Anonymous asked: Thoughts on Richard Spencer getting punched in the face?
I think Richard Spencer’s an ideological entrepreneur and Donald Trump stole his lunch - giving the American right a platform and pose to match the cross-class white identity that increasingly defined it but existing elites resisted.
And Trump didn’t need Richard Spencer gradually assembling an apparatus, or putting out white papers to give cover for his deportation plans, or building a bench in Montana, he just straight-up did it in his blustery Mr. Magoo style. And with Bannon in the White House and Sessions at AG and all his other men in place, no reason going forward Trump needs a guy with a freshly-furnished office and Tila Tequila in his Rolodex.
To his credit guy does understand the Beltway ecosystem, knows if he just fades into the background now his life’s work is over and purposeless, knows how to work media contacts and self-promote and pitch off a news hook, knows how to create spectacle - guy wasn’t just out for a walk thinking about Pepe when a protest broke out and someone asked for his take.
And now, look, as a result of going out and offering himself up as spectacle, Richard Spencer is now central to a hot news story that hooks into relevant questions of How We Live Now In This New Trump Era. If Richard Spencer wasn’t relevant and in the news because of this, why else would we be thinking about Richard Spencer? We wouldn’t.
But he did, so we are. The contradictions are heightened, he’s kept his name in the papers, still got a shot at the history books, if maybe as a Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Horst Wessel.
Now, as a political tactic, underdiscussed precedents regarding punching Richard Spencer in the face include the SPLC’s approach of defunding disliked rightist groups by filing claims in friendly courts seeking damages for targeted violence that their ideological programs inspired in their audience.
And that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps was a civil rights lawyer who used the Westboro Baptist Church as a profit-generator by seeking damages for attempts to suppress their unpopular expression.
Which, using the court system to shake down a deeper-pocketed NGO with antifa sympathies, literally a police-enforced imperative to be nice to white nationalists, you’ve got the question of who else in the ecosystem says “Damn the courts, we’ll stir up violence against who we want” – becoming suppressable in normie-friendly idiom – and who demoralizingly splits solidarity and adds WN-positivity to their HR sessions and social media policy.
Course you need a martyr to even start that questline
Now, as a political tactic, underdiscussed precedents regarding punching Richard Spencer in the face include the SPLC’s approach of defunding disliked rightist groups by filing claims in friendly courts seeking damages for targeted violence that their ideological programs inspired in their audience.
And that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps was a civil rights lawyer who used the Westboro Baptist Church as a profit-generator by seeking damages for attempts to suppress their unpopular expression.
Which, using the court system to shake down a deeper-pocketed NGO with antifa sympathies, literally a police-enforced imperative to be nice to white nationalists, you’ve got the question of who else in the ecosystem says “Damn the courts, we’ll stir up violence against who we want” – becoming suppressable in normie-friendly idiom – and who demoralizingly splits solidarity and adds WN-positivity to their HR sessions and social media policy.
Course you need a martyr to even start that questline
And that’s just civil justice, as far as criminal goes, with Sessions at AG and loyalty from the cops who make up the Deep City everywhere… Before you even get to antiterrorism or whatever Palmer/COINTELPRO black bag shit they dream up, you’ve got the concept of criminal conspiracy, that if you’re working together with people towards some criminal end - and the police were making riot charges at the inauguration, observers were surprised, say they haven’t seen that in a while - you can individually be charged and punished for the act of any other.
Hell, RICO, that came out of the RFK-Mafia wars specifically as a way for an attorney general to dig out people embedded in their communities - respected “clean hands” types, hooked up with the local political machine - and send them away based on what the disposable street muscle did. NOW v. Scheidler establishes that political causes aren’t exempt; you could maybe hang a predicate on let’s see, extortion, kidnapping, arson, hopefully not murder. Ooh, obstruction of justice, witness tampering - people already leaning on each other not to identify Black Bloc-ers, that’s got potential. You wouldn’t even need punches, or for the underlying investigation to be any good, for that one.
Now, the Kennedys had a kind of Nixon-goes-to-China thing, the Mob couldn’t well pull their trick of squalling out in the name of Catholic Democrats. The Tension meter has a few clicks yet before Jeff Sessions unlocks the ability to jail community organizers for postmature antifascism.
Still the folk mythology may go that any attempt to suppress anything going under cloak of political protest will register as repression and further intensify resistance, but I assure you, there are workaday already-legitimated law-n-order countermeasures to “let’s publicly build a movement around punching our opponents in the head”.
(The “leaderless resistance” thing, untouchably pristine allies hosting online target lists for lone wolves to pick from, with a “points” system to assure them people were inaudibly cheering for them, that might have potential. The eco-terrorists and anti-abortionists were running that in the ‘90s, Anders Brevik suggested it for the “Knights Templar” in his 2083 manifesto and I’m not sure what the countermeasure is to that. That’s probably when you get to counterterrorism, tho also that was back when you hosted sites off of towers in your own closet, today they’d probably just lean on the hosts or something.)
god damn it it just hit me that my tumultuous love/hate relationship with the concept of monasticism is literally just a cover for my depression since when you take monasticism and subtract all the parts i’m explicitly and irreconcilably opposed to what you’re left with is basically ‘very lonely person who gets a pass for wearing the same outfit every day’
what Calvin’s Dad (already a joke!) meant by “building character” was being shoved up against the self/other distinction over and over until it was viscerally established that the self was not the system
(occasional reminder that Wikileaks and Assange’s current Americo-political valence comes after Sady Doyle’s intentional and successful effort to spike his more intuitive bond with the anti-government left)
I’m not sure, but I think this blog just accused me of turning Julian Assange into a Trump-enabling anti-Semite by… pointing out that he might have raped some people?
Keeping him from becoming a left martyr was your intentional project, Sady.
That whole strutting male Rage Against the Machine great man rebel thing that you didn’t like, it has less of a place on the American left, because you acted to make it so, and it worked.
