Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

In the past two months, antifascist work feels more and more like trying to patch holes in a sinking ship.

Police are going full mask off all over the place, politicians are complicit, crypto-fash & their apologists are outing themselves happily.

Back in February and March, I started to notice that a lot of the "ironic" alt-right style racism and antisemitism that antifascists had worked so hard to get out of the mainstream was getting whitewashed into left and discourse by "ironic" dirtbag influencers.

It became more and more clear that a lot of the complaints about "identity politics" on the left had stopped being critiques of mainstream D's disingenuously trying to pretend like class was a white issue, and started to be about full on denialism of racism and other oppressions.

I'd talk to other antifascists who'd been watching the trend and they'd basically say, yeah, it's a white dude victimhood cult full of edgelords who think racism doesn't exist, they hang out with nazis in r/stupidpol.

People gave me a lot of shit for starting out by focusing on Chapo Trap House and their very real ties to fash apologism, but they were the popular entry point for the whole dirtbag scene.

The reality is, though, they were/are the portal.

Fans of Red Scare, TrueAnon, Cum Town, and Aimee Terese may not all get along with each other or Chapo fans, but many of them passed through that gateway.

Why?

Well, look at Will Menaker.

His dad was literally the fiction editor of the New Yorker for twenty years.

CTH was tailor-made for a Brooklyn media elite he was born into, and it was very successful in becoming a hot topic among them.

That media elite has treated Chapo as basically shorthand for Bernie supporters in its discussions, and newcomers to the left accepted that lazy equation and treated CTH listenership as sort of a merit badge for their new left-branded identity.

What's become increasingly apparent is that the media elite that crowned CTH as the Official Show of the Left has no understanding of what leftist organizing or base looks like.

Because their only political lens was electoral, they just assumed Bernie = left.

By assuming that Bernie support encompassed the entire soul of leftism, that media elite managed to elevate these guys to Arbiters of Leftism status.

Newcomers & the Jacobin crowd welcomed that, & so these racism-denying, cop-loving chuds become Deciders for the online in-crowd.

I supported Bernie, but I've always known he was weak on racism, women's issues, and policing.

These guys taught their followers that this weakness was a strength, because Bernie was perfect and class reductionism conveniently stopped critiques of their own racism.

Antifascists have long known that most good white liberals will overlook police terror unless forced to acknowledge it.

We've long known that the right (and much of the far right) will celebrate it.

The left has traditionally been the space in which the racist excesses and abuses of police can be lifted up in an organized way and held in front of liberals in a way they can't deny or escape.

We exist at a time where police terror is being enacted in ways that would seem unthinkable to most liberals just a year ago.

They showered the BLM uprisings with gas and rubber bullets.

They're disappearing people into unmarked vans in Portland.

We are literally on the brink of authoritarian fascism.

It is beyond crucial that the left stay united and loud in naming this and calling out the abuses of the police and militantly demanding police abolition.

We cannot afford anything less.

And yet, here are these "leftist" podcasters treating this like a parlor discussion and throwing around spicy bootlicking talking points for attention in the midst of it all.

They are praising police and actively working to undermine left solidarity against the cops.

They are copjacketing other leftists that disagree with them on this shit.

Let that sink in for a second:

Bootlicker dirtbags are COPJACKETING intersectionalist leftists as retribution for naming their bootlicking for what it is.

I don't copjacket, so I won't speculate about what motivates them to be so strangely attached to that pro-cop hill.

I WILL say, however, that dividing the left and copjacketing antifascists as fascist police forces consolidate strength serves one party only:

The fascists.

There is a *reason* that badjacketing/copjacketing/snitchjacketing is considered one of the worst possible things you can do in leftist space.

That reason is, cop infiltrators have historically done EXACTLY that to undermine left unity and leaders.

Whatever the reason, that is *exactly* what is happening now.

These dirtbags are actively trying to convince their bases that police abolition is a distraction, that the far right are just frens we haven't made yet.

People who think this is about left infighting fail to understand the historical role of the left in US politics.

Very rarely do we win office.

We often, however, succeed in organizing to draw clear moral lines in the sand and force mainstream liberals to pick a side.

The dirtbags hid behind Bernie and said their reactionary bullshit was a calculated decision to help him win, but that time is past.

There is no possible left electoral victory to sacrifice ideals in service of right now.

They're being reactionary because they're reactionaries.

In servicing a reactionary agenda at a time where we are quickly succumbing to fascism, they are undermining leftists who understand that this is a life-or-death moment and understand that we HAVE to force mainstream liberals to realize that and act.

They so despise "liberals" that they think they're above appealing to them, above trying to build any broader consensus or win them over, even when the stakes couldn't be higher.

They'd rather rub shoulders with nazis.

That's what cost Bernie the nomination.

They have become so committed to that sneering dismissal of "liberals" and so cozied up to the far right at this point that they're actively engaging, absorbing, and disseminating their memes and conspiracy theories.

They are actively assisting far right recruitment.

At the same time, they are poisoning hundreds of thousands of leftists and potential leftists, whispering to them that cops are good, actually (except anti-cop leftists, who are somehow cops and bad).

They lie to them, tell them the left can win by appealing to the far right.

All of this would be terrible at any moment, but it is happening at a moment where we cannot afford for the left not to do its job and unite around drawing that clear moral line in the sand, around holding mainstream liberals accountable to it.

And yet, they continue to deny the very existence of that moment.

They look at us being gassed and shot and disappeared & say, "this is normal, things have always been this way."

No the fuck they have not.

The US has always been a shitshow, but this is a new kind of shitshow.

When Bernie was in the race people excused their downplaying of Trump's fascism and claims of its normalcy by saying, we can't let Biden's team use appeals to popular front strategy to defeat Bernie, we can't focus on Trump's evil right now.

Well, dirtbags tanked Bernie's campaign, he's out of the picture, and they're STILL downplaying Trump and mocking people for naming his fascism.

There's no strategic excuse.

They are self-centered, attention-hungry dilettantes playing with fire, and they are burning all of us.

Thank god there's still an actual fucking liberatory movement led by Black people has been out in the streets refusing to stay quiet, rising up against the fascists and totalitarians and cops and complicit, cowardly local Democratic politicians.

THAT is the left base, friends.

This online dirtbag one-uppery and podcast opining is cosplay, but it is cosplay that matters, because any time we aren't out on the street, the media defaults to assuming that the cosplayers are the One True Voice Of The Left, and newcomers just keep believing them.

We cannot fucking afford to let dirtbag cosplayers gaslight newcomers and the media into thinking they are the spokespeople and thought leaders of the left.

We cannot keep letting the Peter Coffins and Michael Traceys and Will Menakers con their way into stealing our voice.

It's not about ego and it's not about gatekeeping.

It is about survival.

Without a left united and drawing a moral line in the sand for the mainstream, we are going to plunge over the cliff of fascism once and for all.

Movement matters.

Liberatory movement will never be mainstream, but it will always be our job to give the mainstream moral clarity by exposing and challenging injustice.

We cannot afford to let reactionary dirtbag cosplayers appropriate that work and steal our voice.

The left may not run this country, but we are its conscience.

If we keep letting the dirtbags use gaslighting and reactionary tactics to silence that conscience, fascism will win.

We will die. Figuratively, and likely literally.

It is that simple.

The end.