[script revision] The Cost of Doing Business

Hey team! I've been reading a bit of Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism and it clarified some stuff I wanted to add to the current video. In thinking it through, I realized that this was, in many ways, the thesis I had been building to and hadn't quite nailed, and could now put into a historical context. So I ended up rewriting the ending of the script, which has a) made it better, but also b) made it longer and pushed back release into next month. Which is a bummer! But I'm way happier with it now.

(Nothing is final until release, naturally; I'll want to run this by my sensitivity reader to see if she is okay having her name on it and/or would be up for another commission of notes.)

This segment starts right after "The Right will threaten POC sometimes just to call the white moderates’ bluff" in the current script.

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Racism must be understood as more than a set of individual emotions but as a tool for achieving political ends, first and foremost because claiming otherwise is both factually and morally wrong. But also, without this understanding, white culture can’t recognize the stakes.

Fascism exists in a state of permanent conflict. Authorities consolidate power on the grounds that the people are in danger and need to be protected and mobilized. This isn’t unique to fascism: between the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, the US has been in some form of ongoing conflict for the last three generations, but: you’ll note the Cold War didn’t end on a battlefield, it ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. Communism, terrorism, and drug dealing are patterns of behavior, and they wax and wane, often for reasons outside our control. Geopolitics may someday shift such that terrorism becomes less prevalent, or that lowers the demand for drugs.

Fascists need an opponent that won’t go away on its own. So it always comes back to identity politics. A communist can choose not to be communist, but Black people are a population that will not go away except through violence.

Fascism begins by stealing populist targets from the Left: they focus on elites, corrupt businessmen, weak-willed politicians, shifting focus to types of people rather than the systems that produced them. But, sooner or later, they settle on something unchangeable: race, gender, ethnicity, religious background. In Germany it was Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romani, Slavs, and queers; in Italy it was Slovenes until they needed to invade Eastern Africa and then it was Libyans and Ethiopians as well; the American Nazi Party targeted African-Americans, Jews, and Catholics; Spain under Franco tried to determine the exact racial makeup of the Spanish people so they could cast out those with the wrong mixture of bloods.

If you want evidence the Right knows trans people aren’t actually cis folks in disguise, look at how transphobia has almost completely replaced Islamophobia as the animating bigotry of the Far Right. If they actually believed in desistance and conversion therapy - if they believed trans people could just stop being trans - they never would have picked them for an enemy. They know transexuality is innate.

This where it begins. This is why you should have no patience for anyone who says “wokeness is dividing the Left, we should focus on class.” They’re not attacking us on class. They’re trying to sell themselves as better on class than we are. Where do you think that narrative about “blue-collar whites” comes from? It’s not true, but they want you to believe it is. They want you to believe that they, and not the socialists, are the path forward for the downtrodden. Fascism came into existence and recurs in response to a strengthening Left. Every fascist movement has been preceded by a leftist one. Their goal is to redirect class resentment towards a scapegoat. They come at us on identity; in specific, the identities that are already disregarded under the current system. It always comes down to the shape of the human skull.

When a provocateur shows up on a college campus to talk about “ideas,” it’s not a debate. There’s no special sequence of words that will defeat them - this isn’t Hogwarts. This is a show of dominance. They are presenting themselves as white compatriots to be reasoned with rather than agents of white supremacy to be opposed. In that framing, the stakes are attention, the weapons are words, and people of color are not players but tokens on the game board. And they are checking whether you will submit to that structure.

They don’t care about ideas. They care about power.

And power is what beats them. They tell you four hundred people showing up in protest is just free news coverage. But when four thousand show up? They cancel. That’s power. And, in absolute numbers, most events they can’t rustle up four thousand supporters, but we can, provided cishet white dude lefties (like myself) haven’t told all the Right’s biggest targets their struggle doesn’t matter. (And, it’s worth mentioning, cops fuck with protesters less when some of them are white.)

This [white moderate] isn’t who needs to win. This [POC] is who needs to win, and, if you’re white, you need to be over here [antiracist]. I’ve collected as many resources as I can find by POC on what they need and want from white allies, and put them in the down-there part. There’s a plurality of opinions on this, so I recommend reading more than one.

But what I can tell you is, when business gets done, we need to split the check. A movement cannot be antifascist if it isn’t antiracist.