The Fascists Are Going To Win
The circumstances of my life couldn't be more different today than they were in the mid 2010's. Given this, it seems strange to be looking at events in the news, and feeling as if we are once again, back in 2015 - 2016, some six or seven years on, it's as if nothing has happened. In too many places of privilege, absolutely no learning has occurred, despite worsening conditions.
Earlier this week, Penn State attempted to host Proud Boys founder Gavin Mcinnes, despite weeks of pleading and warnings from students and student organizations that where the Proud Boys go violence follows. When a group of students showed up to protest, they were attacked by Proud Boys, as usual. University police, stood by and watched, before declaring the protest an unlawful assembly.
The statement from the University announcing the cancellation of the event, within an hour or two of its scheduled start, follows:
You can find a separate statement from the University President, behind this link.
Here's how the New York Times covered these events.
Wikipedia has an incomplete, but still long list of incidents of violence involving The Proud Boys.
You can find video of what actually happened at Penn State HERE.
Penn State and its President are acting as if the time, from 2017 to today, doesn't exist.
You can find liberal and leftist writers, commentators, researchers and pundits who spend a good deal of time talking about the conscientious ignorance of our current fascist movement, specifically the ever present average American who's fallen under the spell of nefarious leaders. It's true. What we once considered conservative media has become a fascist propaganda machine, its audience encased in a self imposed cone of silence, blocking out any inconvenient realities which might cause discomfort unless they can be manipulated for outrage and to target whichever minority or marginalized group is on the menu to feed the fascist power hunger in a given week.
Less often discussed or recognized is another kind of conscientious ignorance, which is as devastating, and works in concert with the variety fascists have come to rely on in their followers. It's the conscientious ignorance of people who have some modicum of power, like university presidents and administrators, leadership in news networks, and politicians who refuse to acknowledge the reality of the last six years. It's the kind of conscientious ignorance they hide behind empty words about free speech, as President Neeli Bendapudi does in her statement.
This isn't an ignorance which is dedicated to denying new scientific evidence. It is an ignorance which conscientiously avoids acknowledging the evidence though, and even as it's not religious, it has a basis in a kind of faith. It is a "secular faith," but not one based in science. It's based in American Exceptionalism, this belief that the United States is somehow special to a degree that it is exempt from the same forces and consequences other democratic societies have fallen prey to. It's a belief in the tenets of this faith as if they are somehow totems whose invocation works as a spell of protection. Calling out to the tenets of "free speech," "democracy," "tolerance" as if the words by themselves are protections against that which would undue them.
The evidence, as it exists currently, is that The Proud Boys aren't an organization interested in the free exchange of ideas. The evidence is that The Proud Boys express their ideas, with the intent of being able to identify those who express disagreement, in order to target them with violence. Their only interest in a free expression of ideas is to be able to identify and target people who have correctly assessed the evidence that they are indeed hate mongers and fascists.
The Proud Boys were one of the entities central in organizing the Jan. 6 2021 attack on the Capitol building in D.C, in an attempt to overthrow a legitimate election. Exactly what about this suggests this is an organization willing to engage with the public forum, that doesn't include violence as part of that engagement? If free speech and democracy are interdependent, than what good does it serve to continue to let people who have used violence to attempt to prevent the core basis of democracy from existing use the status of your institution as part of their megaphone for continuing to bellow disinformation and calls for further violence? This is to act as the altar and blade for your own sacrifice, with the understanding that you won't be made a martyr, and will instead have your corpse defiled for the entertainment of a cheering audience.
This morning, a man with a brain addled by conscientious ignorance and a steady diet of conspiracy theories (including those about the 2020 election, and January 6), broke into the home of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and attacked her husband. The attacker, was apparently yelling "Where's Nancy?"
That should sound familiar. On January 6, it was a regular refrain of the people livestreaming as they attacked the Capitol to prevent a legitimate election. Of course, the fascists are going to do everything they can to distract from the fact that this is an assassination attempt.
The man police found on top of Paul Pelosi, wielding a hammer, was ensconced in what has become the garden variety fascist media environment. His blog is a collection of conspiracy theories, far right bugaboos, and the various specters haunting the insecurities of those who identify with the hyper masculinity popular among fascists. His obsessions stand shoulder to shoulder with the topics The Proud Boys have spent the last few years showing up to commit violence for. The reports are that Paul Pelosi is currently undergoing surgery for a number of injuries to his hands, arms and skull. There's a kind of dystopian irony to Mr. Pelosi being treated at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, considering the part Facebook has played in helping spread the variety of disinformation and conspiracy theories which have landed him there.
I'm not saying that Penn State or President Neeli Bendapudi are responsible for the attack on Paul Pelosi. I am saying that everyone who has continued to give fascists access to their platforms, as the evidence of their appetite for violence has grown, have abdicated their responsibility to the public. Whether they have done it out of a sincere faith in the kind of American Exceptionalism undergirded by predestination in a glorious future or they are cynically manipulating that faith in order to not have to whether the inevitable criticism of fascists crowing out free speech, doesn't really matter. Neelie Bendapudi and Penn State are responsible for this specific instance, the violence on their campus, but universities, news publications, politicians and many others have been using this same reasoning as a means to ignore the evidence for a number of years now.
The evidence of an appetite for, desire to cause and spread violence isn't enough for a group of angry white men to be denied the opportunity to access the audience and the legitimacy our institutions confer by being giving them a platform. We don't have to outlaw any variety of speech, if people with power of a platform and the institutions which confer reach and legitimacy take the responsibility of their positions seriously. Continuously allowing fascists to use these as a way to both spread their violent message, use that message to identify people to target for violence, and then execute that violence is an abdication of that responsibility.
Attempting to paint this as a matter of freedom of speech is to have already ignored the evidence. It's not a matter of free speech. The Proud Boys are an organization which has demonstrated it has no interest in participating in the public forum, to any degree, without violence or the threat of it. The constant reference back to free speech by The Proud Boys and their associated fascists is specifically meant to invoke the faith in American Exceptionalism (a faith which free speech is a central tenet of) as a way to cloud the examination of the evidence, the facts in front of us. Clearly, it works.
What I'm interested in is what this all says about our future that people whose entire lives, careers and status are centered around the collection and dissemination of information, creating a base of knowledge. The power of those individuals and those institutions are based on the status conferred to them in the name of that endeavor. What does it say that Pennsylvania State University and its President are unwilling to (or incapable of) assessing the evidence as it exists? This isn't just a matter of one university. We've seen this same pattern in other universities and with some of our most influential press, media and politicians too. In this case, it is particularly enlightening though, because it does center on one specific organization, one specific entity, The Proud Boys, and the refusal to accept the evidence at hand even in the case of one specific organization, not a broader argument about free speech. This isn't a hypothetical, and doesn't seem at all extreme to suggest organizing and participating in an attempt to overthrow a legitimate elect is a worthy reason to find anyone connected to an organization worth denying whatever platform one might have. What does that say about our ability to resist fascism more broadly?
It says to me fascists are ultimately going to win. They may not gain control of all our institutions and become the prominent cultural power, but it's a lack of imagination to imagine this would be the only way they could win. A protracted, years long campaign of guerilla warfare and violence, either with the aid of the continued conscientious ignorance that's allowed them to come this far or through something more like the civil wars we've seen in South America, would also be a win for them. This will include assassinations as a central part of their strategy.
On our current trajectory, we're likely to see more attempts at assassination. The conspiracy theories driving today's attacker have already been pounded into the minds of tens of millions for a few years in most cases, and decades in others. Right now fascists are not hiding the fact that they have no interest in legitimate elections. Election deniers are running for offices across the country. People armed and in masks are "watching" ballot boxes, ready to act as vigilantes (this one is really interesting, considering the conspiracy theory floated by conservatives in 2011, about the New Black Panther Party).
All this as Elon Musk has bought one of the worlds most expansive communication platforms and has publicly asserted his plans to reinstate the kinds of users who've been peddling all of delusions favored by The Proud Boys and the man who was attempting to assassinated Nancy Pelosi today. Musk has repeatedly regurgitated talking points about free speech identical to those of our fascist movement.
All this, was this week alone, while what should be the institutional opposition continues to lean back into this delusional faith in American Exceptionalism, and evinces a fear of drawing criticism from the fascist movement. American Exceptionalism making implicit, "It can't happen here," seems to have them all waiting around for a savior that isn't coming, if they even believe this fascist movement rises to the level of being something we need to be saved from.
Of course, to say this is to invite a number of different responses. One of the most common is "That doesn't leave any room for hope! We should all be saying something hopeful, encouraging people to take action!" I've done a lot of trying to encourage people to take action over the years, and even when the necessary actions wouldn't have been quite as dire or "extreme" as they are now, it was a fools errand. The quagmire of capitalism and the cultural saturation of American Exceptionalism are impossible to overcome through a reasoned, straightforward explanation of the facts and the conditions. Most people are already expending considerable time and effort just trying to keep their heads above water economically. It doesn't leave much time or energy for "action." Even as many of them feel the kind of creeping dread that is the recognition of the oncoming fascist nightmare, American Exceptionalism is the soothing whisper in their subconscious, telling them it will all be fine (or at least that they, personally, will be fine).
The other response, is "Well, if the Left would just stop (insert whatever the latest conspiratorial claim about whichever targeted minority group, identity politics, or whatever else), we might be able to have an actual conversation about things that are important." I'm exhausted with the willful desire to not acknowledge that banning trans people from existing isn't going to solve inflation or that preventing anything like an accurate historical education in public schools isn't going to raise wages, but these things are still connected. Committing genocide against indigenous people was about the economics of treasure and land, but it was also about insuring that genocide was acceptable through racism, the sense of "Christian" identity etc. These things aren't separate. They are intrinsically connected and intertwined.
When Trump was elected, I was relatively sure he wasn't someone who was going to let go of power easily. I thought it possible he'd do what he could to insure elections in 2020 wouldn't happen, and was sure if he did, and he didn't win, he wouldn't accept those results. At the time, I didn't say much about it, other than to the people closest to me, because I didn't want to be considered over the top or unhinged. Now, I don't care, so I'm being clear about the likely future, given the evidence.
At least in the United States, we don't have much record of overcorrection where the protection of targeted populations is concerned. We have a history of making some kind of cursory move toward protecting targeted populations, and the elements of the right wing which are now fully behind this fascist movement screaming about slippery slopes, and then intimidating anyone who happens to disagree through harassment and violence. We don't have a history of over correction in favor of people who are not the ultra rich. We have a history of taking some tentative steps to curb the extremes of capitalism, and the capitalist class using all of their wealth and power to claim these things are communism and then to intimidate and harass anyone who happens to disagree.
Maybe, an assassination attempt on The Speaker of the House will be enough to convince some of these institutions a new perspective is necessary, but it's doubtful. The combined events of the last five years haven't been enough to produce that change, and the attack on the Capital isn't somehow less shocking or consequential than an attempted assassination.