agitprop

Need a video that's just Nancy Pelosi calling Republicans her friends, along with her calls for a strong Republican party. She got what she wanted.

Important Bsky post laying out that the Dems are cold war fossils and HATE their base.

https://bsky.app/profile/sovereignbeast.bsky.social/post/3ladyvif5vi2c

If your state itemizes write-ins (like, all of them. Not many do), these things read like a message board lmao.

https://www.bergencountyclerk.gov/_Content/pdf/ElectionResult/write-ins%2011_7_24_signed.pdf

I've been saying this for over a year, but: I will not vote for a candidate who would rather threaten me with fascism than say "okay maybe we should tone down the genocide", who is willing to risk open fascism to keep the guns flowing, who gives their finest most bloated cutting edge weapons of murder to the literal Hitler apologist neo Nazi piece of shit actively on trial for genocide he admits to like every five minutes, and old outdated crap we would otherwise be throwing away to Ukraine¹.

Like, putting aside the fact she's a legendarily transphobic cop, and nothing short of personally going down in culturally aware and exceptionally competent ways on every single trans adult in the country would make me forget that long enough to vote for her, these chucklefucks were never going to be the bulwark of democracy. They did not question the extremely suspicious election results² the open election interference or more than half assedly prosecute the violent coup. The defenders of liberal democracy would have had gallows up on January 7. Elon musk would have been hung drawn and quartered by now, and it would have been shown on cspan, mandatory viewing in every school in the nation. None of this is surprising, for those of us who remember 2000. I've been telling people the libs would roll over for belly rubs at the slightest excuse for years, that they're not worth voting for, because they will not even attempt to hold the line. They have affirmed that this was the right decision.

Bringing on the Clinton and starmer teams as advisors was just a declaration that they wanted to lose. Actual democracy can involve a vote, but it is at best a small part of it, and I don't believe its valid here. The strict adherence to voting is a failure of imagination, a failure of volition, and an abdication of ones role in society.

I dont know how many of you have long talks with random strangers outside of lefty spaces, but so many people suffer from this failure of imagination. They have died inside, their imaginations and consciousness, even their sense of themselves and connections to community stifled by lifetimes of obedience and fear, their horizons cut away in bloody strips by the knives of capital, individually packaged in neat little boxes by alienating neoliberal media. Their resurrection, and the murder of the metaphorical cops residing in their heads, is our responsibility. Even if we don't immediately love the person who climbs out of that dirt. Where we as leftists must act is not just in feeding the hungry, in practical needs or armed resistance or whatever the fuck your praxis is³, but in sparking the imagination, expanding horizons past the options explicitly presented by their masters, and connecting those expanded views and ability to act to everyday life. We can and should use this chaos to break out of the ordinary, to make the world more surreal, to blur the edges of what capitalist subjects see as possible. This is the responsibility not only of the mass chef and the soldier, though it does remain a part of theirs, but of the artist, the drug dealer, the thief, the builder, and the engineer-including and especially of software.

Get out there and do some necromancy, folks. Scream messy poetry in a coffee shop, project a movie on a blank wall, make your error messages surrealist. Intrude on peoples fucking tiny little lives. Make the world a little stranger. Bring back the dead.

¹I know, not popular here, but at least in the lib rhetoric they're fighting a defensive war against a genocidal invader. Whatever you believe, it shows what the libs really value. And more importantly, there was a god damn treaty since they gave up their nukes. Nobody's ever fucking doing that again after this example. The failure to defend them ended even the most remote dreams of nuclear disarmament without dismantling the state. There will be fallout from this, and it will be literal. Just when we were back to making fresh modern LBR steel, too. Fuck.

²I'd believe trump won the electoral college, but he absolutely did not win the popular vote. Not honestly. They cheated. We knew they were cheating. We caught them cheating. They admitted they were cheating. Nobody cared.

³its still that. I don't mean to call what youre doing unimportant. Whatever it is, we probably still need that. I'm saying its not enough. What I was doing wasn't enough either, as demonstrated by a lack of revolution. By lack of mainstream resistance. By the left still being marginal.

A good response whenever you hear someone express shock over voting for Trump:

“If you were able to overlook a genocide and cast a vote for Harris, you already know how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism and vote for him.”

https://xcancel.com/briebriejoy/status/1854548845381787825#m

Anyone have any thoughts or reflections on better messaging towards men from the center and left given the results of the election?

The Democrats did not treat this as the most important election of our lifetimes. They did not even seriously treat it as an election at all.

They treated it as a protection racket. "Oh, it'd sure be a shame if ol' cousin Donny broke your kneecaps. Now, I can keep him away from you but I'm gonna need a little something from you first."

Was this the most important election of our lifetimes?

Is this really the last chance to stop fascism?

Will Trump make the Palestinian genocide 10x worse?

Is democracy itself over now?

Then where’s the rioting on the streets fucKKKing pussies

I think they’re right, tbh, at least in the vibes sense, but why aren’t they rioting?

The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision--a total implosion of the do-nothing "centrist" political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future--healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change--the far right will keep winning. They're the only ones with ideas.

Now is the time to reach out to your liberal friends to help them understand that this is not a fluke, but the system working as designed. This failure by the Dems didn't come out of nowhere. Lots of us on the left saw this coming a mile away, and can help make sense of it. They're flailing and looking for an explanation. We have that. Help them understand. Help them see that we don't HAVE to live like this. We don't have to put up with only being given a sliver of political power every 4 years, with the threat of fascism hanging over our heads. The people at the top--the donor class, campaign managers, and beltway lanyard bros--aren't worth your time. But your mom or friend who voted for Kamala and is devastated and confused by the loss of the popular vote definitely IS worth your time. Those people can be comrades. Give them a chance. Reach out and listen to their frustrations and concerns. Don't be smug--be sympathetic. Talk to them about why they think this happened. Offer your perspective. Ask them why the Democrats raised over a billion dollars and still lost the popular vote. Ask if those might be connected. Ask why progressive voter initiatives--protecting abortion, sick days, wages increases, etc.--outperformed the Democratic presidential candidate so much in so many places. Ask what they think that means about the state of the electorate; does it mean most of America really is irredeemably evil? Or could it maybe mean something else? Ask if they really think Kamala Harris and "nothing really needs to change" is the best we can do, or the message most people need to hear. Help them see that it isn't. Help them see that a better world is possible. Help them get organized. This is your chance.

I might not be good at agitprop.

Every time that someone implies that Palestinians should have been sacrificed for the country, I just call them fascist.

It is after all what they are but I'm not sure if that convinces people to try something different.