Author: russelldobular

by Russell Dobular

“We like the stock.” – Jim Cramer, January 28, 2021

Except for a few rare moments of populist uprising big enough to force concessions from elites (the labor movements of the late 19^th-early 20^th century), the story we tell ourselves about our own history, is mostly the story of the upper classes.  Thus, when we think of the 60’s, we think of hippies at Woodstock, even though there were never more than 500,000 hippies, and they were mostly drawn from middle to upper-middle class homes. The majority of young boomers at the time were too busy working, raising families, and fighting in Viet Nam, to be cheering on Hendrix at Woodstock. 

Similarly, when we think of millennials and Gen Z, we think of fragile, wokester snowflakes, more concerned with pronouns and speech codes than systemic corruption in our political and financial system. But this only represents a small fraction of their generational cohort and it’s mostly the fraction that’s fortunate enough to have gotten through two decades of endless war, financial ruin, and now a once-in-a-century pandemic, without ever having to work at a Wendy’s. 

The media never tells us what the two-thirdsrds of people under 30, without a 4-year college degree think, except to represent them as quasi-human, Trump-loving, 4-chan using, white supremacist, troglodytes.  But a perusal of Wall Street Bets on Reddit, where the greatest frontal assault on Wall Street in its 232-year history was conceived and hatched by a bunch of broke kids, many of them with low wage fast food and retail service jobs, tells a very different story.

Funny, irreverent, self-effacing, generous, savvy, pissed-off, and decidedly un-PC, the Wall Street Bets community reads a lot like what you might have gotten if Abbie Hoffman had written the screenplay for Oceans 11.  They’re pulling off the heist of the century and they know it.  And the best part is the people they’re stealing from not only deserve it but have all directly or indirectly had a hand in creating the land of no opportunity that is the only America they’ve ever known. WSB is full of stories from young adults who experienced the 2008 financial crisis through the eyes of a child who helplessly watched their parents lose the house, or the family business go bust.  And it’s also rife with stories of people donating a portion of their windfall to charity; children’s hospitals are a favorite recipient.

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One lucky winner who swore he’d bring bags of peanuts with $100 bills taped to them and give them out to the workers at his local Game Stop if the stock price hit $60, did just that.

There’s a fierce determination not to be like the greedy hedge fund assholes they’re robbing that’s completely unexpected if you’ve only been exposed to media accounts of the sub-reddit, which predictably attempt to paint its users as unusually finance obsessed Nazis.

And then there are the kinds of pranks that a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings flush with more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives and animated by a loathing for institutions would pull.  After Robin Hood shut down trading on Game Stop, AMC, and a host of other WSB targeted stocks, one newly wealthy Game Stop investor hired a private plane to fly over Robin Hood’s San Francisco headquarters for an hour, trailing a banner emblazoned with the legend, “Suck My Nuts Robin Hood.”

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Renting out billboards and filling them with taunting messages aimed at the hedge funds they’ve gone to war with, has also been a favorite use of Game Stop winnings.

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In the face of overwhelming odds, and in many cases, deep personal hardship, the WSB community has used their ingenuity to find a way to strike back at the system that’s screwed them all their lives and make a lot of money doing it.  With can-do spirit, cynical humor, and stick-to-itiveness (“diamond hands” is a favorite phrase, which means, a person who will never sell, even if the price dips wildly), they’ve taken on the whole financial establishment, and exposed its corruption in a way that no social movement of the past several decades has been able to achieve. 

In other words, this army of retail investors, some of whom are buying just one or two shares of Game Stop, in order to support the cause, better exemplify the qualities of individual initiative and outside the box thinking that have always been at the heart of the American myth, than anyone or anything we’ve seen represented in our politics and media for a long, long time. 

Turns out the American spirit isn’t dead, its just not on the TV.  To find it, open yourself a reddit account and wander on over to Wall Street Bets.  The self-described “smooth brained monkeys, autists, and pranksters” over there will probably bring a smile to your face, maybe for the first time in awhile. Unless you own a hedge fund, in which case, you should probably cover your short now; I haven’t personally examined them, but as far as I can tell from the price action, these folks have diamond hands.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article should be construed as financial advice.  The author holds positions in AMC and Sundial and plans on opening a position in Game Stop at market opening, simply because he likes the stock.

For more on this topic, listen to episode 104 of the Due Dissidence podcast by clicking the player below, and subscribe to the Due Dissidence podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player:

_{Images: Twitter, Reddit}

by Russell Dobular

“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”

-President Roslin, Battlestar Galactica

If there had been any doubt about the notion that the collapse of the American Empire was no longer ahead of us, but something that we’re now experiencing in real time, the first presidential debate of 2020 should have settled the question once and for all. If candidates for a nation’s highest office in some way reflect the zeitgeist of the society, then we are a nation torn between the dying echo of a weak, senile neoliberalism, and a uniquely American spin on fascism in the form of a blustering game show host.  Whatever the outcome, no great nation that’s belched up these two men as the only choices in a country of 330 million people, can be said to be truly great, much less qualified to take a leadership role in the world.  

The international community had already figured that out long before Donald Trump and Joe Biden finally faced each other on a debate stage, as reflected in the kinds of economic policy moves central banks and developing countries have been making of late. Stories about the finer points of global finance aren’t sexy enough to make headlines, but those policy shifts have greater implications for our future than most of the things that do: Russia and China have begun conducting bilateral transactions in their own currencies, at the expense of the dollar, global reserve managers last year cut dollar holdings to their lowest levels since the 1990’s, and African nations today are more likely to seek out economic development deals with China than with the US.  The jockeying for position in a post-American world has already begun. The only ones who haven’t noticed are Americans, who have increasingly come to resemble a nation of Norma Desmonds, waiting for their close up without realizing that our once adoring fans have moved on to other things.  

All that’s left to fascinate now is the freak show. We continue to enjoy good ratings from a worldwide audience that is taking in our Series Finale with a mix of schadenfreude, sadness, and shocked disbelief.  We’ve never had a fully televised imperial collapse before, and certainly never one with such bizarre aesthetics. America has always had a bone-deep weirdness at its core, but that quality has been cranked up considerably as the contradictions in our system finally come crashing down in one big, crazy, explosion of dystopian elements straight out of a Phillip K. Dick fever dream: Proud Boys, Robin DeAngelo, Joe Exotic, WAP, SJW’s, Jeffrey Epstein, Kanye, the Lincoln Project, and an old Jewish socialist screaming fire in the midst of the theater of it all, like a ghost from a time when the public good wasn’t entirely beside the point of our government. It somehow feels like a fitting send off for the nation that produced both jazz and Cheese Whiz. It’s like a dark jam session with all the major elements of the American id, grabbing an instrument and contributing a line.

The finger-pointing has already begun, even as we deny what’s actually happening to us by calling our deepening balkanization as a people, social progress.  Black vs. white, gay vs. straight, trans, vs. cis, progressive vs. liberal, conservative vs. everyone else, and on and on and on into an infinity of categories, and sub-categories, each more granular than the last. A country as lacking in a sense of irony as ours, simply isn’t equipped to contemplate the idea that an obsession with personal identity, necessarily comes at the expense of national unity and is itself a symptom of cultural decline that has arisen in the final days of all the empires that preceded us. Yes, all of this has happened before and, in all likelihood, all of this will happen again in another place and time to another people, although probably not with quite as much entertainment value as we’re bringing to the occasion. Give the devil his due, we know how to put on a show, and we’re pulling out all the stops for this final act of the Great American Implosion Vaudeville.

Like our immediate predecessor, Great Britain, will we seize the opportunity presented by our impending release from the burdens of empire to create a more egalitarian society with a more progressive tax system which funds public services like universal health care and higher education? Maybe.  But it’s just as likely we’ll have a protracted low-grade civil war ending in the final triumph of a fascist “America First” regime. The right-wingers have the guns and the resolve.  Snarky memes and Aaron Sorkin won’t be much of a match against an army of assault rifle toting fanatics.

If you’re looking to put together a bug-out bag full of antibiotics and cash in light of all this, consider growing your nest egg by investing in mail order bride start-ups; not for people who want to bring Ukranian women to America, but for American women trying to get into Canada.  That, and picking through the detritus of empire for roadside diner artifacts, Elvis night-lights, and Disney memorabilia for sale on ebay to the rising Chinese middle-class are probably your best options now.

On the bright side, the six-volume set about these years that’s sure to be produced by a future Gibbon, is going to be a lot more interesting than the Roman version. And how many among all the long generations of humans who have lived and died on the planet have ever gotten a front-row seat to the precise moment when an empire crumbled?  As historical experiences go, that’s among the rarest of delicacies.  Its only ever happened on this scale twice before, and only once without a successor state to ensure a relatively smooth passing of the torch.  Of course, that lack of a successor caused a millennium of poverty and ignorance we now refer to as “the dark ages,” but the planet could probably use the breather right about now.

Progressives are perhaps the only people in America who aren’t surprised by any of this, and for whom the debate didn’t play as a revelation. We’ve seen this coming for a long time. It’s the reason we’re progressives. We’ve been doing a very loud Casandra bit since 2016, trying to warn anyone who would listen that this was where we were headed. Having a vested interest in the status quo, not enough of the people with the power to change course listened.  

In the aftermath, some of us will stick around to try to help pick up the pieces. Many of us will go into exile rather than wait around for the federal forces to start showing up on our streets. A few will try to keep their heads down and ride it out. If nothing else, when that future history is written, we’ll be among the only actors to come off relatively well. Not quite the win we were hoping for, but at least we’ll be able to look our grandkids in the eye over a long-expired can of peaches, and account for ourselves in these times without shame.  

If you own a pussy hat, on the other hand, you might want to burn it now and delete all the photos.  There’s just no way you’re going to be able to explain that in a world without bees.

For more on the debate and the collapse of the American Empire, listen to our latest podcast by clicking the player below:

Subscribe to the Due Dissidence podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player!

_{Photo: ABC}

by Russell Dobular

If you live in New York City and you’ve watched a New York crime show in the last twenty years, it probably felt a lot like alternate history science fiction. What if you put Starsky and Hutch in a world with cell phones and the internet? Those realities never co-existed, but that doesn’t matter for the vast majority of viewers who not only don’t live in New York, but in most cases have never even been there. The city only functions as a symbolic stand-in for everything they find threatening and mysterious about urban life.  You don’t need New York crime to make a New York crime show, anymore than you need real cowboys roaming around Wyoming to make a Western.  Its become a beloved genre, completely independent of the actual place that is its theoretical setting.

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In the same spirit, and perhaps because New York played such a central role in the storyline the last time we were facing down the prospect of total collapse as a nation, certain portions of the media have been playing up the idea that the 70’s have come back full-blown, with crime and chaos on every corner, as well-heeled Upper West Siders flee the marauding homeless hordes. But the truth is, its pretty damned quiet. A lot quieter than it is most everyplace else. You can’t just undo 30 years of gentrification in six months. The kinds of people who made the Bronx burn were locked up or driven out by skyrocketing rents decades ago. And we still have a police force that, if it were an army, would be the world’s 11^th largest. No, New York isn’t descending into chaos. At least not yet. But everyplace else is. The result is a perverse inversion of 1977. The Bronx isn’t burning, but the nation is. Never has Spaulding Gray’s vision of us as “an island off the coast of America” seemed more apt. It’s like living in a city-state on the periphery of Rome circa 476 AD, and watching the collapse of the empire with morbid fascination while wondering what it’s all going to mean for our small, independent, trading hub.

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The last time I drove cross-country, I stopped and took a picture of the world’s largest cross. It looms up out of the flat Texas plains and you can see it for miles and miles before you get to it.  There were people there praying and kneeling, and, it being Texas, I couldn’t help but to imagine what might happen if Leatherface were to suddenly burst out of the weeds with his chainsaw. How would they process that? If I lived in Texas, I’d pay a lot of money to find out. In the event, I just took the picture, and when my fiancé at the time asked why, I told her, “So I can explain American politics to New Yorkers.”

We like to deny it, but the truth is, we’re not really Americans here.  Most of us would feel more at home in any European capital than we would in any other part of our native land and all the worst suspicions that our countrymen have about us are mostly true. We’re happy to take their tourist dollars, but we’re even happier to see them check out of the Best Western and be on their way. For these past four years we’ve been mostly keeping quiet when they stroll through Times Square with the red hat on, but only because it is not in our nature to tip off the mark.  

For a commercial people, the ultimate measure of intellectual superiority is the ability to take your money.  Getting the MAGA’s to give us theirs has been some small comfort in these trying times and we haven’t survived this long by being choosy about who’s pockets we dip our hands into.  Besides that, it’s hard to really hate what you can’t even begin to understand. These puffy, fanny-packed, credulous, Trump-loving specimens might as well be Amazonian tribesmen dropped in the middle of 8^th Avenue on a sacred mission to find the nearest Cold Stone Creamery. I’ve spent enough time in their villages to have caught the drift of their thinking, but for most my fellow New Yorkers, they’re as incomprehensible as Quantum Mechanics. I try to explain it to them once in awhile, but then they just think I’m taking their side.

And so we watch in horrified fascination as the nation that we have only ever nominally been a part of, tears itself apart over questions of culture, race, and settled science. We watch people refusing to wear masks in a pandemic, not out of a perverse laziness, but as a matter of principle, and we just can’t figure it out. We see a man like Mitch McConnell who wants to give people less money in the middle of an economic catastrophe cruising to re-election, and we just don’t understand how you could assemble a majority of people in any state who would want to vote for that, undeniable shittiness of his opponent notwithstanding. There’s something very sackcloth and ashes about it. Or BDSM. Please sir, harder this time. We would happily secede if we could, but the centurions would be on us in a heartbeat if we tried it.  The only question is how much we can decouple our fate from that of the “everyplace else,” places.  Probably not much, which seems grossly unfair. But we aren’t the first to make a deal with the Devil, only to realize when the payment came due that he was hiding there in the details all along.

The irony of all this is that the shit isn’t going down around the figure of some homespun Deep South fascist, as ninety years of science fiction, going all the way back to It Can’t Happen Here, had always intimated it would.  Its going down around the first native New Yorker to win the Presidency since Theodore Roosevelt.  It’s as if Gozer had asked the nation to pick the form of its destruction and instead of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, it had inexplicably chosen a tabloid punchline from a part of the country that it had always despised. Who could have seen that coming?  But then again, that may be why he slipped under the radar. Raving about Mexican rapists in a Southern drawl would have been a dead giveaway. Trump’s guy-from-a-bar-in-Queens thing is more associated with mob movies than visions of the apocalypse. And the idea of putting Tony Soprano in charge for awhile probably seemed like a hoot to a population that hasn’t been getting much entertainment value from their government over the past 30 years.

As of this writing, we’re 44 days out from the election, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away 48 hours ago.  Just typing that sentence, makes me feel like I’m not composing an essay so much as I’m ripping off Vonnegut. All the absurdity of human nature and all the cruel ironies of fate that were the author’s favorite themes are on full display in the way we’re choosing to dispose of our empire. Not in a final, glorious stand against the barbarian hordes. Not in the self-sacrificing decision to fight against Nazi tyranny. No, we’re going down because half the nation believes that a failed casino magnate and former game show host is their only salvation, while the other half believes that he’s the second coming of Hitler.  Neither side has much faith in democracy anymore, and when the citizens of a democracy no longer believe that democratic processes are an absolute good, regardless of outcomes, no peaceful transfer of power is possible. The results are going to be catastrophic.

New Yorkers, you can take some comfort in the fact that your bone-deep belief in your own superiority has been borne out in some way by the reality that one of the least of us was able to bring down the country in just under four years. Everyone else, well, take some comfort in the fact that your prejudices have been confirmed – all it took was one godless New Yorker in the White House to ruin the whole damned national endeavor.  Whatever our differences, we will ultimately share the same fate, and perhaps in the end we both have it coming; us for producing him, and you for electing him.  

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em folks.  In six some-odd weeks, this is all going to end the way it was always meant to; in a Vegas floor show-style spectacle, with a half-assed con man leading the way.

^{Title Photo: Noam Galai, Getty Images / All other photos by Russell Dobular}

by Russell Dobular

It seems like hardly a day goes by that we aren’t being urged to cancel somebody.  Whether it’s a media celebrity who lacked the foresight to behave according to current standards, 10 years ago, a historical figure who had the poor judgement not to be woke in the 1700’s, or just some poor schmuck who didn’t get the memo on the universal hand gesture for “okay,” no longer being okay, the list of non-persons just keeps on growing.  But there’s one group that seems uniquely impervious to cancellation: establishment Democrat politicians.  It’s very odd that folks who want to throw Ulysses S. Grant into the dustbin of history, would overlook some of the most powerful and influential people in our society in the course of deciding who does and doesn’t belong in the public sphere.  But if you’re a prominent Democrat in good standing with the party’s leadership, there doesn’t seem to be very much you can’t get away with, from overt racism all the way up to rape, with nary a peep from the Twitterverse.  Let’s take a look at a few prominent examples.

Pete Buttigieg

One of Mayor Pete’s first official acts was to fire Daryl Boykins, the first black police chief of South Bend, possibly at the urging of his donors. The explanation given was that Boykins had illegally recorded his own officers’ phone conversations.  According to Boykins, their conversations included racial slurs directed at him, and also discussion of a conspiracy to get him fired that included deep-pocketed Buttigeig donors and the Mayor himself.  So, essentially, Pete chose to punish the alleged victim, rather than the perpetrators.  In response to demands that he release the tapes, Pete refused, claiming that releasing them would be illegal, given that they had since become evidence in an ongoing FBI investigation. That all seems pretty cancelicious, no?  But wait, it gets better.

Partly because of this history, and partly because, let’s face it, Pete’s personality style makes mayonnaise look ethnic, he struggled during the primaries to get any (literally, any) black support.  His solution? Fake it ‘till you make it. Bad enough was his tokenizing of the few black people he could find at his events, who he would often pressure into surrounding him on stage, whether or not they were actual supporters, or just Americans guilty of checking out a rally while black.

The coup de grace came when Pete sent out an e-mail to black politicians and community leaders, that gave them 24 hours to “opt-out” of endorsing his “Douglass Plan” for black America.  Yes, you read that right.  If you happened to ignore the email, or if you didn’t open it in time and thoroughly read its contents, you woke up the next day to the news that you had not only endorsed Pete Buttigieg’s plan (a plan that it appears was written exclusively by white people), but you found your name included on a list of 400 supposedly black South Carolinian supporters, that later investigations found was at least 42% white.  Now, maybe I’ve misunderstood the premises of “anti-racism,” but its my understanding that white people speaking for POC, much less exploiting them in this way, is a big no-no.  Seems like the kind of thing that should get you canceled, no?  Especially when combined with Mayor Pete’s history in South Bend.  And it didn’t end there.

Even after being called out by many black politicians, some of whom had publicly endorsed other candidates, Pete didn’t give up on this tactic of faking black support by claiming endorsements from virtually every POC he had ever shaken hands with. In South Carolina, the Buttigieg campaign claimed that black-owned businesses they had simply patronized, had “partnered” with the Buttigieg campaign. Once again, this led to denials from the blindsided African Americans in question.

Now, maybe this is just crazy talk, but it seems to me that if you’re going to cancel people for just saying fucked up shit, actually doing this much fucked up shit should have made Pete persona non grata in polite society a long time ago. But far from being canceled, he was a prominent speaker at the recent DNC convention, and it’s pretty much assumed that he’ll be getting a cabinet position in a theoretical Biden administration. And the craziest part? Most of his fan base consists of the same college educated white liberals who would be clogging up your feed for days with their peculiarly off-putting brand of high dudgeon if 1/10^th of this fact set belonged to anyone without a big blue D next to their name. 

Bill Clinton

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this dirtbag’s long history of sexual assault going back decades.  The facts are so well known and undeniable, that even the most head in the sand party-line Dems are aware of them.  But there are two facts that they haven’t really reckoned with, one old, and one relatively new, because to acknowledge them would be to make allowing Bill to continue on in his uncanceled state an impossibility.  And the forces of woke really just don’t want to deal with it.

Clinton has been credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, and that’s been out there since 1999. Has he been accused in a “would stand up in a court of law” kind of way? No. Sexual assault allegations rarely meet that standard, which is a big part of why, in frustration, many have chosen to litigate guilt via social media. By Twitter trial standards though, the evidence against Clinton more than clears the bar. So why was he speaking at the DNC, and why hasn’t the #MeToo movement harassed him out of the public sphere?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, we now have two separate witnesses, one of them an Epstein victim, placing the old pervert on Epstein’s “pedophile island,” a place he claims to have never been. He also lied about the number of trips he took on Epstein’s plane, owning up to only four trips, when flight logs show he did in fact take 26 flights on the so-called “Lolita Express.”  Records also place Clinton on the plane at the same time as some of Epstein’s possibly underaged trafficking victims, identified only by their first names. And mere days before Clinton’s appearance at the DNC, photos leaked of him receiving a massage from one of Epstein’s victims. To be clear, thus far none of the women have claimed to have had sexual contact with Bill Clinton. But one thing no one has ever accused Slick Willy of is abject stupidity. Does anyone really believe that Clinton was spending this much time around Epstein without understanding what was going on? What if every time you went to your middle-aged male friend’s house, they were surrounded by a bevy of extremely young girls? What would you think was going on there? Karate lessons? So why was this man speaking at a political convention whose main message was that Donald Trump is morally unfit for office? Why is he still walking around unimpeded by the Twitteratti while other men (and some women), of far less consequence, are hiding under a blanket?

Joe Biden

The shit that flies out of Joe Biden’s mouth every time he gets in front of a microphone would be career-ending for pretty much anyone who wasn’t an establishment Democrat in good standing.  Here are just a few examples.

On working with segregationists:

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland.  He never called me ‘boy’; he always called me ‘son.’  Well, guess what? At least there was some civility.  We got things done.”

On desegregation:

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.”

On the intelligence of POC:

“Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.”

On black parenting:

“They want help, but they just don’t know what to do.”

On black politics:

“What you all know, but most people don’t know. Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

On black identity:

“If you’ve got a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”

We could go on and on, but you get the picture.  Biden regularly says things that would send the world’s biggest movie stars straight to Kevin Spacey-land, if they offered similar observations.  And yet, far from being canceled, he’s the nominee of the party most sympathetic to the idea of breaking out the digital stocks for anyone caught expressing these kinds of sentiments.  Its almost like its just a weapon they use on their political enemies, and not something they actually care about at all.  Weird, huh?

It would be bad enough if Joe Biden just kinda said stuff.  In fact that’s pretty much the defense those who are self-aware enough to acknowledge the contradiction at the heart of his nomination offer, by dismissing all these statements as “gaffes.”  But far from limiting his racism to his stated beliefs, Biden’s political history is a virtual laundry list of cancelable offenses.  

As a Senator, Biden repeatedly collaborated with his beloved segregationist buddies to work on overtly racist legislation.  Not only was Biden one of the leading voices speaking out against school busing, he worked with avowed segregationists Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond on numerous bills and amendments aimed at preventing it.   

Throughout the 80’s he continued to collaborate with his favorite segregationist, Thurmond, who had run for President in 1948 on a white supremacist platform, on a series of draconian anti-crime measures.  These bills created the groundwork for the carceral state we live in today, by introducing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, and the now infamous sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine.  The capstone of the Biden-Thurmond love affair was the 1994 crime bill, which Biden gleefully bragged, “would do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”

If making racist jokes about Asians is enough to get you canceled, what should we do with someone who destroyed the lives of millions of POC in order to score points with white voters, all while claiming the new sentencing guidelines in his bills were aimed at keeping people off the streets “who don’t meet the middle-class criteria of susceptibility to rehabilitation.”  If there were a dog-whistling Olympics, Biden would surely have taken home the gold for that bit of racist pablum.  Seems like if we’re going to apply the Biden standard for fitting the punishment to the crime (except where his son is concerned), Biden should be doing the Cersei Lannister naked walk of shame through the middle of DC right about now.  And now you’re never getting that image out of your head.  You’re welcome.

And lest we forget (which is exactly what we’re supposed to do), Tara Reade has made accusations of sexual assault against Biden that are at least as credible as a host of others that have ended the careers of many people not named Joe Biden. Reade’s accusations were accompanied by all the supporting evidence we look for in these cases: people she had told about the incident at the time, dismissal from her employment with the accused in the right time frame, and even a call-in from her mother to the Larry King show discussing her daughter’s problems with a “prominent Senator.”  Whether you believe the accusations or not, one thing is beyond debate: by the standards that the #MeToo movement had previously established, Biden should have been forced into hiding.  That’s exactly what would have happened if you attached the same set of facts to anyone who wasn’t an establishment Democrat in good standing.

To make the hypocrisy even more glaring, in order to defend Biden, the “nuts and sluts” defense that feminists have rightly been working to delegitimize for decades was turned against Reade full-force by the media, party leadership, and the rank and file brainwashed cult members that make up most of the party’s remaining base. That in the course of carving out a Joe Biden exception, they’ve set the #MeToo movement back 20 years by ensuring that those accused of assault in the future will now make full use of the Biden defense (“They said the same thing about Joe Biden.  This woman is another Tara Reade.”), doesn’t seem to trouble them in the slightest.  But then again, people who never saw a downside in holding extra-judicial social media trials that would be adjudicated by the kinds of isolated and emotionally damaged people who make up the greater part of regular Twitter users, clearly aren’t ones to think in terms of unintended consequences.

And just for bonus points, Biden has been lying about his civil rights activism for thirty years, right down to the present day. That kind of unfathomable insult to the legacy of those who really did put their lives on the line in the struggle for equality is about the most cancelable shit I’ve ever heard.  Except for pretty much every other thing Biden has ever done in office.   

These are just some of the most egregious examples of those who have managed to duck the people’s tribunal by flashing the blue-check sign.  You could also make strong cases for Kamala Harris (fought against gender reassignment surgery for inmates), Hillary Clinton (ran one of the most overtly racist campaigns in recent history against Barrack Obama), and Joy Reid, who was rewarded for lying about her old homophobic blog posts with a better time slot on MSDNC.  

Just to be clear, I’m not making an argument for cancellation.  As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of the concept of turning decisions about who does and doesn’t get voted off the island over to the congregation of miserable freaks who do the most jumping up and down online.  But if we’re going to be cancelling people anyway, shouldn’t we be starting with the folks who have the most power and influence, and saving Hollywood types and poor working stiffs for later?  I mean, isn’t it kind of like guillotining the minor nobility and the peasants without ever getting around to the royals?  Or gunning down the Kulaks, while leaving the Romanovs unmolested?  Say what you will about the Ruskies, but when it came time to upend the social order, they didn’t fuck around.  The People’s Army massacred the royal family right off the bat, and only got around to executing the merchant class later.  And they didn’t even look at thought crimes among the serfs until everyone else was already safely dead or in the gulag.  It’s like we’re doing this whole cultural revolution thing backwards.

So, listen up liberals, you’ve got a choice to make here.  You can either keep going after the easy targets, or you can truly make an impact on society by taking down the big game.  So far you haven’t really accomplished anything other than destroying stand-up comedy and arguably getting Donald Trump elected. That’s a start in a nihilistic Joker-esque embrace of chaos kind of a way, but if ya really wanna pull an NKVD kinda deal, you’re going to need to set your sights a little higher. 

_{Photo: AP}

by Russell Dobular

“Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere.”

-Henry Miller

In spite of the nomination of Joe Biden, progressives have been given reason to hope that their movement may come to define American politics in the not very distant future. From the popularity of AOC, to the overwhelming victories of Rashida Talib and Ilhan Omar over their primary challengers, to the recent primary wins of Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Mondaire Jones, and a host of progressive candidates in local races, progressives can see the future and many have come to believe that it belongs to them.  It’s only a matter of time and boomer mortality rates. But there’s something they’re not taking into account: Donald Trump.

This is surprising, because unlike their neoliberal nemeses, progressives have been relatively clear-eyed about how Trump won and why. It’s obvious to most of them that by running to Hillary’s left on war and economics, while running to her right on social issues, he hit the American sweet spot, no Russian trolls required. To assume that progressives are going to own the future then, is to assume that the GOP aren’t going to figure that out over the next few years, and that new politicians aren’t going to rise up on the right who copy the Trump model with the added benefit of not being Donald Trump. Because if a patently absurd figure like Trump could ride that message all the way to the White House, imagine what a competent politician could do with it. And now imagine what a politician who actually meant any of it could do.  A candidate like that would not only win Republicans and Independents, they’d take a lot of conservative Democrats, and at least a third of the progressive movement along with them.

Don’t believe me?  Think you’d never vote for the Republican?  Okay, let’s run a thought experiment for the progressives – but to run it we’re going to have to be a little honest with ourselves. At the risk of triggering your PTSD, lets think back to 2016 for a minute. Remember all those times you tried to make a policy case against Hillary Clinton and you got called a sexist if you were a man, and someone with a bad case of “internalized misogyny” if you were a woman? Remember how frustrating and unfair that was? And remember how the media reinforced those narratives while sandbagging your candidate and his supporters at every opportunity? Now remember how even though you may not have liked or trusted Trump, you kind of secretly loved it when he went after the media, the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, and the whole MSNBC-liberal enterprise? And here’s where you’re going to have to be really honest, even if its not something you’ll ever own up to publicly – remember how all those images of crying Hillary supporters on election night made you feel all warm inside? You probably had those YouTube compilations playing on loop for a week after that election. I know I did. Now imagine after four more years of neoliberal bullshit, with a huge extra helping of “woke” thrown in, a GOP candidate is running on economic policies you agree with, while attacking everything cancel culture and slamming liberal elites at the same time. For the coup de grace, add into the mix that Harris is their opponent, and she’ll likely have gotten into that position by beating a progressive in yet another rigged primary. Now tell me you aren’t going to vote for the GOP candidate, or at very least, secretly cheer them on. See what I mean?  

And you probably aren’t even so much socially conservative as you are repulsed by the self-righteous hypocrisy, and anti-free speech tendencies, of liberals. So how do you think conservative Democrats who really are freaked out by “autonomous zones” and talk of defunding the police are going to vote, given those choices? Especially after the crime rates explode in the cities that try it. Now, wait, I know what you’re thinking.  How dare you suggest that we need a gestapo police force on the streets to prevent crime. But we kind of do. Because the system of capitalism creates the conditions of dehumanization and desperation that cause crime. If you don’t change those conditions, having less police is inevitably going to lead to an increase in crime rates. The real job of law enforcement in an oligarchy is to get those who have been most brutalized by the vicissitudes of capitalism off the streets, so that everyone else can sip their lattes without being brutalized in turn. It’s no accident that the prison population has exploded as the greater share of national wealth has been gradually funneled to the top 1%. The more unfair the system, the more forcefully you need to suppress the have-nots in order to protect the haves from their vengeance. But we aren’t likely to have that conversation in the event. We’re just going to do what we did the last time crime exploded in our cities under conditions of mass unemployment and poverty: turn to law and order types like the current Democratic nominee, to rescue us from the victims that our system has created.  Out of sight, out of mind.  

And in case you’re thinking that the African-American community will stand as a bulwark against any such repetition of history, I have two words for you: Joe Biden. 

But look at Trump’s numbers!  The American people have clearly rejected him.  No, they really haven’t, at least not in any meaningful sense. Trump is a great performer. But like any actor, he’s only as good as the script you hand him. His campaign is so remarkably tone deaf this time around, only because he’s surrounded himself with traditional Republican operatives and consultants who don’t understand that painting Joe Biden as a closet socialist makes about as much sense as painting Barrack Obama as a radical did in 2012. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t working now.  There needs to be a kernel of truth in order for propaganda to be effective.  There are an infinite number of devastating angles one could take on attacking Joe Biden, but calling a man who very obviously wouldn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, a socialist, isn’t one of them. However, this doesn’t mean that Trumpism is politically impotent, or that its victory in 2016 was an aberration. It simply means that running Trump on traditional GOP talking points is like casting Meryl Streep in Plan 9 From Outer Space. There’s only so much he can do with the material. Without the evil genius of soon-to-be felon Steve Bannon to guide him, he seems to have no idea of what the basis of his own appeal was, or how to recapture it. But smarter people on the right have surely been watching, taking notes, and plotting their own stab at the Bannon/Trump formula. And those wanna-be Trumps are likely going to find very fertile ground for their message in four years.

Assuming the Biden/Harris ticket prevails this November, by 2024, the memory of Donald Trump will have faded, while the experience of governance by virtue signaling and corrupt corporate toadying will be the current reality for most Americans. Educated suburban elites will be rejoicing, with Biden-Harris having successfully restored their leisurely, politics-free, pre-Trump brunch habits, while for the working class, and the habitually rational, the combination of pronoun policing from the highest office in the land and policy crumbs where a bread factory’s worth of loaves are needed, will have left the same bitter taste of bait-and- switch in the mouths of voters that has followed the election of Democrats for at least 30 years. Enter an economic populist who unabashedly attacks woke culture, without veering into the overt “Mexican rapists are coming for you and everyone you ever loved” racism of Trump, and you’ve got yourself a winner.  Especially with an empty pantsuit like Harris as their opponent.

The identity politics left fucking it up for the economic populist left is an old story, going back at least to the 60’s.  It was the central disagreement that led a certain portion of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) to splinter off into the Weather Underground and start bombing post offices. They were the identitarians of their time, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s had the displeasure of running into their humorless, holier-than-thou ideological descendants. As long as the left was associated most strongly with economic populism, they had an edge on the GOP. Once it became associated with obnoxious suburban white kids preaching at the working class, the Reagan era was all but assured. They fucked it up for us then, and they’re very likely to fuck it up for us now, once again handing our future to the American right with their politics by pussy hat.    

Add to all this the fact that, embarrassing assurances of our old mentor aside, if Joe Biden wins, we won’t be entering a new era of populist FDR Keynesianism. We’ll be replaying the Carter years. Just like Carter, Biden will be inheriting a devastated economy, with high unemployment and exploding crime rates. As with Carter, those conditions will not have been of Biden’s making, but very much like Carter, he’ll be too weak a President to find a way out. In Carter’s case, his own idealism stood in the way of doing the kind of politicking that, as distasteful as it might be, is necessary to get anything done in Washington. In Biden’s case, his lack of idealism will lead him to cut deals that are going to infuriate his base (well, maybe not his base, but the more progressive base of the Democratic Party), while continuing in the neoliberal vein of championing identitarian causes, in the absence of meaningful economic policies.  

By the time 2024 rolls around, the door will be wide open to any right-wing populist with the stones to seize the main chance.

Post RNC Convention Update: Here’s the reality; Biden has historically low enthusiasm, and all indications are that his turn-out from young, Latino and African-American voters is going to be weak. Without a plague, the Dem ticket would have no chance of winning under those circumstances. To compensate, Dems have thrown all their eggs into the converting suburban Republicans basket. Just like Hillary did. The thing is, those people are Republicans for a reason. They may not be racist AF, but they’re at least racist af. I promise you, parading out John Kasich and company didn’t make up for the overall virtue-signaling tone of the DNC convention with that audience. They hate that shit. That’s a big part of why they’re Republicans. Not like this was the party of Eisenhower before Trump, or even the party of Nixon. These are people who stayed Republican after the Bush years. Their support for a Democratic ticket is dicey at best. For those voters, the RNC convention’s celebration of free markets, small government, and law and order, played out against a backdrop of rising crime and riots, resonates. The polling in swing states was already tightening to the margin of error before the convention. Don’t be surprised if Trump starts to pull ahead in some of them this week. In other words, reports of Trump’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

^{Photo: AFP}