into standing for The Movement Conservative Agenda But Less for the last 30 years, they too will necessarily undergo a corresponding transformation. But Democratic leadership only know how to run the playbook that weathered the long neoliberal winter of movement conservatism, a world we cannot return to even if that were desirable.

The current Republican Party is terrifying. The term for politics which rejects the legitimacy of any politics or citizens occupying any other position, which uses liberal democratic norms in bad faith to destroy libdem institutions, which cares more about theatre than policy, which has a cult of personality around a hateful blatherer is … fascism. I do not think we arrived at a new era with a fully fascist Republican Party and a Democratic Party of Just Not Fascism. Things remain in motion. The Republicans could land in a different place, like maybe Strong Social Democracy But Only For Married People With Kids or something like that — but most of the possibilities are bad.

And a Republican Party which does go fully fascist would be a nightmare. Just Not Fascism describes most voters but it does not constitute either an electoral coalition or a governing coalition. A fascist Party would lose a lot of elections because fascism is unpopular, but determined fascists only have to win once because they will make sure to never allow a free election again.

The music will stop soon, and anyone who has not found a chair will be locked out of American politics for at least a couple of generations. The Democrats must seize the tiller and make sure that they, and not this Republican Party, define the new lodestar of US politics which will replace the movement conservatism which replaced New Deal liberalism. Yet sclerotic Democratic Party leaders cannot even see a need for a response to this moment of reälignment, much less offer a path through it.

Zimmer’s original thread

I want the Republican Party to take back the party to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment. Here I am, Nancy Pelosi, saying this country needs a strong Republican Party. Not a cult.

The fundamental asymmetry of American politics is captured precisely by the fact that Pelosi won’t stop with the “strong GOP” nostalgia while no one on the Republican side would even consider saying something like this about the Democratic Party. It’s so bizarre.

In a vacuum, yes, a functioning democracy should have several democratic parties competing with each other. But this type of fact-free nostalgia only perpetuates the myth of a GOP that was only recently captured by extremists — an aberration from the noble Republican norm. That mythical tale is utterly inadequate historically — the Republican Party that “cared about a woman's right to choose” and “cared about the environment” hasn’t existed since at least the 1970s, when conservatives became the dominating faction within the GOP.

What Pelosi is saying is significant, however, as a manifestation of much of the Democratic establishment’s inability to reckon with the radicalizing Republican assault on democracy and civil rights. I wrote about this a while ago for the Guardian:

The Republican party is abandoning democracy. There can be no ‘politics as usual’.

Many in the Democratic establishment act as if politics as usual is still an option and a return to “normalcy” imminent, even as Republicans could not be clearer about the fact that they consider Democrats the real enemy and Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate.

One important explanatory factor is age: People like Pelosi came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress — and they are longing for a return to the days of amity across party lines.

Additionally, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an “Un-American” faction by most Republicans has deeper ideological roots. Some establishment Democrats seem to feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism and status-quo dogma — they seem to believe that it is high time to push back against the “radical” forces of “leftism” and “wokeism.”

This helps explain why so many who are supposedly in the Democratic camp reflexively defend reactionary Supreme Court justices against relatively tame protests, defining peaceful demonstrations for civil rights and against the powerful as an illegitimate breach of “civility.” Much of the (older) Democratic establishment seems to be looking at the mobilization of civil society against reactionary conservative elites less as “We’re finally coming for you” and more as “They’re coming for all of us”. Not exactly a defense of democracy and civil rights. The Right’s dogma that the world works best when it’s run by (predominantly wealthy, predominantly male) white elites — that this is, in fact, the “natural order” of things that needs to be defended and upheld — evidently has some appeal beyond the conservative camp. Many Democratic elites also seem all too willing to accept conservative ideas of who represents the “real America,” and they still seem to operate from a premise of defining “white” as the American “normal” — which leads them to emphasize the interests of the GOP base.

The GOP has been focused almost solely on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives for decades and Republicans are explicitly claiming to be the sole proponents of this “real” (read: white Christian patriarchal) America. That’s why conservatives are willing to dismiss numerical Democratic majorities: They don’t count because they are based on a coalition of people whose status as members of the body politic is, at best, considered provisional and can always be revoked.

Many Democrats seem to have a hard time shaking such ideas of the (white) “normal,” of who does / doesn’t count as “real America.” And so they seem unwilling to go against those “real” Americans, opting to go against the interests of their own majority coalition instead.

The constant attempts to normalize a radicalizing Republican Party also have a lot to do with two foundational myths that have always shaped the collective imaginary: the myth of American exceptionalism and the myth of white innocence. Much of the Democratic elite still subscribes to an exceptionalist understanding that America is fundamentally good and inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be. It builds on a mythical tale of America’s past, describing democracy as old, consolidated, and exceptionally stable, ignoring the fact that multiracial democracy started not even 60 years ago. Acknowledging what the GOP has become goes against the pillars of that worldview.

To the extent that Democrats acknowledge, as Pelosi does, that there is something very wrong with the current GOP, they tend to present this as the result of an unfortunate and very recent departure from the Grand Old Party’s true noble self. It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of this aberrationist tale: If the problem is just that the true Republican Party has been captured by a few extremists, then all we need to do is to encourage all those good Republicans to stand up and take back their party. In this interpretation, what’s currently happening in American politics is basically just an unfortunate hiccup. No deeper ideological struggle detected, no need to revise the fundamental tale of America’s ever-progressing, ever-perfecting democracy.

In this way, the Democratic establishment’s “Make the GOP Great Again” nostalgia is also shaped by the paradigm of white innocence: Whatever animates white people’s extremism, it must not be racism and they cannot be blamed for their actions. The myth of white innocence has a sanitizing effect on the American political discourse: Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean — the incentive for politicians and pundits alike is to reach for non-incriminating explanations. The idea of white innocence also clouds the perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces — maybe they are just cowards, or they’re being seduced by the mean demagogue.

What about white Christian nationalist extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene who so very obviously don’t fit into the “Just seduced/scared to speak up” framework? They are exceptionalized: The fringe, the cult, as Pelosi says, an occupying force separate from the real GOP.

The president often tells the world how he likes Mitch McConnell, considers him a friend — perpetuating that same myth of the noble GOP that just temporarily lost its way: No matter what those “good” Republicans do, underneath they’re nice guys, they’ll snap out of it.

I get on with Mitch. I actually like Mitch McConnell. We like one another.

Politically, Democrats are in a tough situation. Pelosi gets a lot of applause for her “Strong GOP” nostalgia; Biden is measured by whether or not he can “unify” the country — not just by much of the established media, but also by a significant portion of Democratic voters. But what’s on display here isn’t just politics — it’s a specific worldview that prevents Democratic elites from acknowledging the depths of GOP radicalization, and from grappling honestly with the very difficult question of how to counter it effectively.

Ultimately, the “Strong GOP” nostalgia obscures the long-standing anti-democratic tendencies on the Right, the role of “normal” Republicans like Mitch McConnell, or the conservative legal movement’s decades-long crusade against the post-1960s civil rights order. Pretending the Republican Party was a noble, (small-d) democratic force for good until very recently is just political fiction; wishing such a party into existence won’t work.

Better to grapple with the GOP that actually exists — the one that’s an acute threat to democracy.

I made numerous small clarifying edits to this post 23 June 2023.

Fascism in history

Very intrigued with this interview with Kurt Weyland, who has just had a book published Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism During the Interwar Years. It clarifies some things about the relationship between 20^th century fascism versus other authoritarianisms, which I think is very important, though I think about it rather differently.

A few highlights I want to keep for future reference —

I think of fascism as a distinctive authoritarian ethos among other authoritarianisms — Weyland sees fascism as so distinctive that he splits it entirely from authoritarianism:

Fascism is a different type of political regime from authoritarianism. In the political science terminology, it’s totalitarian. It’s an effort to establish total control, to have strong mass mobilization pushed by the leader in order to bring a profound transformation of politics. And a profound transformation that is, in some sense, guided by a contradictory vision, bringing back elements of the long-forgotten past, but also in a form that is hypermodern, that uses the most advanced technology. And so, fascism is a profoundly totalitarian, very energetic, very dynamic, very mobilizational kind of system.

Conservative authoritarianism is very different because conservative authoritarianism wants to either preserve what exists or go back just a little bit to the preceding authoritarian regime that existed.

[...]

One can understand all authoritarianism, in some sense, like a division of labor. Let the elite and the government govern and the people stay out of it and don’t get involved in politics. And so, what underlies authoritarianism is a hierarchical approach to politics and approach where most of the population is supposed to be depoliticized, not to get involved. So, it doesn’t have nearly the dynamism, the energy of totalitarian fascism. And so, they’re quite different types of regimes. You just see that in a number of specific features. So, fascism is much more violent, much more imperialistic, much more expansionary than conservative authoritarianism.

[...]

authoritarian regimes used organized coercion of the state to employ usually targeted repression. And so authoritarian regimes tell the population, ‘Stay out of politics.’ And many people comply out of fear. And so that means that authoritarian regimes, most of the time do not need very much repression and they use the police and the military to specifically target people who actively oppose them. Fascism is very, very different partly because fascism emerged from bottom-up mass movements. [...] this is not the state using organized coercion. The mass movement takes over the state and because of its totalitarian goals of totally transforming things needs much more massive, much more widespread much more permanent kind of coercion.

On the conditions for fascism succeeding: a democratic state that is too weak to address leftist organizing, producing an anti-left mass movement:

... fascism is a direct reaction to a perceived leftwing movement. You know, here the left tries to pull things off with these land seizures, these factory occupations, and then the right emerges and cracks down. And fascism emerges and is most powerful only in kind of countries of middling level of modernization. What you’ll see is the most modernized countries of Western and Northern Europe, they maintain democracy. Their democracy was developed enough. Civil society was advanced enough, developed enough. The party system was consolidated enough that when they had right-wing movements like in France and Belgium, they never really got a ton of support that could kind of contain them and limit them. So, in the developed countries, democracy survived.

In the really backwards regions, Eastern, Southern Europe, and Balkans their society was so backward, left-wingers never got strong enough. That established kind of elite and the state and the military took care of the problem. And so, fascism emerged kind of in between

[...]

And so, you see, of course, the interesting thing is fascism only came to power in the democracies, because it was a mass movement that then used democratic mechanisms to turn that mass movement into, especially in the German case, increasing electoral support and in the Italian case, at least get a foothold in the party system and then rise. Where authoritarian regimes that close the electoral arena and that was strong enough to crack down, not only the left-wingers, but also on the right-wingers, the fascists never came to power.

On fascism’s anti-conservatism:

Because the conservatives, they want to establish their control. They want to cement hierarchy. They want to exclude the population and the fascists. The fascists were in some sense anti-conservative. They didn’t think that the established elite had done a very good job. They wanted to push them out of the way. They wanted to establish the preeminence of their personalistic leader, their equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini. And so, there was a significant conflict and the fascists had a much more dynamic transformational project. They had a much more of kind of bottom-up support, whereas the conservative authoritarians were kind of top-down and hierarchical. There was also a social difference because many of the fascist leaders and the fascist movements essentially came from lower, lower middleclass groupings and different from the elitist authoritarians.

On distinguishing fascism from the populism of figures like Perón:

[Populists] downgraded liberalism, they cracked down on the opposition, they screwed the playing field, they became over time authoritarian, but they always maintained elections. They never had mass terror. They didn’t turn Argentina into a kind of bastion of dictatorship. Very different from German Nazism and Italian fascism. And so, you can say that, yes, in some sense, the Argentine case shows populism emerged from the realization that fascism wasn’t viable anymore and you had to kind of transform. But I do think as Finkelstein used to emphasize in this academic work that this is a qualitatively different phenomenon. That populist leaders get their way in their eternal hunger for power and their effort to establish their own hegemony.

I think the worst that can happen under populism is what Levitsky and Way call competitive authoritarianism. So, you have an authoritarian leader who still uses elections and parties and there are opposition parties allowed and all these kinds of things. And that is totally different from fascism where there was no opposition party and there were no elections. And there was mass violence and a profoundly transformational impulse and they were much more ideological.

Street action resources

I am too old now for much street political action except when it helps to have a lot of bodies on the street, but I realized that I keep coming across resources and losing track of them, so I'm collecting them here. Just one thing for the moment:

• Portland Action Medics index a bunch of information, and merit support

The livelihoods of far right cranks

TLDR

Gods help us all, I have almost 8000 words here. After saying something dumb and irresponsible, I had an obligation to write it.

The only people I would tell to read it are folks who want to take the step of sharing or acting on the preposterous claim that I am a “fascism apologist”. I am not. Here is the proof. Every word I say here is consistent with the mess of my comments on Twitter.

For everyone else, here is the gist:

• I said something on Twitter which it was irresponsible to try to say in 280 characters.
• The implied defense of Curtis Yarvin as a person or a commentator was a clumsy, irresponsible misstatement on my part. I have thought from the jump that he is despicable and dangerous and merits no defense.
• Fascism and the far right are poisonous and dangerous, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter them …
• … and bigotry in the workplace is poisonous and harmful, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter that …
• … but recruiting conference organizers and corporate HR in that project by having them judge people’s public political writings, then attack the livelihood of those who expressed far right ideas, should not be in the toolkit …
• … if only because free speech principles make us hesitate to have democratically-accountable governments inspecting people’s public writings and delivering consequences for them, so we should hesitate even more over less-accountable agents doing so.
• There are a lot of reasons to think I am wrong on this point, and while I respectfully disagree, I emphasize “respectfully”, as I grant a lot of merit to those disagreements.

And.

After thinking this hard, and talking to a range of people about this subject, I have an ethical vertigo that leaves me stumped. Considering both the magnitude of the threat of the far right and the magnitude of the effort which that calls for, plus the magnitude of the damage bigotry at the workplace does, deciding whether far right propagandists do or do not give technical talks at conferences shrivels into an absurdly trivial question. In the course of laying out my opinion on the question, I became giddy with confusion about whether it mattered.

Consider this a capture of what I believed and advocated for, in the moment I made the original comment and engaged in the conversations which followed, rather than a picture of where I stand at the time of this posting.

I don’t know where I stand now.

And with that, the long version:

What I said, and meant

The other day, in the course of succumbing to getting into a long, messy argument on Twitter, I foolishly made a comment trying to make a point about a very particular antifascist tactic, a point just too subtle to try to get at in snippets of 280 characters, and I screwed it up.

I was prepared to hold my nose and defend Yarvin on the basis that he was not appearing at λ as Moldbug so his repugnant politics were irrelevant — and then he kindly nullified my hesitancy by defending UR in his public comment on λ

If you cringe reading that, I respect it. “Foolish” is, in fact, too kind a word for what I did there. Though I stand by the principle behind it — this essay is about what that principle is, and why I consider it important — first I have to register that the tweet was irresponsible.

It also got more attention than I had reason to expect, and soon I was facing a wall of smart criticisms of what I said, dumb criticisms of things I did not say and do not think, and a lot of stuff in a space in between. The resulting discussion sadly went as these things do. I bear significant responsibility for that. As I say, the original tweet was clumsy and wrong in a vital way. I said graceless things to some people. That internet shitstorm dynamics got the better of me explains but does not excuse my sharper and clumsier comments; I should have done better. Some folks in that conversation say I owe them an apology. Well, I was careless, and I am sorry.

In service of doing better, I hope that this is a more appropriate medium in which to say properly what I had to say. I’m afraid that I see no way to do this right without getting long-winded. I want to be held responsible for what I actually think, rather than for what one may glean from messy conversations held 280 characters at a time.

Reasonable people may think I am wrong. I want people holding me responsible for being wrong about what I actually think.

Also in service of doing better, this essay ends with a catalogue of several key counters to my stance which I have heard or considered. I include this both to lay out why I am not convinced and because many of these points haunt me with the possibility that they are right. If you read that far, you deserve to chew on those objections, because I still do.

So, with apologies for using so many words ….

Yarvin? λ? Moldbug? UR? WTF?

If one is unfamiliar with the story I alluded to in that tweet, I offer this thumbnail sketch from memory. I properly should check all the particulars and provide links — and I might try later — but as I write this I am snowed in with limited internet access.

Several years back, a guy named Curtis Yarvin was scheduled to do a talk at a technical conference called LambdaConf.

On one level, this was perfectly natural. I gather that Yarvin was and is an undisputedly significant figure in the technical domain of the conference, with relevant knowledge to share.

On the other hand, Yarvin is an extraordinarily terrible person. Not just extraordinary in the degree of his terribleness, but in the kind of his terribleness.

Under the name “Mencius Moldbug” he wrote the blog Unqualified Reservations, in which he made very very long and complicated arguments about culture & politics which made him one of the leading figures in a small, energetic, strange, nerdy, evil movement of political ideas known as the “Dark Enlightenment” or “Neo-Reaction” or “NRx”.

Moldbug said that if one reads enough dead white reactionaries, one realizes that democracy stinks and liberalism is at war with human nature, so we would be better off if we appointed someone smart like Steve Jobs to be dictator of America. Or maybe we should clone Charles II and crown the clone king. After all, Singapore is authoritarian but a nice place to live and very economically productive. This long, tortured argument was full of repulsive asides like, “Golly, reviving slavery is probably not the best move, but while it is not a big deal to me, I have to admit that dead white reactionaries made a lot of persuasive arguments that slavery is actually a good idea, and if you think about it, Black people really are best suited to slavery, aren’t they? Not that I’m a white nationalist, though. Those guys are not as smart as I am.”

If you don’t know Moldbug, I know that sounds like a parody. It is not. That is a succinct taste of stuff the blog really said. I read a fair bit of it years ago, fascinated by its bizarre style and repulsive ideas.

Moldbug is not exactly a Nazi or a fascist; he reflects an idiosyncratic far right sensibility significantly different but equally horrible. Yarvin was not attached to a political movement which did anything real, they just said a bunch of crazy, evil stuff on the internet, but that is still quite bad enough. And though really just a blowhard, he is a dangerous, damaging blowhard. He has radicalized a bunch of nerds. Yarvin evidently had some kind of contact with the Trump campaign though the racist, fascist advisor Steve Bannon. Fascist or not, I cannot overstate how evil his ideas and influence are.

Rather than get fussy about which evil far-right nuts are According To Hoyle “fascists”, antifascists use the word “fash” as a term of art for the whole range of evil far right nuts. Moldbug is definitely fash, and I will refer to him as such here.

(If you are cursed with a desire to know more about Moldbug and this bananas movement, I recommend Elizabeth Sandifer’s witty and suitably vicious book Neoreaction: A Basilisk; I am proud to have backed the Kickstarter which funded its publication.)

Yarvin maintained a soft split between his professional work as Yarvin and his political writing as Moldbug. One could easily look up Yarvin and not discover Moldbug, but he made no secret of being the person behind both names. It was easy to find out who “Moldbug” really was, and to discover Moldbug while looking in to Yarvin.

So when people saw Yarvin on the conference schedule, many of them offered the conference their Strongly Worded Concerns about a fash presenter.

Then Yarvin published an essay on the internet — under his name, not as Moldbug, not on the Unqualified Reservations blog — saying, “Hey there, LambdaConf community! My politics are not as bad as you’ve heard! Sure I think Black people make good slaves, but that is really no big deal if you think about it!”

Really. I am deliberately not linking any of his stuff, but you can look it up for yourself if you have the stomach. That is what he said. [Update: since originally publishing this post, I have added a few links in the name of helping newcomers make sense of the particulars.]

All this left me with an itch, which led me to talk about it now, years later.

Am I some kind of fascism apologist?

So what the heck? Why would I hold my nose to be in any alliance with this asshole?

It is because of a serious, principled objection to a very particular political tactic. I mention Yarvin at all because he presents an acid test of my dedication to the principle. The main purpose of this essay is to describe the line I draw, as clearly as I can. But I need to lay a little track about where I am coming from.

First, I have to confess that an important part of what I screwed up is that I was foolish — no, worse, irresponsible — to frame my position as though it were a defense of Yarvin. I retract the heck out of that. I don’t have a defense of Yarvin, I have a specific principle which makes me reject a particular attack on him.

My phrasing was dumbass and wrong, so people reading me wrong has been in significant part my own fault.

Thus I have a big correction to that tweet. I offer no defense of Yarvin. No defense of his evil, racist, reactionary, anti-democratic philosophy. No defense of the far right in general or of fascism in particular. I want to attack him however will work best. Everything I say here is motivated by me thinking about how best to combat the Yarvins of the world.

Indeed, I have been excitable about my opposition to fascism and the far right for a good long time. I first threw a little money at David Neiwert, my favorite journalist covering the far right beat, over a decade ago. This is part of why I had already taken a hard look at Unqualified Reservations when all this LambdaConf stuff happened.

With the turn American society has taken in the last few years, my opposition to fascism has grown more pointed.

I support militant antifascist work, both in principle and (very modestly) materially. Go git ’em. I have some tactical quibbles with the people who do that stuff (and this essay is about a big one) but they are doing the work in a way that I am not, so I misgive my own misgivings. Doxx the fash to their friends and family. Disrupt their organizing. Step up against them when they show up in the streets; don’t start a fight, but be ready to face one down. Shame and embarrass and belittle fash at every turn; videos of them getting punched in the face are known to work. Et cetera.

Ideally I want well-resourced, serious law enforcement efforts to disrupt fash organizing and crimes ... but this is a fantasy, requiring law enforcement institutions which are not structurally kinda fash as they are now, and a law enforcement corps which is not riddled with officers who are super duper fash, as they are now. So after we abolish the police — which we ought to do, in large part because they are so fashy — let us replace them with institutions which combat the far right rather than support it.

Fash are always grave threats, and especially so now. We must smash the hell out of them. I have sworn an oath to a terrifying elder god to fight fascism in my nation. Over on the same Twitter where I put my foot in my mouth, I also do exactly that, as I do on this blog, and in other places. I am not a militant antifascist, but I support those who are, and I do my small part.

So, again: what would make someone like me potentially supportive of a monster like Yarvin in any way, under any circumstance?

The answer lies in a principle which I hold dear because it lies at the intersection of what action against fash is effective, what action is wise, and the principle of free speech.

Free speech

When I summon the question of free speech, one has good reason to expect that I am about to offer the arguments of “free speech absolutists” who reliably get suckered by fash. There are free speech boneheads naïve about the Paradox Of Tolerance who fall for bad faith actors like fascists claiming that they deserve to lie, plot, and threaten people without consequence. And fash are among the free speech charlatans feigning a commitment to free speech in bad faith to their own advantage.

I am neither.

Limits to free speech

A few years back, I blogged a short essay about what the principle of free speech means, in part because I had been through the conversation many times and figured I needed to just set out my thinking and have it handy. I also wanted to have it as a companion to another essay about how it was right for protestors to No Platform Milo Yiannopoulos.

I will recapitulate the important arguments from both.

Both bonehead and charlatan free speech absolutists would say Yiannopoulos had a right to be heard. But he did not, on two counts. First, while he has a right to say what he will on platforms willing to have him, that does not give him a right to speak in every forum, on every platform, or even on any platform. The people who own the microphones, and the communities around those microphones, have not just a right but a duty to examine whether his voice should be heard in the space that microphone reaches. Second, it would be enough that the community rejected his message for any reason, but they had especially good reasons with Yiannopoulos. He was not just offering odious ideas, though his ideas are odious. Worse, he had demonstrated that he would use the microphone to harass members of the community and thereby target them for further harassment. That is not just unworthy of protection and support, it is criminal.

Yiannopoulos is a free speech charlatan, abusing the principle of free speech in defense of harassment, deliberately doing this, as fash do, in order to discredit the principle of free speech itself. We must actively work to deprive such people of platforms.

No Platform’ing such figures is a defense of free speech principle, not some exception to them. We have no conflict with the First Amendment. It does not protect harassment, lies, threats, criminal conspiracies, and the like. The principle of free speech protects people who offer ideas — even bad ones — but not threats and other crimes.

Since my response to Yarvin hinges on the need to defend free speech principles, even when it puts us momentarily on the side of bad people, this also makes a good moment for me to talk about a mistaken moment when principle put another free speech defender momentarily on the side of some fash: the ACLU’s support for Nazis’ Skokie march.

I love the ACLU, their rigor, and their commitment to taking difficult and unpopular stands, and forgive them this error, but they got this one wrong. The march was not an offering of ideas to the American public. A swastika is a way of saying, “I am advocating for killing people. I am planning on killing people.” There is no swastika which does not say that. It is a threat. Carrying a swastika or its equivalents, marching for Naziism, and such are crimes.

But though I believe in a lot more limitations on free speech than “absolutists” do, in an important way I have a commitment to a more muscular version of free speech than many of them do.

Beyond the First Amendment

I hold that the principle of free speech extends well beyond First Amendment protections against government censorship.

The state is not the only force of coercion. If one cannot express ideas without facing violence from private citizens, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s housing, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s livelihood, one does not have free speech.

So I oppose — or at least withhold my support for — a lot of Get ’Em Fired pressure campaigns when the reason for the campaign is that the person they want to see fired said something very bad, even when I share the desire to see that person face consequences. My reasoning is both principled and practical.

On principle, as a civil libertarian, I do not think any of us have the wisdom to choose unerringly which ideas should be punished. I would not punish people for expressing ideas at all ... and I surely do not want that power in the hands of corporate HR, bosses, and social media mobs.

On principle, as a leftist, I do not think anyone should be driven from being allowed to work so long as we live in a society in which dignity and survival depend on working for a wage. If we embrace a tactic whose logical endgame is to leave people who say sufficiently bad things houseless beggars, how is that meaningfully different from just saying we should round up people who express sufficiently bad ideas and throw them in prison?

I am vexed that so many leftists have this libertarian-ish blindspot which only fears government power over speech. One of the injustices of the world we have is how landlords and corporations and bosses are permitted to exercise this power without even the inadequate democratic accountability of our government. They are not censors we should court, they are censors we must oppose even more than the government.

In practice, I also think that such campaigns make a grave strategic error.

I am vexed that so many social justice advocates do not just legitimize but actively court the exercise of this unaccountable power over people, shaming employers of bigots and other villains. I respect their frustration at having so few means to deter antagonists against social justice, but history teaches us who suffers most when employers fire employees because of their political views ... or other things they have said ... or fear public pressures over their employees. This knife cuts reactionary white male professionals the least.

Advocates for these campaigns say that it will teach employers not to hire fash, but I do not imagine that the bosses will learn that lesson. They will learn “don’t hire people with controversial political opinions”. They will inspect workers’ social media. They will ask “do you have any political opinions we should know about?” in job interviews. That is bad on the merits and will most hurt the most vulnerable.

In practice, if we support Get ’Em Fired campaigns, then we legitimize those campaigns as tools for anyone to use, and we encourage employers to make their own guesses about how to preëmpt them. Yes, it will hurt the fash, but I expect that it will most hurt the most vulnerable.

With all that, I do not want depriving fash of their livelihoods in our Fash Smashing toolbox. There are plenty of other ways to respond to them.

Principles for the workplace

Having said that we should reject moves to fire people for their politics, even if they are fash, it would be nice if it were simple. But there are complexities.

My rule is more specifically don’t fire people for ideas they share outside the workplace, if the ideas are irrelevant to their job.

In this I do not want to legitimize the most visible critics of “Cancel Culture”, who are profoundly wrong. I am pushing back against a part of what we talk about when we talk about Cancel Culture, but not their part.

I call shenanigans on culture industry professionals decrying other culture industry people losing jobs — or most often, just having to change jobs and move to another platform — for the ideas they publish. If one’s day job is offering ideas, then of course one may lose their job over the ideas they share to the world.

More generally, one’s employer has a legitimate interest in what one says outside the job about the kind of stuff one does on the job. On Twitter I talk about design, because I work as a designer; if I say something stupid or smart about design on Twitter, then of course it will affect my livelihood.

Similarly, for a manager or executive with significant power and authority, especially over other people, a wide range of ideas that person expresses reflect on the fitness of the leadership judgment which they exercise. If an airline executive advocates for the Flat Earth theory, then that suggests they might not be right for, ah, global responsibility. If a manager expresses racist bigotry, then that indicates that they are unfit to manage people, who may be people of color ... or who may not be, because the bigoted manager drove them away.

And of course an employer has an unmistakable interest in the ideas which a worker voices at the workplace. A bigoted machinist working a lathe alone who keeps their mouth shut about their bigotry well enough that their colleagues do not know what they think is one thing; if that bigoted machinist wears a swastika T-shirt and spews offensive epithets in the lunchroom, their colleagues are harmed and the employer has not just a right to kick them out, but a responsibility.

That does not draw a perfectly bright line but it gives some principles, which underlie my teeth-gritting defense of LambdaConf offering a speaking platform to a fascist. Yarvin is the opposite of the reason for the principle I describe here; he is the hard counter example which tests how deeply I believe in it.

The case of LambdaConf

All this undergirds why I might have defended Yarvin being allowed to present at LamdaConf ... and why I felt perverse relief when he ran his mouth.

As I understand it, there was no reason to imagine that he would bring his politics into the forum. Since his politics is published under another name, legitimizing Yarvin as a technical expert did no legitimizing of Moldbug as an expert in culture & politics.

When confronted by the community with the link between Yarvin The Expert and Moldbug The Fash, I imagine a possible response in terms of the principles I have committed to here.

LambdaConf could have said something like:

We are hosting a technical conference, and have invited Mr Yarvin to speak on the subjects of his technical expertise. We are aware that he comments on culture & politics under another name, and we do not condone or support any of what he says on those topics. We have told him that his professional obligations as a conference presenter forbid him speaking to topics outside the technical subjects we invited him to discuss. We ask that conference participants not prompt him on other subjects, as we want him not to have any occasion to air his opinions on them.

Yarvin could have said something like:

While I do write on other topics under another name, it would be irresponsible of me to use the platform I have for talking about technology in this forum to promote that other work. I discourage anyone intrigued by my presentation about the Urbit technology from taking that as a reason to seek out my commentaries on culture & politics; the one does not inform the other in any way.

Had they done that, much as I would want to see Yarvin suffer embarrassment, dishonor, and loss for being fash, I would have gritted my teeth and stood by LambdaConf, because they had excluded his political ideas from the professional space.

This would have been desirable as a bulwark against placing both impossible duty and unmerited power in conference organizers’ hands. We should not want conferences vetting everything a presenter has ever said in public.

But Yarvin, instead, responded to his critics by publishing to the conference community some of his very worst political / cultural opinions, to offer his justification of why people should not find them troubling. He brought his politics into the forum. Once introduced into the space of the conference, the organizers had responsibility for it, and this made it right and necessary to exclude him. Alas, they did not.

Years ago, when I learned of this, I breathed an unwholesome sigh of relief. I did not have to occupy the position of conflicting principles leaving me supporting the platforming of fash, even in the privacy of my own heart. I could cheer Yarvin’s exclusion with a clear conscience. Yet I must also register the cost which makes my own response unwholesome; it meant people throughout the community had been exposed to his evil justifications of slavery and racism.

In sum

I oppose the far right and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting them. I oppose bigotry in the workplace and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting that. But I reject the specific tactic of attacking their livelihoods of people who express far right ideas in public, both on principle and because I believe that it in the long run it does more harm than good, including that it puts vulnerable people at risk.

I read Yarvin as having been subject to one such attack, so while I favor a number of measures to disrupt the spread of his fashy ideas, those principles took precedence. Potentially standing with him on this particular point is a high price for what I take to be a necessary, very particular, virtue.

It was foolish and irresponsible of me to open this subtle question on Twitter. This longer treatment was necessary.

Criticisms

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I have faced a number of criticisms of this stance over the past few days. I am frankly frustrated by how many criticisms I received took me as advocating things different from — sometimes even diametrically opposed to — the things I said both there and here.

But there are many legitimate criticisms of what I advocate here. I disagree, but respect many of those deeply. And some of them give me strong enough doubts that I will sit with them and revisit my thoughts over time.

Harms from fash

In one sense, Yarvin’s mere presence at the conference is as unthreatening as a person could be, just another nerd talking about software. But it is obviously painful for someone who knows what his views are to see him at the front of the room in a position of honor. I am too white to understand what it is for someone Black to know that Yarvin looks at them as a potential slave, but what I can imagine is nauseating and enraging enough. Perhaps some might find a bit of comfort in the thought of Yarvin chafing at having to hold his poisonous tongue in front of people alert to find any hint of his politics, but that is not enough. Again, as a white guy I know better than to try to gauge how deep that cuts.

Indeed, one of my Twitter challengers told me that it is simply not my place to evaluate harms, period, I should simply accept when people assert that a person’s presence is harmful to them. It should be obvious why I deeply respect the impulse which gives rise to that sentiment. But that proposed principle chills me. Almost everything I say here comes of trying to out-think bad actors who might twist the principles we apply. Radical credulity about harms practically invites abuse.

The principle I am calling for does have a deep cost for the people who already suffer the most. I would not do so if I did not think the alternatives are worse, for the reasons I describe.

If we do count being in the presence of a quiet bigot intolerable, I am at a loss for a proper remedy. I wish Yarvin’s measure of bigotry were so very exceptional that we could find the entire poisoned handful and tell them that the only work available to them is done in solitude. But they are numerous. Shall we find and fire them all? How will that work out?

Is the presence of my hypothetical tight-lipped machinist in the workplace intolerable? If we left them alone but were as quick to punish visible bigotry in the workplace as I hold we should, I count that as coming out well ahead of the status quo. And this does not grant a pass to the Klansman who has the good sense to leave his robes at home; I simply hold that we should deter, catch, and correct that Klansman outside the workplace rather than within it. I see plenty of headroom to do better at that without resorting to coming at their livelihood.

And all of this underlines that my principle — that we should refuse to make workplaces better by responding to the bigotry we find in things workers expressing outside of work — only has moral credibility paired with an assertion that we must do a lot more to make workplaces more just, safe, and supportive for people who face bigotry. In one sense, my stance is prioritization of where we put our energies: not in ferreting out secret bigotry but addressing the unjust circumstances we know we have inside organizations. There is so much to do. That it is so common for people to suffer harms large and small from bigotry at the workplace that we should have the impulse to catch bigots there by looking at what they do outside only underlines the urgency of doing all of the other things we need to do to improve those spaces.

Free speech

There are a few arguments against the fundamental importance of free speech.

The most fundamental says that free speech is integral to a Western liberal democratic tradition which gave us colonialism, slavery, genocide, exploitation, environmental crisis, racism, war, and other evils. I am deeply committed to free speech liberal democracy. But, uh, yeah, this critique is undeniably right on an important level and keeps me up at night. Free speech comes to us from guys like John “Slavery” Locke and Thomas “Slave Rapist” Jefferson. I believe in the potential for a deeper, more profound liberal democracy — societies which are categorically more dedicated to equality, equity, rights, democratic accountability, and all the promised fruits of the libdem tradition through new institutions with better formulations of rule of law and public engagement and rights protections. But my hope may well be wrong. It is all too possible that the worm lives in the seed of the apple, and any radically new liberal democracy would only reproduce the failings of the old. Thus free speech would simply not merit valuing. Again, I disagree, but respect the heck out of the position, and would love for someone to offer me a better alternative to liberal democracy.

There is also the horror and bafflient with which people like the Germans look at the way we conceive free speech in the US. They know firsthand its vulnerabilities to movements like fascism. We are certainly in a moment in which the threat of toxic bullshittification of our entire public discourse already has a genocidal body count and is only getting started. Maybe free speech is itself specifically poisonous. Again, I don’t think so, but the people who do have very good reasons.

And there are the people who say free speech is good, sure, but just not as important as I take it to be. Other things are just more important. Some of these folks frankly make me uneasy; I suspect that they do not value free speech at all, and I wonder what their social and political philosophy really is. But many of them are weighing values against each other, as we must. As I say above about harms from fash, there is every reason to respect weighting them above free speech.

The vulnerable lack this protection

I hold that we need to protect fash from attacks on their livelihoods for things they say outside the workplace because, in part, we need a hardline principle to protect more vulnerable people who already face injustices from suffering similar attacks.

One may object that I am being naïve in thinking that I am protecting those folks. We can point to examples of how they already suffer loss of livelihood for things they say and do outside of work. Am I not, in practice, proposing a protection which only the privileged fash will actually enjoy?

My calculation is different. I believe that existing injustices show where the energy will go if we step up attacks on the livelihoods of people who express disagreeable ideas in public. Yes, the vulnerable suffer now. If we make this move, I submit that this will not simply stay the same, it will get worse. We would win victories against the Yarvins of the world at a price of even greater pressures on the folks we were trying to protect.

Are corporations and conference organizers wise, ready to learn to ferret out the fash in their organizations? Or are they stupid, likely to learn from attacks on the livelihoods of fash that one must guard against employing people with “controversial political opinions”? Will employers learn to lock out bad actors, or become overreactive in ways which bad actors will learn to exploit? History teaches me to bet on stupidity.

But this is also a place where I am least confident of my prediction. My own privileges make me less qualified to judge than those who experience the risk. If those folks have a strong consensus that they are prepared to roll the dice, that matters more than what I think.

Political expression is not a protected class

One may say that we have already litigated who we protect from the caprices of employers. We protect immutable characteristics like race and sexual orientation and gender (increasingly, but not yet universally, including protections for transgender people). Chosen characteristics like political beliefs and public expression, we do not protect.

But in many cases we also protect religion, as we should. Religion is “chosen” but deeply held. We protect it because we recognize the dangers of discrimination. And even where we do not legally protect it, we have norms which understand that firing someone for being Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Atheist or Buddhist or whatever is wrong.

I am arguing for a norm even though we do not have the law. And yes, I very much advocate legislation. Workers’ political creeds and expressions outside of work absolutely should be protected by labor law. If they were, that would, again, most help the most vulnerable.

(I should add that one Twitter critic of mine said that what I really should favor is universal basic income: if one’s livelihood is just not dependent on employers, then employers lose the coercive power which make them a threat to free speech. This is, indeed, one of the countless reasons why I am a UBI crank, who holds that we should implient a generous UBI and other policies sufficient for a dignified life without work.)

Fash require ruthlessness

I know from militant antifascists that doxxing fash to their employers and getting them fired works. It often breaks those individuals away from their politics, and often does the same for the other fash they know; imagining that one is persecuted is fun but being persecuted turns out to suck. Even if they stay with it, the disruption makes them less effective.

As I say, there are plenty of other tools for fighting fash, but I want to recognize that I am advocating that we discard one of the best.

This is partly because I believe that how we win matters as much as that we win. But it does matter that we win. And we have a fash problem right now. There is a school of thought which says that vigorous militant antifascism is a bit like running a fever: it’s bad for the host, but worse for the disease. So I respect folks who think that this particular move I resist is necessary for the duration of the crisis. But I also worry about how temporary crisis measures have a tendency to stick around.

The fascism gets in everything

One can make a case that Yarvin’s technological projects are themselves inherently fashy, with reactionary politics baked into the structure. That may sound silly, but to me it does ring true; I know that Bitcoin has libertarian goldbug ideas implicit in its structure.

Further, there is a good case to be made that this is not specific to Yarvin but characteristic of all fash: their worldview is so consuming that it gets into everything they do. My imagined tight-lipped fash machinist may not find a way to make a fash cog, but they still will do some harmful fash stuff all the time.

If you don’t know much about the far right, or fascism in particular, this sounds paranoid. I have read enough studies of fascism, authoritarianism, and related political and cultural tendencies to be a little paranoid.

Not quite an attack on livelihood

One could say that I am right to want to avoid attacking fash for the ideas they expressed in their day job, but that preventing Yarvin’s presentation at a conference does not quite meet the threshold of qualifying as a sufficiently coercive attack on his livelihood. Missing a speaking opportunity is a different order of thing than outright unemployment.

This is another fair point. The point of the hard principle is to be strict, but I have already talked about many fuzzy edges. One could draw a bright line which says one’s actual day job merits protection but more para-professional stuff like conferences does not.

(Note that this is in friction with a parallel criticism one may offer of my position, that Yarvin’s presence at the conference damages the livelihoods of diverse people who are deterred from participating in career-advancing conferences by the presence of him and other monsters. Surely if his attendance impacts their livelihoods, barring him impacts his. And again, if I thought this were the entire choice, it would be easy for me to decide against Yarvin and figures like him.)

In this I fall to the principle of erring on the side of caution and expansive rights protections in general. I know very well how professional opportunities include much beyond the workplace itself.

Presenting is power

Per my point about managers and executives facing a more stringent standard, admitting more of their outside-of-work behavior as relevant to their jobs, one might argue that presenting at a conference likewise calls in more of a presenter’s whole self than merely attending.

But I find this criticism much less impressive than many of the others. Yes, presenting is power, but far less pervasive power than a manager or executive’s. What misbehavior a bad actor can do as a presenter is in plain view, literally presented to the community, such that what matters can be judged without needing reference to outside the professional domain.

We will only use this power for Good

One may argue that one is not advocating for allowing attacks against the livelihoods of everyone for the things they say outside of work, only people who say really bad things. That’s not to be flippant about Yarvin. His politics are, again, evil, a word I generally hesitate to use.

This is in important ways both the best and the worst argument against my point.

I am sure that a lot of people read me as just doing some stubborn white guy nose-pinching here, letting abstract principle get in the way of just doing the obvious right thing. Fergawdsake, just let other questions be other questions and answer this question. Fergawdsake, we know who it hurts and who it helps to have him present versus to kick him out, so just be on the right side of that.

I certainly respect people who see me as overthinking things, getting in my own way, prioritizing distant theoretical worries over a very present very real very serious threat to real people.

And also, this is “the ends justifies the means” territory, setting aside principle or thinking ahead to unintended consequences or possible error is in judgment. History teaches what happens when people convinced of their goodness and rightness decide that they don’t need rules or systems of oversight. Yes, we can agree that Yarvin is really bad, but what will we do when we disagree?

I think we need to care about principles, which is why I have written so very many words about mine, to clarify for you and for me what mine are, and hopefully to help clarify for you what yours are.

In sum: respect

It should be apparent that I take the disagreements many have with my stance seriously. There are good reasons to reject my position that the principle of free speech must protect even a figure like Yarvin from attacks on their livelihoods for ideas they express outside work.

Indeed, I assume that most people do not share my worry about this particular move, and are unworried to see someone like him take a blow this way.

I hope it is clear that I recognize that I could be plain wrong on this. I hope that people will register that I am not merely dismissing their concerns. I invite people who disagree to continue to try to convince me. And I pray that if they are indeed right, that they will convince me.

Ethical vertigo

After sweating out this long essay, and engaging in both friendly and hostile discussions about these questions on Twitter, I have spent enough time steeped in the fundamentals of these questions that I have become unmoored.

We face far right ideas and movements which are a cancer on democracy and a deadly threat to countless people now, and are on the march to do the worst things imaginable. We face injustices and cruelties in the workplace which reinforce grinding, horrible, pervasive social inequities … and even make those workplaces less effective along the way.

There is so much we must do. The addition or subtraction of a few tech conference speakers does not rate. I feel dirty having written the necessary words above.

In the face of such things, my hesitation to back an ouster of Yarvin before he brought his politics into the forum is, in one sense, a check on my own impulse to ruthlessness. Because whatever misfortunes he suffers for being fash, when I hear of it I will start by carving myself a thick, guilty, delicious slice of schadenfreude pie. Costing him a speaking gig is not even a tiny pebble at the foot of the mountain of things I am prepared to do to keep his ideas from taking hold, which is good because I remember the time it took lakes of blood to stop the Nazis from filling the oceans of blood they wanted.

I asked people about their endgame for stopping the far right at the workplace, and some reassured me that there was no way we would have a world where everyone who expresses far right ideas is so universally reviled that they end up homeless and destitute out of inability to find work, which I suppose means that the hope is to have a world which screws up the livelihoods of fash just enough that it deters them just enough, which … does not sound right.

If spending an hour listening to Yarvin talk about data structures is intolerable harm to people who know themselves to be threatened, physically threatened, by his ideas then should a guy like that have any job, any place? If we were prepared to send GIs across Europe with tanks to blow fascists to bits, which was both justified and necessary, then keeping far right advocates out of the workplace is small potatoes, right?

Are unaccountable conference organizers a better instrument for this than the government because they can do so much less? That too is several kinds of wrong. If, as I argued at grinding length in this essay, it is worrisome to have conference organizers and corporate HR and advocacy campaigns to pressure such organizations acting as censors, then does that principle create an obligation for me to attend a tech talk by a Yarvin, lest I pressure the conference? That too is thoroughly perverse.

So the disrupting the livelihoods of far right cranks is justified, which makes depending on a constellation of jumpy corporate authorities too chaotic and unaccountable. But that implies doing something systematically, exercising authority, with, uh, due process of law? If we are prepared to impoverish these folks because they are dangerous, should we not put them somewhere where they cannot hurt anyone? Uh, did I just now propose that we scour the websites for folks like Yarvin, put them on trial, and put them into prison? Camps for political prisoners? But not, y’know, too much of that? Is that what I am saying?

Seriously, what do we do with these folks? We have many thousands of outright fascists. We have millions of QAnon cranks in the US who seriously want to murder most journalists and Democratic Party leaders.

Keeping their visible proponents from speaking at tech conferences? I cannot care any more about that. What will we actually do?

I am giddy with horror. I have stalemated myself. I cannot think about this any more, right now.