The only people “at fault” for this election are the fascist dipshits who wrapped their entire sense of self around using thought terminating cliches to pwn the Libs, their greedy, idiot fuckbag financiers, and weird narcissist idols. That’s it, that’s the list. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
This election wasn’t an argument, it was a power struggle. And the Right spent a solid decade building up an identity cult around a malignant narcissist. They built an identity completely dependent on the act of performative abuse, from online bullying to driving cars into protesters to shooting up mosques and museums.
They bought the marketplace of ideas, and flooded it with toxic Nazi garbage, and fed the fragile egos of people, who felt vulnerable against a changing and uncertain world, a shame-avoidant delusion so they could feel powerful and superior. Even now, instead of promising that their ideas will solve the problems they promised they would, they are ramping up the rhetoric to include rape threats, murder fantasies, and jubilant cries to “bring on ze camps”.
We have to recognize that the current build of Patriarchy is inherently Fascist, selling a Genghis Khan fantasy of toxic masculinity, where everyone gets a throne built on a pile of the skulls of their enemies, in a palace full of powerless slaves and child brides, feeding everyone from OG fashy bros, Fox News bros, entrepreneur in bio bros, crypto bros, sport bros, gamergate bros, gooner bros, etc a vision of the future where they all get underage harems and plenty of helpless victims to perform that cruelty upon to their hearts content.
Nick Fuentes’ “your body, my choice” tweet going viral is the virtual trophy of this gestalt of masculinity so poisonous that every sense of basic human awareness bounces off their smooth, armored brains, worn shiny by years of aggrievement porn and from-birth entitlement narratives. They’re not unhappy because they’re weird, abusive shitheads addicted to pwnage culture and incapable of real emotions other than self pity and violent rage, no, THOSE people are keeping them from, again, the skull thrones and child brides.
100% of this rests on every facet of the massive machine that got so mad that we elected a black guy that one time that they went full 1936 and put billions upon billions into forcing what is functionally narcissism based on a toxic masculinity endgame onto the population, especially young men so mad that a girl rejected them once that they had no choice but to turn into Nazis.
Wait, it’s all Patriarchy? Always has been.
Look, it is no secret that The Left is full of our own strident, yammering know-it-alls also yelling thought terminating cliches and pre-chewed opinions into the void, we just don’t have the solidarity of a narcissism cult, nor the machine to build one. And that’s a good thing. We still hold spaces for actual discussion and disagreement.
And it’s the height of hubris to think that we don’t swim in the same waters of toxic masculinity that make all of this stuff all about ego and performativity, demanding dopamine for putting others in their oh so less enlightened place – after all, who pwns the Libs harder than we do?
We are not immune to these basic fantasies of righteous violence, competition, dominance, and power.
The overarching culture of toxic masculinity and patriarchy has turned us all into bitter, self absorbed, violent, reactionary, shame-avoidant dipshits, no cap, fr fr, and any examination of the way forward has to realign with anti-Patriachal work, just as we do with anti-colonial or anti-imperialist threads, both in the personal and the political.
It is always unfair that the abuser has to put out the flaming garbage of the abuser, but that’s unfortunately the way this dogshit world works.
As with any abuse, it is not our fault, and while I disagree with a lot of the stances people have taken about voting, or the fingers they’re pointing, honestly, it makes my point that lashing out in a maladaptive shame-avoidance tantrum is learned behavior, taught to us by our abusers.
This outcome was not anything we could have prevented simply by voting. But as with the horrible inequity of abuse, it is still our responsibility to do the work to heal, ourselves, the country, the planet, whatever. And that means rooting out this toxic behavior – including in ourselves – and learning to approach concrete solutions with solidarity and coalition, to not be afraid to both challenge and seize the levers of power.
This is not a call to compromise, it is a call to organize around our shared values of community and liberation, and find the real solutions we know are worth fighting for. The Master’s tools of violence, competition, supremacy and oppression cannot tear down the Master’s house.
They are trying to make this loss humiliating, because humiliation is all they have. But if we can see it as humbling, we can begin to do the real work.
“Pride is not the opposite of shame, it is its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.” – Uncle Iroh, ATLA
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