THE SHORT VERSION

In April 2016 I was expelled from Philly Socialists. It involved some personal drama which was utilized as weaponized identity, but it was obviously political because I was the main figurehead of opposition within the organization, and the organizational culture was very visibly not mature enough to handle opposition prior to that point. They kept details of accusations in private channels intentionally so I couldn’t fight back against them (claiming they were protecting victims).

About a year later at an action called Disrupt MAGA people from Philly Socialists stalked and harassed me, attempted to convince others present to physically remove me, and then posted multiple callout Facebook statuses vaguely accusing me of being some kind of abuser or predator, starting a pile-on against me and encouraging people to mass-unfriend me. Somehow in the chaos of the callout posts, someone accused me of sexual assault. Again, details were kept from me.

I’ve given it an immense amount of time and thought and this just doesn’t sound like anything I have actually ever done. I’m not perfect, but it’s unavoidable that people who generate pressure on authority figures will be perceived as having bad personalities. Political disagreements are in fact always personal, and diplomacy between tendencies is only a postponement of inevitable recurring conflicts.

I considered trying to figure out where these unknown accusations came from, but if people went to that length to keep them anonymous, clearly these people don’t want to talk to me on even a conciliatory basis, so investigation would probably serve only an inflammatory role henceforth.

I have stayed relatively silent on this because I was facing riot charges already and didn’t want further complications to emerge from social media drama. It’s not a moot point; my pro bono lawyer basically tried to bail on me after the callout posts. My arrest is now expunged. For the short version, I’ll just say social media reputation attacks damage a millennial working class person’s ability to survive in a post-recessionary economic environment where death is already increasingly common for at-risk youth.

I’m going to resume being politically involved because the planet is dying and we are on a ten-year deadline. I’ll do my best to avoid people who seem weirded out by me, but unmistakably the political project of establishing either socialism or an extraordinary Green New Deal, in order to save the species, takes absolute priority over all other concerns.

If you don’t want to associate with me, ghost me. If you run a certain event or space and don’t want me there, let me know and if possible I will utilize other avenues. However I warn that the priority of this mission requires that I possibly veto such prohibitions, even sometimes in spaces which on the surface seem apolitical. Anyone who continues attempting to keep me out of events or spaces necessary to the completion of this mission will be either disregarded or counteracted.

Obviously, stop being a member of, working with, giving money to, or cosponsoring events with Philly Socialists. Their core purpose is totally dishonest and you shouldn’t give them a platform. Their leadership is collectively guilty of snitch cop narc behavior which had real immediate tactical and safety consequences for me mid-action. Kick them out and don’t invite them back.

++End of transmission++

THE LONG VERSION

Some epicly weird stuff has been going on in my life I need to address.

Around late April 2016 I was expelled from Philly Socialists. About a year later, during Disrupt MAGA (a black bloc attack against a Trump/literal Nazi rally), members of Philly Socialists started a number of callout social media posts against me.

I was #MeToo’d during a riot. Nothing summarizes 2017 like that.

The accusations were heaped on. It started with things like sexual harassment (but also a host of other weird tankie charges like somehow trying to backstab the organization, in which at my time of membership I was actually a true believer). Then after the riot-callout, I started hearing whispers like “there have been accusations [of what?] by multiple women against you,” and even one mention of sexual assault, which is definitely more serious. Philly Socialists demanded people mass-unfriend me and recommended to the Philly Left that people basically not allow me around. They attempted to enforce this at Disrupt MAGA, and basically failed, but not before literally canvassing the crowd mid-riot with accusations against me, and approaching me literally seven times trying to intimidate me into leaving. (And yet supposedly I’m the one following them.)

However, I know strangely little about the details of the accusations against me – no names, no stories of what I allegedly did. I know there was a conscious effort to limit the details which got out, which the listserv email about my expulsion said was for the benefit of victims. I also know there has been literal organizing against me, because a former acquaintance who is centrally involved in this drama had once mentioned to me an article from “The Revolution Starts at Home,” a manual for dealing with abusers in activist communities, containing tactics for waging social warfare against abusers. (It also says on page 79 that accusations can be a form of abuse against marginalized people like me.) In reality they limited the details of the accusations to reduce my ability to rightfully fight against accusations they know can’t withstand examination.

I have enacted an extremely thorough fearless and searching moral inventory of myself, and my lifelong sexual, romantic, and intimate history. There is definitely a lot that I am not proud of and would not do again. However, of these charges, I have to say I am completely innocent. Everything I have ever done romantically, sexually, or otherwise, was done in a context in which it was at least understandable given the interactions leading up to that point. Everyone has been guilty of misreading signals or getting consumed by a crush that’s hard to contain. Everyone has been a dumb kid and done kinky stuff, then learned later there is a more mutual way to do it, which they should practice moving forward. What’s astonishing to me is that, given what an ugly loser who never gets laid I am, that people were even able to think of anything to accuse me of. My intimate history is barely long enough to mention, let alone prosecute. Ha ha very funny, everyone laugh at loser me.

However, the bitterest truth of this is that even I cannot reveal what few details I know. In order for me to give a coherent story of anything that happened which would clear my name, I would need to reveal details that are EXTREMELY politically and personally damaging to someone I had conflicts with in Philly Socialists, in a way from which I don’t think they would ever truly recover. They made accusations to smear me as a source, because I was privy to knowledge of genuinely disgusting and reprehensible behavior on their part (of which I know literal eye-witnesses besides a direct confession from my “accuser” to me personally, and they know this, so don’t @ me). They pointedly showed zero intention of ceasing, and they didn’t want word to get out. Me outing them would potentially fatally damage their career and/or their status of being accepted among their fellow organizers. All I will say publicly is that it is weirdly analogous to the Kamala Harris/Willie Brown scandal, which is good in a way, because fuck Kamala Harris. But ultimately…there are way more legitimate and political reasons to hate Kamala Harris, and same goes for Philly Socialists. For reasons I’ll revisit, I think we just need less of this social warfare on the Left, especially having experienced extreme survival difficulties related to the accusations, ranging from sleeping on the street, to losing social media when I needed it in crisis housing situations, to losing supply lines for my medication. (Unfortunately, the best cure for migraines is psychedelics. While ridiculous, it’s also true: my medication is illegal. It’s the only way I was able to hold down straining jobs, but after the callout, my sources stopped replying. This whole thing is really about healthcare. Don’t come between me and my LSD supply is Rule #1 of the new order. It is my actual medication, and anything I do to preserve access to it, or preserve my social network which provides it, is literally necessary self-defense from blindness and torture. I chemically have no choice.)

Claiming innocence is harder than you’d think, because every claim of innocence is inherently a counter-accusation that someone else made false accusations – and false accusation is one of the most morally damning things you can accuse someone of, especially in a climate where people are guilty until proven innocent. Claiming innocence seems innocent, but it’s unavoidably also an attack on someone else’ reputation which they must defend, often through counterattack. So this scenario has unpreventable retaliatory cycles, which will continue because the other side, its ideology, and its survival interests will compel it to fire back even if it rather wouldn’t. Same with me. It’s like Marilyn Manson said: “In the end we’re all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven’t been on the show.” Highschool never ends, so you might as well put on a black hoodie and embrace it.

It’s obvious to most people by this point that this heavily involved political dynamics within Philly Socialists, in which I ran for chair against its founder Tim Horras two months before the expulsion, and continued contending for my politics and for leadership in a local branch right up til I was kicked out. I didn’t realize the extent to which hardcore authoritarian communist ideologies were entrenched in the core leadership of the organization, at least at that time (they’ve since caught Leftbook cancer). It is clear this had a lot to do with both the desire to purge me and the method of carrying it out. Callouts have a self-expanding energy, drawing from social media to create a bandwagon, as well as a spiral of silence for skeptics, who are afraid they’ll be tarnished with the brush of association with the accused.

Leona Nelson commented on the main callout thread they had heard I sexually assaulted someone. I don’t know where this comes from and it’s probably best for the Left’s ability to function that I don’t find out. I have speculated, but have concluded that such speculation is probably not helpful, given that if someone really does feel wronged by me, even if I disagree, the best thing I could do for the situation is give them distance. (For obvious political reasons I won’t be attempting to rejoin Philly Socialists.) However, in conversations I had with Leona, they specifically said to me that in various situations, like friend groups in the punk scene (their example), accusations were used specifically to remove people with whom someone just had an irreconcilable personal conflict, or so much emotional rawness that they literally can’t stomach being around the person (the latter is the condensed summary of everything that happened with me, we were a pair of immature edgy friends who made each other painfully insecure). Leona told me they were dating someone who in the past had such accusations against them, and Leona was skeptical of those accusations and the honesty of the woman who made them, and that their partner’s case was precisely more of an interpersonal conflict and raw emotional thing. It makes no sense for Leona, then, to throw out an anonymous and publicly unsubstantiated sexual assault accusation. One of the founders of Philly Socialists also had an incident of being accused of gendered oppression, only to be protected by his new feminist woman partner who called the accuser the real abuser. This same woman then went on to use accusations to help drive me out of the organization. Sorry to drag people through this disgrace, but the Left’s hypocrisy is too much to accept.

I didn’t give a proper accounting of this to the public, as vocally as I wanted, because I was facing riot charges, and was worried the social media drama could have even worse consequences, ranging from legal issues, to vigilante warfare with random zealous antifa lone wolves who sent me threats. (This scenario could have led to an assault charge if I defended myself, which would have killed my first time offender deal for the riot charges; the legal implications of physically defending myself from psychos is the real reason I stopped going to protests). As you know, I logged off for a long time. My progressive pro bono lawyer stopped showing up to my court dates for riot charges; I had to strongarm him into showing up using the cell phone from my codefendants’ lawyer, because civilian cell phones are not allowed in the criminal justice center. I had no idea if some dumb prosecutor (or whoever, I’m not a lawyer) was going to stumble upon a radical leftist drama thread on social media, and think it was something The Law needed to deal with. (Again I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know how it works.) I was already facing three felonies and three misdemeanors; I didn’t need any more. I started working on this statement when my probation was up and I learned my arrest records were expunged. I will admit that I briefly for like five minutes considered some kind of libel lawsuit but eventually concluded that would just be a cop thing to do, in addition to me having no money and libel-related harm being unprovable. (Yes, this has an uncanny parallel with the difficulty of legally proving sex crimes, none of the dark meta symmetry is lost on me.)

What kind of person would initiate this domino effect of shamefulness? Maybe Abigail Williams, the serial false accuser who started the Salem Witch Trials. Or the Phoenix Program, a US operation in Vietnam, which incentivized southern Vietnamese to snitch on each other to the Americans. They accused each other of being Communists, when in reality they were just neighbors who didn’t like each other, using the dumb Americans to murder each other by false accusation. Or, I dunno, McCarthyism. Or the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 80s/90s. America has a history of this.

Point is, if you think people are better than this, buckle up, and if you think women are all better than this, definitely many of them are, but apparently some of them are not. Women are people, after all, and some people are astonishingly evil, or we wouldn’t live in a class society. Gender has been a convenient “Trump card” to win all disagreements within the Left (though it doesn’t work against the Right, as Clinton and Kavanaugh indicate) but if we’re playing Oppression Olympics, my disability outranks your gender. Now that I’ve won the Oppression Olympics I abolish them permanently.

It doesn’t mean #MeToo is entirely wrong. As page 77 of “The Revolution Starts at Home” says, “the wider feminist antiviolence community has a principle of always believing women if they report being sexually violated. CARA also leans in this direction, but we do not do so uncritically. We try to develop a process of engagement with a person’s story of being violated, rather than thinking of the process as a fact-finding mission with an end goal of determining the Objective Truth of What Really Happened.” They’d probably deny it, but that’s a gentle way of saying it’s okay to examine accusations. Things like #MeToo have done real good for a lot of people. It may also need to adjust its methods; sometimes #MeToo has been guilty of friendly fire, as Dave Chappelle explained. We don’t have to throw out the whole thing, nor keep the whole thing. The process is ongoing.

WHY AM I REALLY WRITING THIS?

Everything in the accused and/or abuser playbook says that, it might actually be better just to back away and hope the whole thing blows over. But I can’t do that. (And let’s not pretend there isn’t an abuser playbook, though I’ve never seen it collated in one place, except ironically insofar as all the tactics from “The Revolution Starts at Home” can be inverted by abusers, which is pretty much what I’m trying to tell you happened to me.)

There are no clean breaks in 2019. Everything is connected by social media, people use Facebook events to organize. People see things from people they wish they didn’t on social media because of friends-of-friends; radically breaking ties with someone involves disconnecting over potentially dozens of social media groups, chats, and pages, some of which anyone is bound to forget, only to be unpleasantly reminded later. It’s simply realistic to expect that people would continue raising these rumors every single time I came into even accidental digital contact with the wrong people in random social media discussion, causing them to fly off the handle again – this is, in fact, what was happening before I logged off Facebook, and why I logged off. Given the utterly berserk way a few specific individuals have behaved in this situation, it’s safe to assume they are literally triggered into confrontational and irrational behavior by even the digital or in-person sight of me. (This is not to mock triggers, at least in this instance; I have a ton of them.) I think this has less to do with some idea that I genuinely somehow hurt anyone (a smokescreen), and more to do with the fact that, if we ever truly had out the argument in public, boy would they be shown as terribly, terribly wrong, and be revealed as having committed other shameful grossness. My existence is a painful reminder of their shortcomings. I think what this mostly comes down to is that Philly Socialists doesn’t want people to see me crater them on social media for being a top-down, liberal nonprofit-like Maoist sect that lies to its own members and the public, claiming to be a multi-tendency democratic unity formation. Maybe they don’t want people to see me wreck Maoism generally with my vastly superior Third Camp politics. Smh. (Tl;dr: everything that Maoism invokes to justify authoritarianism is invalid, and every attempt by Maoism to claim it is not authoritarian is a cynical lie, a lie it nonetheless reiterates in various forms continuously. Just read the brief “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win” by Mao to see he is vehemently anti-democracy. This also happened to be the slogan on the front cover of the original Philly Socialists intro pamphlet. Sadly I didn’t know this when I joined the group, or I would have stayed out; democracy is fundamental.)

BUT WHY DO I NEED TO EVEN BE ENGAGED IN POLITICS?

The world is literally ending. We have a 10-year deadline to either overthrow capitalism, or terrorize the bourgeoisie into enacting a truly unprecedented and vast Green New Deal. Either would require essentially the same methods and urgency.

So yeah, I’m afraid the world is so catastrophically on a course for self-destruction as to warrant my re-emergence into politics on literally an emergency basis. I find it impossible to outright reject the possibility that maybe I have some things figured out which other people don’t, and the world is genuinely in need of my intervention, unfortunately. Yes, I know how over-the-top and self-aggrandizing that sounds, but when you look around, do you really see anyone addressing the crisis with the full measures required? I, in truth, do not. The world got bad enough that I’m the lesser evil. Bleak!

Given that I know nearly nothing of accusations against me which have flown around through grapevines on the Internet apparently, all I can say is this:

It’s game time and we need to ruthlessly prioritize.

The apocalypse might seem cool as a concept, but when you’re wading through raw sewage or starving in a refugee camp you’re gonna decide it’s not, so let’s keep that image in our heads in the present.

If people believe I am some kind of abuser or immediate danger, those people can choose not to work with me or include me. Others who see me differently can continue working with me, and probably will, because our planet has bigger problems than the otherwise insignificant speck that is me.

If this is the first you are hearing of this conflict, and you believe all accusations, or all women, I’ve got really nothing to say to you other than, you might want to google “problems with callout culture” or “problems with identity politics” or something, there are now legions of people of a similar mind about these things, but if you need to cut ties with me, just do it. If you are some kind of group and/or venue or something, and you think I am a danger who needs to be kept away, feel free to let me know so I don’t show up at your whatever, I’d rather just avoid the situation. I may disregard such requests in specific situations where I am engaged in organizing or community-building I view as necessary to building the insurgency to save the species. Compromise on this point is impossible.

From here on out, choice is an illusion. We do what is necessary.

De minimis non curat praetor.