Why was the professional activist left so irritated by MTJ’s call to #DefundTheFBI? When every DSA-endorsed candidate votes to fund the feds & for $40 billion to Ukraine while a crude right-winger slams the security state & NATO, it deepens the US left’s painful identity crisis.
As ideological boundaries blur and the contradictions of the US professional activist left rise to the surface, its influencers spend increasing energy gatekeeping and punishing heretics (Dore, Tulsi, etc). They are clinging to a precarious identity and fragmenting community.
The security state now views Trump/MAGA as a threat to “national security” - not necessarily the activist left, as the FBI did during its 60s heyday. The activist left convened around Bernie, who rolled over for the establishment, and BLM, which was co-opted by the NGO class.
The organized US left in its current incarnation poses little threat to entrenched power, and often functions as its shield. This is a private source of humiliation to many activists, prompting them to overcompensate by ritually abusing heretics and performative radicalism.
There is also the professional left element which reacts with open glee as the security state runs wild on MAGA, the same way many of them celebrated deaths of unvaccinated right-wing septuagenarians with Covid. The culture wars define their shared identity & trump any principle.
*by MTJ I mean MTG
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
