It is no secret now that the United States is accelerating toward the dissolution of its founding principles. The contradictions, so blatantly obvious at the moment the foundation was set, have failed to resolve.
I, like, many others, dismissed the battle between Antifa and the alt-right as a kind of cosplay, a fake politics conducted outside of the traditional political sphere, in a new and illusory world of glory, righteous power, and the victory and spoils of war. This sphere of blood-in-the-streets activism is still Hell on Earth. It still moves us not one inch forward to a world worth living in.
I have responded initially to the murder of Heather Heyer in the way that was right in that moment. But now, I only want to understand what will follow. The act of writing, in the end, can only serve as a tool of the faithful witness to understand. Writing can change nothing. It can only clarify what is.
The left, in the wake of this, has been emboldened beyond belief. Many are the thousands who announce victory is now a necessity that a comrade has died at the hands of fascism. Consequently, the left will accelerate a crystallized version of its ideology that it has been approaching for the longest time now: the idea that freedom of speech is just covering up for fascism.
Already, the left has turned against the ACLU. Good people like Jordan Peterson will also no doubt be lumped in with the alt-right and Neo-Nazis, and shutting down his lectures will be a paramount duty of obligation to the revolution. Every syllable, word, thought and synapse snap not directed toward overthrowing racism and capitalism will be seen by the left as a betrayal. If you have any response to August 13th other than: “Smash them, comrades, the hour of victory is nigh, no blood and no glory is wasted”, then you are on the wrong side. You are on the side of the Neo-Nazis. I don’t believe this, but I am only trying to articulate what it is to come.
The debate over freedom of speech in the United States has come to a head here, in the destruction of all language, in the affirmation that politics can only take place as bloodied struggle against the oppressors. What would Angra Mainyu, the materialist, the prince of this world, do right now? Surely he would aggressively recruit cops and veterans to the revolution, he would be a Bolshevik, he would aim for the tipping point of that 10% revolutionary body to overthrow the American government, and he would be a he because this goal is the ultimate expression of masculine outrage and despair. He would build a private leftist militant body like the Oathkeepers, that would descend upon these real-life culture wars armed to the teeth and ready for war.
This contradiction will also eat leftists, who are simultaneously in favor of revolution but against the Second Amendment, against hyper-masculine military culture, and against cops. It wants to escalate, but it clearly lacks the mindset and tools to escalate.
And what would follow this kind of military escalation, if it were to take place? The death of bad people. In our lowest hell, the suppression and destruction of the bad people is considered equivalent to political victory.
The left, now, will support hate speech laws, because freedom of speech is just the freedom to commit hate speech, and hate speech is just the fuel of Nazi murder. The left, which has already abandoned economics and ran for the campus, will only become more a crystal of cultural issues and escape any systemic analysis of capitalism or authoritarianism. Hence, firing and censoring bad people will become a permanent replacement for legislative victory. The left will continue digging the grave of its own ambitions.
It is harder to predict what the alt-right will do now. The category is utterly meaningless. What do Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, and Richard Spencer have in common? The designation of alt-right. What do they share amongst them? At root, very little. Neo-Nazis and Spencer have been around far longer than November of 2016, and they will continue to be a scourge. Anyone opposing government control of speech will become utterly lumped in with these Neo-Nazis. The authoritarians and anti-authoritarians alike will be seen as obstacles to the left. The left will no longer seek to recruit – it will only seek to smash anyone not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its worst ideas.
The right, born and persisting in tacit racism, is off-limits. There is no reaching out to anybody on the basis of common economic goals. So, then, like Twitter itself as a platform, the left caps its recruitment, closes rank, and goes to war with a body ill-fit for war.
The more public face of the alt-right will hopefully collapse. 4chan users present at the Unite the Right rally have been doxed. If someone as lukewarm as James Damore was fired, certainly these odious racists and actual Neo-Nazis will be fired. But it will not end there. The Nazis are the red tips of the fingers that end in the arm and root of capitalism.
Anyone living in this root, living within capitalism, who is standing for speech, debate and discussion over violent clashes will be seen as rejecting the pure materialist struggle, rejecting the necessity to bleed out Nazis in the streets, rejecting the hour of virtue. From Samuel Sinyangwe, and his useful idiot strand of neoliberals, all the way to myopic and evil Twitter communists who have hated freedom of speech for years now, the entire left will mobilize as a beast, a mass of tendon and meat lurching toward aimless war.
There is only one side. You are with us or against us. You are a Nazi or you will support the outlawing of hate speech, and the shutting down of hate wherever it is detected. Anyone who complains or dissents in the slightest will be purged. I will list plenty of interesting and great leftists who have already or will be purged: Freddie deBoer, Michael Tracey, Lee Fang, Zaid Jilani, Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU. The left will consume its own until only the ugly meme-spewing life-resenting bitter violent strand of Marxists will remain. On the left, publishers like Zero Books and The Intercept remain committed to balance and speech at their own peril.
Lastly, Heather Heyer was murdered by a fascist in an event that was an evil act of white supremacist violence. So many at the Unite the Right march were Nazis, and that will continue to bleed politics into the streets, a swirl of the politically impotent against the politically impotent with the only goal remaining to hold the bloody flag high.
The United States is becoming the kind of country it has spent a century building its decadence upon. All the terror we have stoked in the Middle East, in Latin America, all of this was the shadow of the country reaching out and ruining the world, and now the actions of the shadow are damaging and destroying the constitution of the body.
We reap what we sow, and we receive the outcomes that we ask for. Anybody who claims to know what to do right now is lying. The only thing we can do is continue to work and speak (I lied). The center, which is nothing more than the center of democracy itself, must hold, but I see no way it can hold. Surely, if you feel you are in danger, the Second Amendment exists for purposes of self-defense.
We will go down with the ship no matter what. Choose where you stand carefully, because someone will come for you. In the end, this is the spiritual task of being born upon this Earth. Just as God is crucified in the world, the ideals of democracy and human dignity are crucified inside the structures of capitalism. However, as Mark Fisher once wrote, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Thus, it is easier to imagine the apocalypse of Revelation than the slow work of pulling the splinters of a broken cross out of the wounded hand of God.
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