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midnight-hyperion · 3 years ago

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The vast majority of Americans on the left side of the aisle have not yet comprehended the fullness of what is going on with the Supreme Court. This is incredibly dangerous. Americans, if you are under sixty years old – maybe even older - you may have an inchoate sense that somewhere, there are grown-ups who will keep things from going too far in this country, there has been and is always an authority of last resort who could be appealed to who would step in and not let tyranny and injustice prevail. There was. That was the Supreme Court. [..] The Supreme Court is now effectively gone. It has been packed with jackals who are there to dismantle the Court itself, and American democracy as well. If you think that hyperbole, I invite you to contemplate the gerrymander and the present state of voting rights in the US. The forces presently ascendant, having gained power, they do not intend to ever lose it to a mere election. There are no more guard rails on American democracy. There will be no grown-ups to step in before things go too far. There is nothing stopping the wolves from voting themselves the lamb for dinner. Americans, you need to kindly dig this. You have lived your life with the American Federal government working one way, and now it no longer works that way. Some of your fundamental assumptions, your deepest intuitions, are not only wrong, they're dangerous, the way running deeper into a burning building is dangerous. All your life, the ultimate way to pursue justice has been through the courts. Every organization you know that has fought for justice – the ACLU, the HRC, the EFF, the NAACP, the ADL, GLAAD, NOW, etc, etc, etc – has done through by bringing suit in court. That is now a booby trap. Bringing court cases now will not only fail to promote justice, it will make things worse. That is because the Court can only act when invited to. If you file a suit – ask them to review a matter – the court system will only be too happy to take advantage of the invitation to not just decide against justice in the specific case before them, but establish unjust precedent. The court system will take the opportunity to rip even further justice out of our government and our society. Nor is the problem just at the Supreme Court: it's the entire judicial system, because the Supreme Court bats last. Now that anti-individual-rights fascists control the Supreme Court, the fascists bat last. If you sue over your rights in any matter, and you win, the defendant you beat can appeal. And then one of two things happens: either you win at the appellate level and then the defendant can appeal to the Supreme Court, where you will lose, or you lose their appeal, and then you can appeal to the Supreme Court, where you will lose.

from https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1763628.html#cutid1

The supreme court has never seemed just or sane to me, so Siderea and I depart from one another fairly early on in her post, but I get what she's trying to say when it comes to needing a fundamental shift in leftist strategy. And I appreciate Siderea's illustration of how taking cases to the courts is now a losing game, which is most of why I'm sharing her post.

I wrote about how the supreme court's change in makeup fundamentally altered the game board in september 2020 in response to a separate Siderea post, and nothing so far has changed my mind. To me, it's important to get it across to anyone who hasn't realized it yet, that the courts aren't where leftist energy should be flowing. Not that I think anyone should go back to using the courts, but I know some good people on the left who believed in them. So this post is written primarily to those of you who call yourselves leftists and not anarchists (yet.)

Siderea suggests we should spend a century voting our way out of this mess, that there's nothing we can possibly do besides vote. All the while, she slyly nudges at the option of revolution, defining it as something distinctly american, like we have to be doing an american thing to be valid. Perhaps this is a function of anticipated audience, but I couldn't give a fig if revolution and resistance aren't quintessentially american.

But I think Siderea's perceived option space in this fight is heavily colored by her liberal leftist worldview, and I don't believe voting or mass revolution will work. The former is fundamentally flawed, and the latter relies on a mass of humans caring enough about justice to be willing to fight for it.

Taking a century to get the votes to install a liberal democracy is completely unacceptable. We don't have a century, between the climate and genocidal fascism, I'm not sure we have even six years. Fascists will kill us all before allowing the left to take over state legislatures. We're looking at the violent enforcement of one party rule. In some states we're already there. And more besides, I'm not okay with even one victim of fascist violence.

I'm not sure it's really sunken in yet for Siderea that they plan to kill us. Leftists, LGBTQ people, indigenous people, jewish people, sex workers, PoC, abortion rights activists, immigrants, anarchists -- their plan isn't to win at politics and spend a century playing ball until the left wrestles back control. Their plan is total christian cultural hegemony. They intend to erase every trace of lefty culture, social justice, and anything that contradicts a christian worldview. They want to impose a strict gender, race, and religion-based hierarchy upon us, to erase the truth that their choice to sell out to that hierarchy was entirely unnecessary.

Christofascism in a Nutshell

Here is an excerpt from a draft of an essay I'm writing on christofascism:

Christofascists are trying to gain power so they can gaslight everyone about basic observations of reality. And to me, most of what they are doing looks like hurting themselves for no reason. But the truth is actually worse than that. I've elsewhere described their decision as the choice to stab others, as they simultaneously stab themselves in the chest, falsely believing that each stab re-affirms that their own original decision to stab themselves was necessary. That's a lie and a fundamental conceit. At any point, they can put the knife down. They choose not to, thinking that deciding is supposed to hurt, and that pain is the price of admission. I believe they know real friendship and goodness can exist, but instead of seeking that out or embodying it, they choose to stab the very concepts of friendship and goodness, substituting the real thing with a dominance hierarchy. This isn't because they believe real friendship among equals is impossible, but because they know it is possible, and they know they've rejected it. At some point in their lives, probably early on in their youth, every fascist has an opportunity to reach out and seek true friendship, or defend it. And some authority figure, maybe violently, threatens them or tells them "no." And instead of sneaking behind that authority's back, lying, or otherwise fighting in defense of something truly good, that they know to be truly good, they submit. And for them, it's a true submission, not a fake performance, or something they agreed to with their fingers crossed behind their back. And ever since, every fascist commits to the lie that true friendship does not exist, while simultaneously claiming that their sacrifice was necessary. They'd rather die than admit they were wrong. I'm focusing on friendship because anarchistic friendship, true friendship, is what fascism fundamentally exists to destroy. At a simpler level, anarchistic friendship is the choice to meet someone as a fellow agent, and reject all hierarchies.

It is to want to give someone eternity if and only if they want you to, and to anticipate that they will treat you just the same, and that neither of you will care about anything less important until those conditions are met. That's what actually caring looks like. It means that when you encounter another like yourself, you wouldn't want to damage their agency, and you'd anticipate they wouldn't want to damage yours. Anarchistic friendship is full of these symmetries which are only sustainable if what you both want is for you and they live fully, forever, agentically. And at their heart, "fully, forever, and agentically," all mean the same thing. It can't be goodharted. I can describe it this plainly, and a fascist reading this would scoff. Someone wishing to pass themselves off as for real might be able to fake it for a while, but no matter how shiny it is to them, they'll be revealed by what they cannot do. This cannot be hacked by each of you spending equal time as the dom or the sub, switching off. It's the fundamental rejection of dominance and submission, of authority, and is the fundamental association with and acceptance of responsibility for one's desires. It's all of this that fascists wish to deny exists, claiming instead that all relationships boil down to status (high-low, low-high, etc,) control, power, obedience to authority, and obedience to natural-selection-as-authority. Since they know it's a lie, they chase the appearance of power rather than true power. So they go for fancy uniforms, identify with nation-states, and pathetically assert that their ability and willingness to make corpses out of children makes them strong. "No one really loves anyone," opines the fascist, "people only care about looking good." See, it's the second claim, that their "sacrifice" was necessary, that's most interesting to me. To acknowledge that something was sacrificed is to acknowledge that something is real, in the same way as knowing what to gaslight someone about indicates that you know what's true, because you need to know what to keep lying about.

If you claim there's a dragon in your garage, and someone opens the door to check and sees an empty garage, you might be tempted to believe there's no dragon. But if you claim the dragon is invisible, and keep making up more ridiculous excuses for every test that fails ("an invisible dragon that's impermeable to flour and doesn't need to breathe!"), you're not engaging in a search process to determine if there's really a dragon. You're just telling me that you know there really isn't a dragon but wish there was one and want me to play along. In the same way, when a fascist lies about trans people, women, races, and the potential for relationships that aren't embedded in a dominance hierarchy, they're telling us that they actually do know that other people are equal in value to them, and that they could've had real friendships if they wanted to. They just really wish it weren't true, because that makes them cowards. And the worst truth, the most fundamental one, is that their "sacrifice" wasn't necessary. But they can't handle that, so instead of facing up to their mistake, they're killing us to erase the knowledge that they're wrong, like if you drunk texting your ex and woke up the next day to see that your ex had already read the read messages, so you delete all your drunk texts after the fact like that will help. It still happened. Saying anything else is just pretending. So humans like this seek out ideologies that embody "the rule of the jungle," looking for evidence that confirms their choice. Some gravitate towards the logic of rationality, others to the power of body building, or find "compromises" with "pure brutal nature" in catholicism. All the while, they know deep down that all this "brutal nature" & "law of the jungle" shit is just that -- a bunch of shit. But they want you to believe they believe that, because they want you to believe they do, as one prong of a two-prong strategy to affirm that their choice was the right one.

But that doesn't explain why our very existence threatens them. The answer is very queer feminism 101:

Traditional christian doctrine teaches that this dominance hierarchy is written on the heart of every human, that everyone secretly knows deep down that it's true, and that no one can find meaning or happiness outside of it, and that anyone who claims they have is lying or crazy. This is of course a blatant lie, something they only wish were true. And the dominance hierarchy they created exists to sustain the lie that true anarchistic friendship cannot exist. In the family, people raised as men are taught that their birthright is to be a patriarch, the head of the household. His reward for submitting to the hierarchy is a wife to serve him, and children through which he might gain another pale substitution for eternity. He's told that women want this, were born for it, and when he keeps encountering evidence to the contrary, and evidence that the whole hierarchy is a sham and not something actually reflected in nature, he needs to use violence to maintain it, and generate an explanation for why it isn't working out. Deep down he knows his wife is a person, just like him, and that makes him like her, like a woman. And all the other humans say women are subjugated and like it, and if others find out that things aren't going so swimmingly for him, they might take away his reward and subjugate him, too. Except all the other guys secretly fear the same thing. Because they all know deep down it's a lie. So they all collectively gotta externalize that shit, destroy the knowledge that they're like the people they're subjugating, so he and his culture attack feminine men, and exaggerate and fabricate differences between men and women so that boundary cannot be crossed. The few such humans who are more honest about their own delusions will claim that these lies are a "necessary sacrifice" for the sake of order and the perpetuation of society, and will tell you that you're crazy if you don't acknowledge this "brutal truth" of "nature." Queer people, unbroken children, and agentic women directly challenge that illusion. Queer people do so acutely by directly vanishing this boundary. Our very existence reveals the whole thing to be a sham. Historically, queerness has been all about playing with, erasing, and violating the boundaries of that illusion. Because they substitute fear for love, they claim queer people aren't capable of love. Transgender people scare them even more, because "becoming" the "opposite sex" (quotes cause most binary trans people I know don't describe themselves as having become a man or a woman, but always were one, and I believe them,) or claiming to be both or neither evaporates that boundary entirely. That's why our very existence scares and upsets them so much. They can try to stretch their ideology to include gay men and women, by assigning one partner the "dominant" status, and attempting to not think about why two men or two women having sex bothers them so much. But trans people directly evaporate that boundary in a way that threatens their perceived power, which they know is based on a lie. They also have trouble imagining why someone would want a spot "lower" on the hierarchy, given that they spend their whole lives trying to maintain their place on it. Fascists tend to define who is a woman by their capacity to reproduce, seeing womanhood as a kind of noble suffering, a responsibility that comes with a set of restrictions on their behavior that other humans who they designate as women are trying to escape through birth control, abortion, and transition. They tend to believe that humans who they designate as women who reject this definition are mentally unwell, or fundamentally broken. To them, everything we do must be for the sake of our children, and anything else is narcissistic selfishness.

They want our lives to revolve around pregnancy and childbirth because that reifies their choice to submit to this hierarchy, and fascist womens' choice to make their lives revolve around pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing, which they claim to view as their inescapable biological destiny, though if that were true, they wouldn't view what we do with our own lives as an attack on their choices. Fascists designate masculine women, trans men, nonbinary afabs, lesbians, and nonconforming women as licit targets for rape. Because those humans are, through their agency, violating the dominance hierarchy and damaging the illusion that such a hierarchy is natural. Those who believe they should have power over those humans often want to "show them their place." Given that these subjugators believe that a human's place is defined by their designation ("man" or "woman", race, etc.) and that a defining characteristic of womanhood is their ability to become pregnant and give birth, they use rape and especially the threat of an unwanted pregnancy to reify that hierarchy. They believe that the realities of pregnancy and childbirth are the ultimate "cold brutal truth" that will break a human who is otherwise unwilling to play along with their lie. And then the example of the rape victim, especially a pregnant rape victim, and the stigma & shame that follows them, is used as a threat by fascist women to nonconforming humans, "this is what will happen to you, if you step out of line." Rape, pregnancy, childbirth, and sometimes child rearing are the "consequences" of "misbehavior." This isn't just a christian fascist thing, but a pattern found across patriarchal cultures. Birth control, abortion, and later #MeToo, drastically changed some of this dynamic. Through birth control, we're asserting control over our reproductive futures, and thus our destinies, exercising agency. Ditto for abortion. With those tools, rape is a much less effective means of social control. Rape is then relegated to an empty display of dominance, one that, aside from psychological damage, some physical damage, and violation, pale in comparison to the effects of that violation coupled with the trauma of pregnancy and birth, which often permanently alters the pregnant human's body, and generates a whole separate human into existence. And fascists, especially the militant insane ones, are really excited about the prospect of getting to rape people pregnant, to "show them their place." For the last sixty years, we've been "cheating" our way out of our "natural punishments" for choosing when or if we want to have children.

Because we all know that there is an alternative to christofascism, they need to kill us, get us out of the public light, until they can re-assert their worldview on everyone.

That's why christofascist laws, militias, and candidates all optimize for the same thing: for us to disappear, for no one to even even know there is another option besides christianity.

If I don't Know My Name, Then What Shall I Call Myself?

The laws written by christofascists follow a theme that illustrates their purpose when all are viewed together: to erase us culturally and bodily from society.

First, right wing legislatures ban queer literature from libraries, schools, and universities, aiming to fundamentally change the character of colleges. Then they go further and criminalize the sale of queer books, entirely. A Barnes & Noble that stocks queer literature is currently being sued, and it's possible some book stores will refuse to stock queer lit as a result. But that's not all:

FYI on the VA book banning case: the judge will decide if these books can be sold or owned by minors or adults. If the books are ruled "obscene," not only will booksellers not be able to sell them, readers can't own them, & if you do either, you risk criminal prosecution.

from: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/nolafleurdelit/status/1529820443430965248#m

They're not just interested in erasing queer literature, but are using calls for rating guides that identify LGBT content in TV shows and movies as a prelude to banning queer representation from TV. They claim there are no trans kids and that the only way to get trans children is through propaganda.

One candidate for office is currently suggesting that "sharing LGBT ideology" is an "un-american activity" punishable by death & calls for a revival of the house committee on un-american activities (HCUA) for the single purpose of hunting down and killing queers. He's not getting any pushback from his fellows on the right. Other legislators and AGs are generally supportive of similar schemes to enforce the criminalization of sodomy and ban queer life from public life. And their pastors are calling for the mass genocide of queer people.

In the future, I anticipate that SESTA/FOSTA like provisions will be used by christofascists to criminalize the provision of information on reproductive health, since there are already plans in the works to do so. I anticipate that because the effort to criminalize trans care has closely followed the effort to criminalize abortion, with the "death by a thousand cuts" model of anti-abortion laws, that information on transition care will also be censored, like how the current administration already erasing sex workers. And popular social media sites will quickly fall in line, like they're already doing with reproductive care, deleting posts and suspending accounts for sharing information on safe self-managed abortions.

Neither the intent nor effect of FOSTA or Dobbs is to eradicate sex work or abortions, which have existed for millennia and will continue to exist regardless of legality. Remember: these measures aren’t about the law; they’re about power. Such laws slowly and systemically exclude certain demographics from participation in society by codifying what cultural biases already enforce. Consequently, while some people will face arrest, and many more will live the nightmare of carrying an unwanted or unviable pregnancy to term, the widest-reaching effects of this legislation will be the chilling of free speech and the systemic deplatforming of abortion activists from social media and financial institutions, which will protect themselves from liability at our expense.

from: https://www.wired.com/story/roe-abortion-sex-worker-policy/

And I think the author of the wired post is right that we're going to be facing a state surveillance apparatus that criminalizes us, and is used to identify us to censor and later kill us. So we don't have a century. The pace and escalation in this rhetoric is escalating rapidly.

Their effort erase queer literature is combined with attempts to villainize LGBT adults who interact with LGBT youth. The current rhetoric is that young LGBT people don't exist, and that young people who claim to be LGBT have been "groomed" and "brainwashed" by queer adults. Many on the right falsely claim that LGBT people are not born, but that our gender identities and sexual identities are the result of sexual trauma and mental illness from exposure to queer adults.

And that explains some of the drive to stop LGBT people from adopting, to prevent the transmission of our culture.

The drive to erase us is also why they're interested in splitting up our families. There's a drive to separate children from parents who do not raise their children in adherence to fundamentalist christian ideology regarding gender roles. Already, the term "soft transgenderism" is catching on in religious circles as a derogatory term to describe men who do an equal share of the housework, and to shame women who "refuse to accept male headship," or who work after marrying.

In other words, religious extremists who have infiltrated state agencies define "transgenderism" to include equality between genders, and are defining "transgenderism" as child abuse. In doing so, they're setting the stage to define progressive families as abusive, and intend to remove children from those families, so those children can be indoctrinated by fundamentalist families. While this isn't likely to directly work, the criminalization of things associated with progressive people will make them "unfit parents."

They believe that these strategies will keep young LGBT people ignorant of their history, and ignorant of the larger movement that could support and affirm them. Instead, christofascists want them to grow up believing that they're mentally ill perverts who should aspire to be straight and cis, or die trying.

And their views are spreading. A recent report finds strong support in the "united states" for far-right ideology:

49% of people said they believe gender ideology has corrupted American culture, including 34% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 45% of Independents.

And of those of us who survive to adulthood, they intend to first ban transition until the age of 25, arguing that young adults have been brainwashed, and are simply too immature to know what's good for them. Often it's brought up how a majority of trans people are autistic or mentally ill, and that our autism and mental illness should be considered as grounds to suggest that we're incapable of making informed medical decisions, even past the age of 25. The current rhetoric at senate hearings is that trans people don't exist at all, and that the federal government should end recognition of trans people entirely. Various attempts are being tried, including the attempts to ban drag around minors as a prelude to claiming that drag is equivalent to being trans, to re-institute cross-dressing bans.

"If children don't know other queer children and adults exist," they say, "then there will be no queer children." But since we know that's a lie and that queer children exist regardless of whether or not they know what to call themselves, and did exist even during periods where information on queerness was heavily suppressed, the result of banning queer children from information about themselves will be a long string of child suicides. And of the survivors, many will be deeply traumatized, repressed, and hate themselves.

And since it won't work, they're simultaneously enforcing their worldview through stochastic terrorism and fear. Christofascists in law enforcement are often working side by side with militants, who are increasingly engaging in violent acts, from bomb threats, burning down gay bars and the homes of queer people, to lighting flags on fire and creating hit lists. The violent rhetoric online leads to street harassment of children, as well.

And all of this, and so much more, is why we can't wait. They're not just trying to change policy, they're trying to erase us from history.

Then What Do We Do?

So it won't be won back through state legislatures. We're going to have to win this one through anarchism. That means small autonomous groups doing direct action.

It means preserving information on reproductive care, LGBTQ theory, our art, our literature, and making that information available in censorship-resistant ways. It means sharing information on abusers, and making that information censorship resistant as well, because the far right really wants to put #MeToo and associated movements back in the bottle.

I encourage people to look into mesh nets, sneaker nets, torrenting, and encryption. Learn how to use the internet without giving away so much metadata. You can download your kindle library, remove the DRMs, and share those books with your friends. You can share zines, download books using libgen.rs for free, and there are numerous web scraping tools to download youtube channels out there. If you can grab what you can, whatever is important to you, then you're making it harder for fascists to gain or maintain a stranglehold on information.

Because it's not enough to simply know that christofascist dominance hierarchies are a sick sham that must be destroyed. Anarchists and other activists have spent over two hundred years learning from fighting the state, and fighting fascism, and we can use that information to inform our strategies and fight back effectively. A good heart paired with good decision theory is a powerful weapon, but each of us shouldn't have to re-invent the wheel. The information is already there, all we have to do is use it.

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