You did this to yourselves This is the fault of a Clinton administration that calcified the Reagan-Bush era destruction of organized labor and actively hollowed out the rural and working class communities that were once your party’s base. This is the fault of the George W. Bush-era congress that pledged fealty to the president after 9/11 only to suffer historic losses afterward. This is the fault of a Democratic apparatus the squandered their mid-term leverage in 2006 by tossing full support behind a cadre of conservative “Blue Dogs” who worked against the party’s own interest and were all but unanimously voted out with 2 terms. This is the fault of an Obama administration that drained all resources from state parties and abandoned down-ballot races due to their absurd belief that demographic shifts meant they would control the executive branch until the end of time. This is the fault of a party that ignored clear calls for reform in 2016 in order to nominate a woman who wanted to use “Because It’s Her Turn” as her official campaign slogan. This is the fault of a myopic and vainglorious old woman who cared infinitely more about her own self-aggrandizement than she did about the wellbeing of the people who idolized her. This is what happens when a social movement is defined in equal parts by its hubris and incompetence. This is what happens when you deserve to lose. 3 days ago

There’s not going to be a civil war, you dimwits The American electoral system was dreamed up 250 years ago by a cadre of wealthy, syphilis-addled racists whose main goal was to preserve equanimity between a set of semi-autonomous states. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a system in which the people who get elected are not well-meaning men and women who seek to advocate for the best interests of their constituents. Quite the opposite. The only ones who get to sniff power are those who promise the most to the ever-shrinking caste that already has the most. What I’m getting at is that it’s still entirely possible that Donald Trump will be legitimately reelected, at least within the constraints laid down by our utterly illegitimate system. He could very well have an approval rating in the high thirties and lose the popular vote by upwards of 5 million and still win. That’s how our country is designed to function. We might also see something along the lines of the judicial coup that happened just 20 short years ago (the one that all the Very Smart pundits and poli sci professors told us would preserve “normalcy”). In this situation, hundreds of thousands of legitimate ballots will be invalidated due to some very dumb technicalities, resulting in a legally illegitimate Trump victory that will nonetheless still be legitimate because our bipartisan consensus is that rich and powerful people exist above the rule of law . That’s entirely possible, though not probable. Much more likely is an attempt by the Trump administration, in the event of a relatively narrow electoral college loss, to pursue some means of invalidation only to find his efforts squashed by a military and security state that greatly prefers Joe Biden. All this could happen. Who knows? But here’s where we see how badly the American imagination has been rotted by our utter inability to grasp material reality: people left and right are claiming that, in the event of such electoral shenanigans and their inevitable blowback, we will face a civil war. This is very stupid. No one making these claims has attempted to describe what, even hypothetically, a new civil war might entail. What events would occur that would cause it? I’m not asking for a probable scenario. Just a plausible one. What could a mass of Americans do that would present a serious risk to the structure of this country? What threat can we as a people pose when we are under surveillance 24 hours a day, when even the smallest of cities have police forces that are large, aggressive, and militarized, and when our actual military is so bloated and unaccountable that it could easily topple the national forces of any other country on earth? I’m consistently amazed how even though most Americans’ self-understanding is grounded in an exaggerated sense of their own marginalization, very few of us are capable of grasping what that marginalization actually entails. On the right and the left, all of us wallow in sense of righteous victimhood, yet we all still cling to some delusions of self-determination and power. It’s really quite pathetic. Shameful, even. What kind of unrest would unfold if the election is brazenly stolen? Riots? Mass shootings? Severe state repression? You mean the stuff that’s already a part of our daily lives and we’ve all accepted like the shitty, spineless cowards we are? That’s not a war. It’s not a revolution. Good god, you can’t even call it a movement. This is the paroxysmal spasms of a dying people. It’s a death rattle–the sound defeat that is meek, pathetic, and final. Go fuck yourself. Eat shit. I despise you all. 6 days ago

afloweroutofstone: Shout out to Disney for cooperating with state agencies involved in ethnic cleansing in order to make more live-action remakes no one wanted Contemporary liberalism is purely an aesthetic. It is not a movement. It is no way concerned with politics or the material world. It’s an ephemeral thing–a set of vague signifiers that causes its adherents to feel a sense of moral righteousness in spite of their complicity in a deeply broken system, and especially in spite of their resistance of all attempts to reform that system. This aesthetic is very easily manipulated. It cannot be betrayed, because it is based on no principles. And you know what? This is exactly what everyone was clamoring for! All the poptimists, woke comic book fans, and young adult fiction freaks–all you people who prioritize abstract representation over actual reality, all of you who were dumb enough to think Black Panther and Wonder Woman were meaningful in any way–this is the world you wanted. This is what you demanded we get in lieu of a politics. You have won. Now shut the fuck up and enjoy the bullshit you created. 1 week ago

(reblogged from afloweroutofstone)

oldshowbiz: 1966 - The John Birch Society, a racist extremist group co-founded by the Koch Brothers father, made a film that sought to prove the Civil Rights Movement was a Soviet plot.

Ever stop and think about how a literal Birch Society talking point has become fully accepted and normalized among our putatively liberal party? Dark times, man. We live in hell. 3 weeks ago

(reblogged from oldshowbiz)

girinamen asked: LOL, yeah Kendi, just have your Guardian Council knock-off declare any politician that wasn't anti-racist enough "racist" and remove them from office. They totally won't start wearing it as a badge of honor and all get together to write a new constitution and institute a rival government. Unless Civil War 2.0 was your idea all along. Seriously, is *this* how a nuclear power disintegrates? If so, how pathetic. PMC intellectual decadence is why we can't have nice thi...I mean countries. It’s not even about being anti-racist enough. It’s like in that Atlantic article, the lady who was literally being affectionate toward a black child was most likely being anti-racist in a more substantial and material way than the people who criticized her. It is, instead, about taking an incredibly essentialist and reductive understanding of race. In this case, essentially arguing that segregation is good & mandatory, that the sight of a black child and white adult getting along is fundamentally traumatizing? Just fucking insane. But that’s what happens when the purpose of “anti racism” is to excuse the failures of liberal status quo by making profane inequities appear inevitable. 1 month ago

What’s the end result of identity politics? Is it when people who compare having to wait too long in line at Subway to chattel slavery begin demanding I not only vote for, but celebrate, a woman who refused to release prisoners because she said their slave labor was too valuable to lose? That seems like a pretty good summary to me. I dunno. 1 month ago

Fun times at the Democrat National Convention

The Democrat convention has confirmed my long-held belief that 9/11 was 100% justified. It’s what A Prairie Home Companion would have been like if the Nazis had won the war; all the smug, treacly, faux-humility bullshit liberals regard as proof their own intelligence wrapped up in a blanket of unabashed violence and hatred. We have truly entered a world beyond hope. I have seen defeated people before. Plenty of times. More than most. But never in my most depraved imagination could I have pictured so many people so proud of failure, so joyous in their capitulation, so wedded to such an utterly repulsive worldview and aesthetic. These people stand for nothing. They believe in nothing, other than their own moral and cultural superiority. And honestly that would be fine if they just stayed the fuck out of politics. But, nope, they think believing and standing for nothing is the best thing a politician can do. Nothignness is their desired endgame: political organization as an entropic blob in which all communication is heavily policed, everyone feigns a sense of respect toward everyone else, and every imaginable identity subgroup gets its own 30 seconds of exposure. That’s it. That’s all they want. Mentioning any of the very real needs of the tens of millions of Americans who are suffering and dying is considered a selfish distraction.

One time, just one fucking time, I’d like to hear one of the millions of cocksuckers who claimed that they totally supported Medicare for All but just thought Biden was the best way to achieve–I’d like to hear one of these assholes just fucking admit that they were lying, that they don’t actually care about policy, that this is just a fucking game to them. 1 month ago

robertchuck asked: Do you give leftism a fair shake? Firstly let me say how refreshing this is- to find someone to break down this entire debacle, it’s associations to the corrupt Democratic Party, and the sickening selfishness that threatens any era. I also agree with calling it a form of conservatism. It certainly shares features with nutter Christians from the 1950s, as well as the violent excesss of current police strategies (ruin people’s characters and career). Do you consider real leftist thought? I’m a leftist. I’m also a professor of English and I got my phd at a very cultural studies-heavy program so I’d say that I’ve given the left a fair shake. There’s tons of leftist authors whose work I admire. But being really deeply immersed within left thought means that I’m not inclined to cheerlead it or avoid pointing out its inconsistencies.



One thing I hate is the notion of “cultural marxism,” with right wing internet creeps blaming an explosion of cultural idiocy on Foucault or whatever. One thing I’ve noticed recently–particularly with James Lindsay and the rest of the Sokal squared people–is that they’ll base their connections between leftist theory and alienating acts of wokeness on very superficial, Cliff’s Notes-level reading of those theorists. This was striking because there’s usually no pushback from purported leftists against these misreadings–and that’s because most people who go through cultural studies programs, even at an advanced level, don’t actually read the vast majority of the works they discuss and putatively base their beliefs upon.



I’m not exaggerating. I’ve known dozens of people who got tenure track academic jobs and fully, openly admit to doing barely any reading throughout the whole of their MA or PhD programs. They were able to graduate–not sneak by, but excel and become leaders in their fields–by skimming wikipedia pages and connecting what they read to some pet issue of theirs in an extremely tenuous manner. They then go out and become recognized experts on texts they haven’t even read yet and their misreadings become canonized.



It’s gotten so bad that actually reading the theory you’ve been assigned can harm your job prospects, because basing your analysis on what authors actually wrote–rather than the vague summaries and half-assed analyses that have entered into the wider discourse–requires you to alienate yourself intellectually.



That’s how the actually existing intellectual left has collapsed into such a solipsistic and self-contradictory mess. It’s how deeply regressive politics have become standard praxis. And it’s why it’s so easy for intellectual lightweights to issue effective criticisms against us. 1 month ago

lpicador asked: New reader. Love the blog. Was reading your Afropessimism piece with great interest, having already read the McCarthy piece in LARB, but your treatment of the piece about blackness being inhuman and therefore essentially above moral reproach called to mind the character of Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, who repeatedly invokes his blackness as a sort of signifier of his moral depravity but also invincibility: "Coal-black is better than another hue,In that it scorns to bear another hue" etc That is an *excellent* comparison.



Sometimes I wind up accidentally incorporating theory that I read like 15 years ago and I forgot about fully reading it but I nonetheless internalized the gist of it. Been a long time since I studied race in a controlled capacity (ie reading from a syllabus and listening to an expert rather than just picking what I want. I do, however, kinda sorta vaguely remember a discussion along these lines–sort of the pros and cons of tactically embracing your own dehumanizaton. 1 month ago