Your Faves Will Not Save You

Or, Kill the Podcaster in Your Head. 

An Injury To One

What I wanted most to know – and this precisely was not debated in the meetings – was: which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries?

– Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me To Leninism”

Chappell Roan wants to have it both ways. God bless her heart; don’t we all. She wants to defend against a supposed existential threat. She wants to maintain a principled stance. She wants to maintain a vocal position of antagonism to the genocide in Palestine. She wants to defend trans rights and Black Liberation as best she knows how. She wants to criticize the American Ruling Class. She wants to vote for Kamala Harris. 

Megan Thee Stallion wants to have it both ways; sometimes, you can. Oftentimes, that is the correct stance; for example, in medicine, where good patient advocacy, making the patient comfortable, establishing trust, and doing what’s right for their condition or illness are achievable goals, and necessarily must coexist. Other times it’s a principled political stance, where you correctly identify the ongoing violence against queer people with the unrelenting destruction abroad, where you draw connections between finance and law, and which lobbies are writing which policies, and against whom. 

Angela Davis and Joe Simms want to have it both ways. They are right to criticize the tepid, meager defense of worker’s rights from the Democrats. They are right to fear for Black people, women, under a(nother) Trump presidency.  They are certainly right to call out the republicans for their support of violence and destruction abroad. But they will still endorse Harris. 

Chappell Roan wants to have it both ways, but she cannot. She is right to worry about trans people in the U.S., but it has been under the Biden administration where we have seen the most significant rise in anti-Trans legislation. This year there were 658 anti-Trans bills introduced across the U.S., according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. In 2023, there were 615, in 2022, there were 174, and in 2021, when Biden took office there were 155. Where have the Democrats been? Where has the Biden admin been? Where has Harris been? 

Voting for Harris will give us what? Maybe we’ll break the record at 700 anti-Trans bills next year. Maybe Texas will start putting trans people in camps instead of just putting them on lists. Will she lift a finger? Will she even veto a bill if it comes across her desk? Or will she fight tooth and nail to prevent effective transition care, like she did against Michelle-Lael Norsworthy? Or will she continue to preside over the absolute hell that are U.S. prison camps? Will she keep trans women imprisoned with men who rape and assault and murder them, as she did with Carmen Guerrero? Will she torture and neglect trans women in solitary confinement after they were raped, like she did with Candace Crowder?  

Harris’ record on Black rights and liberation is even more dismal. She continued to imprison Black men for non-criminal behavior. California continues to have severe structural violence against Black and brown people that she did little, if anything to meaningfully fight against. Under her new guidance, the Democrat party struck their opposition to the death penalty from their party platform, and in the past weeks, several men, notably Imam Khalifah Williams, and Emmanuel Littlejohn, were lynched by the State. They could have been saved, had Harris or Biden lifted a finger, pardoned them, but that, evidently, was simply too much. 

Is there more? Of course there is. California’s self-identified “Top Cop” has led the escalation of police brutality and violence since the end of the George Floyd Uprising in 2020. She has seen to it that more money, more weapons, more vehicles, more violence are employed by the hands of the State’s enforcers, a modern day Sturmabteilung against Black and brown people, against queer people, against women, and she shows no signs of stopping. She wants to increase border spending and numbers of fascistic uniformed Gestapo. She wants to increase the lethality, capability and reach of the U.S. military in their imperialist and colonial holdings. She wants to increase the expansion of fossil fuels even at the cost of climate and the inevitable genocide of the global south, and people in the country she helps govern. She wants to increase the spread of deadly, dangerous diseases like SARS-CoV-2, like H5N1 Avian flu, and destroy the health care system as it is. 

Harris has already committed so much violence, so much death, just in the borders of the so-called U.S. Worse, she is promising, guaranteeing to commit more! And yet, erstwhile, well-meaning allies like Chappell Roan are trying to cajole us into supporting. How can we do so in good conscience? 

An Injury To All

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Rights of Nations to Self Determination”

Solidarity and Internationalism, as principles, demand care and attention. More importantly, they demand sacrifice and discipline. What discipline, what sacrifice, is being taken, by people who vote for the president? 

What is sacrifice even? Standing in line to cast a fucking ballot? Wake up and smell the ashes. We see the heroic example of Yahya Sinwar, a man who’s been hunted, violated, dispossessed since birth, imprisoned for decades, who dedicated everything to the liberation of his people. He died a brutal death, fighting literally to the end, after he lost an arm, lost his comrades, expended every last ounce of energy, and still mustered up enough defiance to toss a piece of debris at the camera! I look around and all I can ask is: Where are our martyrs?! Where are those who can fill the shoes of George Jackson, Fred Hampton, and take up the tasks of resistance? 

Where has international solidarity gone since October 7, 2023? Weapons shipments to Israel are still moving, thanks to the brave, patriotic work of the Longshoremen union. The Party for Socialism and Liberation have taken the lead at so-called protests, only to ask nicely to the guard dogs of capitalism to escort them on orderly strolls, and sell out actual radicals to those same cops (and don’t forget to vote de La Cruz for Red Collaboration!). 

If I say I oppose the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, what good does it do to advocate on behalf of the people perpetrating it? Does it help anyone to take the bold stance of “I disagree with all bad things… except when I don’t”? Does it do any good to participate in the media spectacle of the election?

Under the Democrats, we have seen an unspeakable expansion of hideous violence committed in the name of Nothing Fundamentally Changing. Can I look at pictures of Palestinian martyrs, see their lifeless and broken bodies, and check Harris/Walz on the ballot? If I do then I’ve lost every human emotion I’ve ever had. 

Can I decry the ongoing genocide and starvation in Sudan, supported by the U.S. and her client states, see images of the starving people there, and Vote Blue No Matter Who? My mind and self would have turned as cruel as the people committing those atrocities directly, and inhumane as the people paying for it. 

Can I then vote for the sole sake of Trans people, of which I am one, just to kick the can down the road a bit, for myself? I’d be selling the lives and souls of people suffering just to avoid it myself! I couldn’t live with myself if I did. The colonial boomerang’s trajectory may be long, but the blowback is inevitable. We do not get to pretend that we are better voting for, or better off under, Harris, except to alleviate our own sense of guilt. 

So go ahead and vote if you must! Vote for your minimum wage that will never increase. Vote for trans people to lose more autonomy. Vote for immigrants who will be policed with ever-increasing force. Vote for Black people to keep dying by pigs who went through an inclusivity class. Vote for more murders of Indigenous women and marginalized gendered people. Vote for only one more genocide, one more death, one more atrocity, and think that that will save you. 

On the Podcaster Question

How can we overcome book worship? The only way is to investigate the actual situation.

– Mao Zedong, “Oppose Book Worship”

Chapo Trap House will not save you. There is no media that you can listen to, nor patreon that you can subscribe to, or anything to watch or read that will bring the revolution. No memes to share, no hot takes to retweet and no posting-as-praxis. Will their next book solve our collective malaise? Will the next episode (premium or not!) give you clarity of mind to start your work?

Rev Left Radio will not liberate your mind. Explorations of Buddhist philosophy as a personal interest will not wake the working class alone. Making podcasts with maga “communist” TERFs will not elevate the worker’s consciousness. The media class is already incestuous and cannibalistic, and just like Harris, they speak out of both sides of their mouths. 

True Anon is not your comrade. Irony-poisoned takes from sour and sarcastic people who shoot targets dressed in keffiyeh are not principled resistance. The information shared can draw connections, maybe, but it has not led to a mass movement. There is little, if anything more that can be said that hasn’t been by these entertainers. Every four years it’s the same nonsense. Election reporting! Takes on the conventions and debates! Are they any different than the democrat stans? Are you?

Hasan Piker is not a modern Marx. He exists in an entire ecosystem of rabid dogs eager to tear apart the worst-off for the sake of live content and reaction. All of it lives in the legacy of the killstream. Open bloodsport spectacle born of the gamergate milieu. Every time someone tells me about the latest Hasan or Vaush or Destiny drama I think of  Amos Yee arguing on stream for child porn to be legal before years later being arrested for possession thereof.

The media environment does not incentivize a real movement of the working and oppressed people. The media figures need to maintain their high profile, they need to maintain the money coming in, they need to continue having things to speak on, to make media on. The media will always be reactive, always dangerous, always self-masturbatory, and always looking for the money to roll in. They will not be, they cannot be the vanguard. 

Against the “Left” Media Class

Social-chauvinism and opportunism are the same in their political essence; class collaboration, repudiation of the proletarian dictatorship, rejection of revolutionary action, obeisance to bourgeois legality, non-confidence in the proletariat, and confidence in the bourgeoisie.

– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International”

People expect media makers to use their platform for social advocacy, and well they should! The readership of this journal may react to my article as an affront, or with annoyance, and think I’m solely castigating people who don’t meet my purity test, which can’t be further from the truth. These are material questions. These issues have a socially defined, material basis. Material questions have material consequences. 

Chappell Roan’s support for Kamala Harris will inspire others to vote for her. Chapo and TrueAnon’s persistent going-over of the election will encourage participation in the U.S. electoral trap. The editorializing on twitter and hosting sites will only present more and more analysis, over and over and over. There is nothing else in the media class to do. They will advocate for their material interests, and as long as the money is good enough, as long as there’s some comfort to be drawn, the media class will avoid material risk, danger. 

So many in the Imperial Core show their willingness to leave the actual work of liberation to the masses of the Global South, or the internal colonies here, while profiting from the labor and exploitation of those same masses. The media makers sit here online, wistfully wondering why Black and Indigenous orgs and individuals avoid them, why women and queer people burn out and leave, why disabled people only seem to appear online. All without a thought towards themselves, without humility or self-awareness!

Lenin said “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” Well, where the fuck is the movement? The revolution does not manifest from microblogs, or spring fully formed from the head of labor aristocrat thinkers! Decolonization does not arise from literary devices, does not develop from words printed on the screen. This is a violent struggle, fought with guns, clubs, starvation, terror, artillery, planes, bombs, assassinations, sacrifice! We need to grasp the other end of the truth: Without a revolutionary movement, there is no revolutionary theory. 

We’ve talked. And talked, and talked, and talked, and talked, and talked. Now what’s left is to engage in action, to refine our theory, and to go out again, over and over until we win. The escalation will not come from the media class, but the people who are broken and hurt, the wretched of the earth, and the masses, willing to fight and die for actual freedom! 

 The revolution comes from the workers and oppressed people of the world. The revolution is done by hands and labor, minds and care, rest and sleep, then wakefulness and hard work. Your faves will not save you. The working and oppressed classes will save us. 

Kill Your Pop Stars

My only argument was: ‘If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?’

– Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me To Leninism”

The truth is, I’m angry and tired. I’ve spent the entire past year seeing dead children on instagram, destroyed homes on twitter, sorrow from my friends for their martyred families. And nothing has changed. I’ve lost trans sibling after trans sibling, comrade after comrade, to suicide and violence. I go to sleep every night thinking of Muhammed al-Na’Im being crushed under a bulldozer, like a strawberry under a fork. I wake from nightmares thinking of Sidra Hassouna, who was blown apart by an iof bomb, and who’s body hung off a wall like a doll on a store shelf. I get a message on discord and telegram, and flash back to the final messages of beloved friends who later took their own lives.

Revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao said, but a dinner party is happening every single day all the same. It’s a dinner party of violence, of cannibalism, of exploitation and terror. We in the Imperial Core show up with our signs, yet are shocked when we find that the dinner being served is the broken, burnt, trampled flesh of people we happily ignored until now. We deign not to eat, but we will happily sit there at our places, in evening gowns, or tuxedos and cumberbunds (according to our preference!), drinking enough wine, squeezed from the blood of children, to numb the horror of what we’re seeing, nevermind where the wine is grown, or who is killed to make it. We get sick watching the feast of men, women, children, people who start bearing a strange resemblance to ourselves, our friends, family and loved ones. We cry out in horror and protest! …And then we quiet down when no one even shows that they hear us. And we sit back down, smaller than before, and drink the blood-red wine. 

We here in the heart of empire, the belly of the beast, we are all now subjects of, part and party to, the violence carried out in our name. 

George Jackson said “We must prove our predictions about the future with action.” All that is left now is to fight.