Notes from the Substack Paywall: Not So Fast, Smart People, I Am Not Done Yelling (Patreon)

As many of you may know, I started a Substack awhile back, essentially for the angry political writing I've heretofore done on Twitter, because who knows how much longer Twitter will be around. It's settled into basically an essay when I get mad at the world and have enough mental space to put it in words, and then a follow-up under the paywall to say things I'm also mad about but don't have the energy to fight about with the internet at large and its army of sea lions.

For the most part, I prefer to keep that screamy energy separate from the cozy atmosphere we've created here. And especially if people pay for both, I wanted to make sure everyone got the value they expected.

But because Substack has some issues, and because I never want anyone here to feel like they're not my main exclusive-content priority, and because I am aware I have really been struggling the last couple of months and not always gotten everything up on Patreon in the timeliest of manners, I sort of mentally committed to the idea that if even one person asked for one of the locked follow-up Substack essays to be posted here, I'd put it up a bit later (to preserve some value for those who do pay for both). 

Well, someone asked, so here is the paywalled follow-up post to There's No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist. 

Thanks for your patience, those of you who have stayed through my struggletimes, I am getting better, my hands are getting better, and as Boxer always said, I will work harder.

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Not So Fast, Smart People, I Am Not Done Yelling

It’s oh-so-very-easy to clown on fascists. The pudding and the hair and the weird laughter and the bizarre statements and the toddler-style compulsive pointless lies and the ichor-dripping fruits of the hardworking monsters of the right.

But while I’m calling them dumb, I have some words for us. For me, too. This shit we are all in is our fault as well. Not the way the media says it is, with their plaintive submissive mewling why didn’t Team Blue wave the magic wand they’re clearly hiding in Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream freezer and make all the Republicans Democrats?

It’s our fault because absolutely none of those braindead 5th grade student council level plans to ruin liberal democracy would have come close to working if we weren’t so bloody bound and fucking determined to constantly relax in a bubbling jacuzzi of complacency making pithy comments about frogs and boiling water and congratulating ourselves on how much we see through them and then just willfully refusing to vote the very next day and going all surprised Pikachu rictus-grin on our hot-take socials when the shrieking eels gnaw their way into office again.

We let this happen and we’re still letting it happen.

Oh, you want to laugh at DeSantis because he’s a huge weirdo whose wife wears capes and who failed laughing 101? Me too, buddy, but that Boston Dynamics rejected box-bot is going to be in charge of real human people for a long fucking time. If it’s not the White House, it’ll be the Senate or changing the law so he can stay governor for life the way he changed it to run for President in the first place or running some massive gibbering maw of a corporation straight into every living room it can find.

And while we’re all laughing at Principal Puddingfingers and feeling relieved, Absorbaloff Trump has just sewn the primary up for himself barring and act of god, the DOJ, or cholesterol. It’ll be him and Biden in 2024 and every time I see someone online being smug about that I remember fucking November 8th 2016 and start yelling all over again.

Fascism may be dumb as a box of skulls but it shows up every. single. time.

Smart means NOTHING if it doesn’t show up. And smart doesn’t like showing up.

And look, I get it. I really get it.

IT FUCKING SUCKS HAVING TO FIGHT ALL THE TIME.

I don’t want to do it! I don’t want to have to write these huge essays about WHY MAYBE PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BE NAZIS. I want to write about magic crows and Eurovision and eat way too much pasta and talk shit about Ted Lasso’s third season and go swimming and paint geckos and horses with my kid. And non-fascists are like that. We just want to live. We don’t want to be required to pay attention. We’re not fucking crazy cult members whose existential angst and longing for a meaningful life was completely fucking fulfilled, soothed, and joyfully consummated by iä fhtagning before a baboon’s asshole in a bad suit and feverishly memorizing every Tiger Beat fact about Dear Leader in hopes of resurrecting the dead old sleeping gods of not only fascism but feudalism and slavery and theocracy and colonialism. Ooooh he likes his steak well-done and his victims raw and u n s u s p e c t i n g! What a guy!

<figure>He had them at hello</figure>

I get it! I’m tired too! I didn’t sign up to man a newsdesk for eight years, I just want to live my life without having to hear these chittering ghouls attempt human speech. We all just want the freedom to ignore politics, and somehow there is this vague cloudy idea that if we just get a non-conservative government in, that’s victory and we all get to go home at last, put our feet up, and zone blissfully out to focus on just getting through another day before the planet catches on fire because everybody loved going zoom zoom more than being alive. But that freedom does not and never has existed. We’re the only ones who thought it did. The fascists never ignore politics, even if they say they do. It’s just us over here putting up nice little signs and pretending that’s enough, that not paying attention is our eagle-given right.

And I am not innocent here. Not even a little. I remember being pissed off in 2017 that I had to know the names that whole rogues’ gallery Trump called a cabinet. I missed the time when I didn’t have the first idea who the Secretary of Education was. I said that to people, more than once, with my own mouth and no sense of shame, all the while knowing full fucking well I didn’t vote in a midterm until 2018 because I suck.

I always should have known who the Secretary of Education was.

It was privilege that I didn’t. Luxury that I didn’t. I do not forgive myself and neither should you. It wasn’t a more innocent time of greater decorum, what the fuck, I was just being a privileged asshole. (A traumatized privileged asshole—I was once very politically active, but spent Bush’s administration as a Navy wife overseas being utterly rebuilt from a vague liberal to a very far left person by the actuality of war, protest, politics, and power and I shut off for a long time because I couldn’t live with no skin, which is what it felt like, feeling everything. But it doesn’t matter, it was fucking selfish of me to shut off like that. If you have no skin to protect you, you go find armor, you don’t cower and hide.)

I would like to believe that after 2016, my generation and the ones after learned the same lesson I did: we don’t get to just check out and hope for the best anymore. But the numbers show it’s only barely true. If the actual silent majority in this country voted the way the death cult does, the aisle would run between progressives and centrists, not a huge coalition of Everyone Not a Total Garbage Slime and Evil Sentient Garbage Slime. But we don’t. We just won’t do it. A little more of us now, but not enough to hold the House when that was extremely doable. Not enough to keep Governor Frankengator from sweeping into office with a margin that made everyone think he was The Guy when that was also very much within reach. Not enough to protect the Supreme Court from the three ghouls who are going to ruin any kind of progress for decades and claw back everything we gained.

<figure></figure><figure>A story about why we lose in two tweets.</figure>

It’s not even about white people having the soft bouncy cultural gutterball guards to be able to afford to just vibe through life without getting engaged. Marginalized people of many kinds don’t vote too much more, and young people just don’t vote no matter who they are.

And ugh I’m just…I’m just going to say this but you can get mad at me all you want about how hard it is to vote, and you’re right, it is hard, but it’s only slightly easier for the right, who also have jobs in the same heartless system with no time off on a Tuesday and who do not all actually live in gerrymandered districts with infinite polling locations, many of whom are elderly, sick, disabled, students, retail workers, who have lots of children and little childcare. Oregon has the easiest voting system imaginable and numbers not appreciably better than anywhere else. We’re all in that shit together, but they show up for evil and we don’t show up for good.

And then, because we live on a planet that was so clearly meant for the dinosaurs and mammals were a mistake, some of us are proud of not showing up. Make all kinds of social media posts about how electoralism doesn’t work (we could TRY it) and this candidate wasn’t perfect and that one wears dumb suits and that one is too old and that one is too young and that one is gay but not the right kind and that one has a slightly different plan for healthcare so they should be banished to Stooge Island and that one is too hot and that one is too cold and I don’t like that one’s beard and on and on and on.

All the Republicans did to come this close to winning was spend 50 years voting for the same letter on the ballot no matter what name followed it every single time. That’s it, there was nothing else to it. Just point to R and say that one, lather, rinse, repeat.

So, you see, it doesn’t matter one little bit if fascists are dumb and progressives are smart, because we won’t even do that. For all Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the person we could all agree on, even his own base didn’t show up to get him through the primary. We just won’t stand up for ourselves. It’s not even getting into the fight or marching or volunteering, it’s checking a box and we can’t be bothered. We wouldn’t do it before and I’m pretty fucking certain we’re not going to in 2024 so our only hope is to once again eke out a narrow victory because the liberals in the middle just barely decided to let the one who isn’t a monster continue doing a pretty good job. And a thoroughly disappointing amount of them are still going to go online and say they had to hold their nose to do it.

We’re really not supposed to talk about who formed a coalition with the Nazis in the early days to get them over the top on the assumption that after them, us, so I’ll just say: progressives are not helping right now and I am mad at all of us.

And DAMMIT, stop shitting on the word liberal. Good grief, the GOP did a great job making that into a slur. So great even our own side agrees with the right that liberals are the real problem, even though agreeing with the right on anything should be a sign that maybe you’re missing a step. And no, neoliberal doesn’t mean anything, either, ask twenty people what it means and you’ll get twenty answers and all of them will describe conservatives. We attack ourselves and cannot support our own leaders and do the work of the breakers and renders for them by fragmenting the only groups even bothering to try to not be Nazis. Hell, we’ll even pretend Marianne Thrice-Damned Williamson is a serious candidate if it means sticking it to the guy who will maintain democracy and tipping a few more votes to the guy who won’t.

What kind of behavior is that?

<figure>Pictures you can hear</figure>

The media is so massively at fault for all of this, and that’s not even really a fixable problem because a defining feature of liberalism is that we won’t tell people what to think and a defining feature of conservativism is they CANNOT FUCKING WAIT TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO THINK. So one can have a captive media circuit and one really can’t pull it off. But even ostensibly friendly media behaves as though conservatives are a force of nature who cannot be expected to do anything but destroy and liberals are at fault for both them and ourselves and also every speck of the the far left who hates the Democratic Party anyway and they do it because we’re the only ones who care enough to adjust course based on public pressure. Democrats are the only ones who will go on TV and speak in something other than Hateraver Dystopian Mad Libs and not only look ashamed when they’ve done something wrong but when the country itself is being a total dick and can’t even vote for their own rights and prosperity. The right, as always, doesn’t give a fuck.

And most importantly, the left will turn against our own, while the right will not, ever, so the only way media figures and owners can feel like they’re doing something in this world is to focus on the ones who will react. You can convince a Democrat to vote for a Republican sometimes, but it literally takes the dawn of true theocratic fascism and genocide on the horizon to get a Republican to even think about voting blue. And even then, the best you can realistically hope for is maybe they won’t vote at all.

And this isn’t even just America, it’s a problem just about everywhere. Labour cannot get it the fuck together in the UK and hasn’t been able to for a generation. Australia has compulsory voting and yet somehow almost always has a conservative government with short-lived islands of Labour. LePen gets closer every election. Putin is part of all of this, of course, but it’s not like he invented the oppressive rot in the human soul and it’s not like far-right fundamentalism doesn’t have a grand time in countries he doesn’t bother with.

I said I would use the paid subscriber filter to say things I didn’t want to argue about with the bad faith internet at large and this is that. I’m so angry at us. All we have to do is say no fascism plz and we waffle and prevaricate and make excuses and alienate allies and slice our coalition finer and finer until no fascism plz isn’t even something we’re all agreed on—looking at you, accelerationists.

Biden isn’t doing a bad job at all with an absolutely atrocious hand of cards to play and we just can’t even give him a C+. Even the Dark Brandon meme, the only bit of good marketing he’s got going, isn’t us, it’s a riff on a stupid right wing meme that someone ran with. Trump and the Qanon folks are about this close to announcing they’ll abolish dragons on day one and then raising millions to handle the very serious dragon problem everyday Americans are facing and the Biden Crime Family is ignoring and yet we are already undermining our own incumbent when we all know exactly what the alternative is because we lived it and some of us, some of us, know we won’t make it through another four years of that if we made it through the first round at all.

Yeah, fascists are brain-bleedingly stupid. And yes, that even goes for Putin, who, if you read up on him, was a middling KGB dingus no one liked and no one trusted until he didn’t give a fuck all the way through to invading Ukraine.

But what difference does it make when smart won’t make a plan and stick to it? Won’t get along even as well as preschoolers? Won’t be patient, won’t be kind, won’t protect the truly weak and vulnerable, won’t so much as leave a microblogging website or shop at Target to show them it matters that they make it so the deep red wasteland can’t ignore how normal af it is to be LGBTQ+ and they must keep doing it because I guess saying fuck capitalism means it vanishes in a puff of righteousness, won’t understand who is going to live and let live even if we don’t exactly agree and who is going to kill and let die?

Smart isn’t doing its job. So, whether it’s 2024 or 2028 when you know this cursed corn syrup zombie country is going to punch itself in the head and say well things are better now so let’s give this Lucifer (R, Ninth Circle) guy a try it’s only fair, stupid is going to reign.