Well that was certainly a week.

Statewide and nationally, Democrats beat Republicans in almost every race where there was even a remote chance of blue winning over red. And it was glorious. The bleating and mewling from the gleefully fascists Republicans began before the count even started, and only increased in volume as it became apparent that this would be an utter blowout.

I really want to write volumes about the ChristoPedoFascists who control this country, and what should be done to them, and what realistically can be done about them, but that would take more time than I have available in the next hour, day, week, or year. So this will have to suffice: Anyone who voted for any MAGA in any of the last twelve years should be named, branded, shamed, and never allowed to have friendship, comfort, peace, success, or love, for the rest of their days. MAGA is a white supremacist, Christian nationalist (but I repeat myself), child abusing (but I repeat myself), misogynist (but I repeat myself) death cult. They do not, have never had, and never will have, anything useful to contribute to society, except as compost and landfill material. And even that would need to be decontaminated of all of the Mar-A-Lago Face treatment materials.

The Democrats are a moderately to strongly conservative political party by any rational measure. They are not liberal, nor “left”, and certainly not RADICALLY left, no matter what the ChristoPedoFascists of the Republican party would have us believe. There may be individual party members who fir those descriptions, but they are, at best, outsiders, and none of them are part of the party power structure.

And the Democratic Socialists who find themselves currently in ascendance are barely left of center, by any rational measure. They will have their work cut out for them. They need to put in place a foundation from which the political window of this country moves back left enough that we can cull the ChristoPedoFascists and hypercapitalists (and their enablers, supporters, bootlicks, etc.) from the halls of power, once and for all. It will be a process of decades, at least.

The immediate problem is that the Trumpists have caused so much damage over the past 12 years that we are in the beginning stages of an unavoidable polycrisis which will crash down, full-force, in the next couple of years. Economic turbulence caused by the Iran war. The AI grift and its stranglehold on the global economy. The ongoing climate crisis. Trumpist brownshirts kidnapping and murdering people in the name of “security.” The war in Ukraine. These are issues which will take many years and decades to mitigate and respond to.

And humans have very short memories, and we are being gaslit by the technofeudal overlords.

The Democrats are facing a likely “Blue cliff” where, because the damage caused by the oligarchs of the Epstein Class can’t be fixed in a year or two, blame will shift away from the perpetrators and onto the people failing to work miracles.

Thus it is vitally important that we exhaustively document every single problem caused by the Epstein class oligarchs, collect the receipts, and use this proof to absolutely bury everyone who tries to shift blame onto anyone else.

And we also need to, culturally, destroy the idea that any members of any in-groups are victimized for being members of those in-groups.

Men are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being men.

White people are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being white.

Straight people are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being straight.

CIS people are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being CIS.

Conservatives are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being conservative.

Christians are never oppressed, repressed, marginalized, or victimized, for being Christians.

(These points are specific to the USA, but largely apply to the rest of the Eurocentric world, as well as any country colonized by a European power)

When it comes to ranking the relative privilege of belonging to one or another of these in-groups, as well as people who might be part of an in-group in one context, but part of an out-group in another (e.g. conservative women, gay men), there is a calculus of intersectionality which can quickly become complicated but which remains valid nonetheless. I will address this, as well as other considerations (such as the grid of supremacist vs. bootlick vs. ally vs. resistance) in future posts.

For now, let us all enjoy the slowing of the slide toward ethnonationalist christofascism. We are still heading in that direction, but the movement has lost a little steam. We have a lot of work to do to reverse that course.

Reading

Currently cooking my brain with Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Farrell and Newman, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian. And for my bedtime reading I just cracked open Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

Writing

I have completed a draft of the poem I will submit to the Hello, Future! project. I have a week to clean it up, run it past beta readers, and send it off.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Apocalypse, Super Powers
Setting: Museum
Genre: Steampunk

Listening

Sun Ra, “Heliocentric,” from the 1965 album The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra.

Interesting Links

• “Tesla to pull the plug on Cybertruck after years of poor sales” (Reuters) – And nothing of value will be lost.
• “‘Time for Some Accountability’: Advocate Says Democrats Must Subpoena Corporate Price-Gougers” (Stephen Prager, Common Dreams)
• “Western Democracy Was Always a Managed Oligarchy. Now It’s Breaking” (Radhika Desai in conversation with Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism)