January 6: A Mass Base for Fascism?

Having obsessively watched live streams of events all day last Wednesday, and subsequently read all the radical accounts I could find, I think this one by Crimethinc is the most comprehensive. Well worth a read — and view of the video clips. And the analysis seems spot-on.

This Business Insider article, “Some among America's military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup and may have had help from federal law-enforcement officials,” breaks down the failure of the pigs to stop the pro-Trumpers from seizing the Capitol. Trump refused to call in the National Guard, leaving it to Vice President Pence to do it at least 2 house after the insurgents had occupied the building. Here are the conflicting layers of the pigs:

—US Capitol Police (USCP), a federal agency providing security to Congress and answering to Congress

—United States Secret Service (USSS) or Secret Service, federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) charged with conducting criminal investigations and protecting the nation's leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government

—Federal Protective Service (FPS), police division of DHS charged with protecting and delivering integrated law enforcement and security services to government-owned facilities

—Immigration & Citizenship Enforcement (ICE) & Customs & Border Protection (CBP), federal agencies under the DHS

—US Park Police, a unit of the National Park Service, a federal agency under the Department of the Interior

—Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a federal agency under the Department of Justice (DOJ)

— United States Marshals Service (USMS), a federal bureau within the DOJ, operating under the direction of the Attorney General

—Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a federal agency under the DOJ

—Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, also known as Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), a federal agency under DOJ

—Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPDC), more commonly known as the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the DC Police, who are the pigs under the control of the city government

The national security French pig, consulted for the article, said:

"I cannot believe the failure to establish a proper cordon was a mistake. These are very skilled police officials, but they are federal, and that means they ultimately report to the president. This needs to be investigated."

So Trump obviously enabled the successful breaching of the building. It took National Guard units from Virginia and Maryland, sent by their respective Democratic and Republican governors, to retake the Capitol Building being dispatched three hours later.

Other interesting articles:

—“The Big Takeover” by Jerrod Shanahan

—“Riot on the Hill” by Mike Davis

—“Broken Windows fascism” by Three Way Fight, with these significant quotes:

In broader terms, Trump’s insistent denial of the November election results has spurred a massive political shift within the U.S. right, as millions of people have moved—at least temporarily—from system-loyalty into system-opposition, as symbolized by Proud Boys stomping on a Thin Blue Line flag. We should expect this oppositional right to remain active and violent long after the current fight over the presidency has died down . . . the oppositional right is a meeting place where different rightist currents and ideologies—such as neonazism and QAnon—converge and interact. It remains to be seen how unified or well organized the oppositional right will be, what kind of strategies and tactics they will use, and whether or not Trump himself will continue to play an active role.

And this:

The attack on the U.S. Capitol is, as many have described it, an attempted coup. It dramatizes Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, demagoguery, and repudiation of the electoral system that put him in the White House, but it also highlights one of the key limitations that separated the Trump administration from fascism. Fascism requires an independent mass organization in order to carry out its attack on the established political order. Trump has never tried to build such an organization. He has skillfully used social media and rallies to mobilize supporters, but organizationally he has relied on existing institutions, above all the Republican Party, which is part of why his administration was a coalition between America Firsters and conventional conservatives of various kinds. Now that coalition is falling apart. And Trump’s control over the federal security apparatus also proved to be quite limited. He could mobilize Homeland Security agents and U.S. Marshals to crack down on Black Lives Matter protesters last summer, but he failed to deploy any federal agents to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election. Today's mob of Trump supporters never had a chance of seizing power, but they did bring Congress to a complete standstill for hours. With better organization and leadership, the movement they represent could quickly turn into something far more dangerous.

So were U&S right in their 'coup' assessment? http://libcom.org/blog/necessity-revolutionary-working-class-program-times-coup-civil-war-scenarios-10102020
Or did the Trumpers just get lucky on the day?

Red Marriott

So were U&S right in their 'coup' assessment? http://libcom.org/blog/necessity-revolutionary-working-class-program-times-coup-civil-war-scenarios-10102020

Yes, of course. The Reichstag is in ashes and Brownshirts are marauding through the streets of every city as we speak. The formerly so-called United States now operates under the rules of the Confederate States of America. The Civil War — to liquidate antifa and consolidate this victory nationwide — starts on Monday, at 9:00 a.m. sharp. They were prophetic!

Less coup than as an attempt at autogolpe, where the executive pre-empts and dissolves the other branches of government. Trump, fundamentally incompetent as befits this combination apotheosis and nadir of bourgeois class rule, played it as if it were a reality TV show, a spectacle for entertainment with a cash reward awaiting the winner. The problem with Trump's version is that the autogolpe depends a previous accumulation of power that can mobilize enough military and civil force to actually dissolve the government, suppress the media, and expand the golpe.

Trump certainly had not accumulated that much power, and his "army" was indeed created in his image-- without program, or ability.

As a point of historical accuracy, this:

But this is not the only danger ahead. In the name of a war against extremism, centrists are going to demand to expand the same machinery of state repression that the next Trump will inevitably use against us. This is essentially what happened in Weimar Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Third Reich.

is not accurate. The "machinery of state repression" was not expanded by the Weimar. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution provided all that was need for the president to rule by decree and determine what leader of what party would become the leader and government.

slight nitpick: DEA is the Drug Enforcement Administration

H

Yes, of course. The Reichstag is in ashes and Brownshirts are marauding through the streets of every city as we speak.

Obviously there wasn't a coup. But the linked AWW article posited a likely scenario of coup attempts and civil war. While from far away I'm not convinced that this was a coup attempt rather than a lucky break quite possibly aided by some pro-Trump security agents (though the article is posted here by RT with an intro describing a "coup attempt" and it's a common description) - still, even you are praising this article which concludes that there is a "rush to escalate towards civil war", a war that "may be inevitable". Do you agree with that?

civil war is possible, but only, it seems to me, if Boss (no longer) Tweet and his handlers/enablers are somehow able to ramp up the right-wing populist suspicions and skepticism about the electoral process and thereby peel away a sizeable base to abandon it as a means of "petition and redress" in favor of something like a regular strategy of plebiscite by invasion -- a strategy that has now been adopted into their playbook. Despite being an obvious political failure, the spectacle of J6 was a tactical victory for the far-right because it shows what's possible with minimal planning beyond gathering in one place at one time and knowing that law enforcement wouldn't be on anything approaching high alert (not to mention a certain amount of active collusion).

Black Badger

Despite being an obvious political failure, the spectacle of J6 was a tactical victory for the far-right because it shows what's possible with minimal planning beyond gathering in one place at one time and knowing that law enforcement wouldn't be on anything approaching high alert (not to mention a certain amount of active collusion).

Despite the well known sympathies of many rank and file cops for the fash and interference from political leaders I'd imagine it will get harder and harder for them to pull similar stunts.

Those of us old enough to remember the anti-summit movement will recall that it basically became impossible to have any impact on the running of the summits.

I remember commentators who'd been in Seattle for the anti-WTO protest in 1999 saying something to the effect that you can only catch the system by surprise once in a generation. I agree with what bastarx is saying above. I also largely agree with Black Badger's post.

To me, the events at the Capitol on Wednesday were a riot. If you watch the videos and interviews with the participants, so many of them were fucking idiots. But they were lucky, in one of those right-place-at-right-time kind of historical moments. Another attack at Wednesday's level of intensity clearly can't be summoned so easily again, nor can it be sustained. I attended every one of the Battles of Berkeley in 2017 and agree with Crimethinc's critique in "How Anti-Fascists Won the Battles of Berkeley." Once anti-fascists began to truly organize our forces, rather than put out feeble calls for mobilizations, we won.

On October 17, 2020 Proud Boy wannabe Philip Anderson organized a "free speech rally" in San Francisco's Civic Center. Anderson, who's a young Black guy from Texas, played up his right to promote Trump in the U.S. city where he's the least popular (Biden pulled 85% in November's election). I got there a half hour before the scheduled event and saw Anderson wandering through the heavily anti-authoritarian counter protest crowd of around 400. He was trying to debate free speech, but thankfully someone expeditiously smacked him in the mouth and knocked out his front two incisors. Only a moron would fail to gauge the enemy and do something so stupid. The Trumpite-fascists only numbered around a dozen, whose rally lasted only about 10 minutes before the cops had to escort all of them away under a fusillade of rocks and bottles, and even drive them to safety in a police van. Admittedly, this was a provocation in anti-Trump territory, so it's not applicable to other parts of the U.S. But my point is that when anti-fascists show up in significant numbers, prepared to fight, the fascist wither and quickly look for an escape route.

Yesterday morning I was listening to NPR and heard this amazing rebroadcast of a 2006 radio interview with labor historian Eric Foner called "On The 'Unresolved Legacy Of Reconstruction.'" I only heard the last bit, which was profound, so I went back and listened to the whole podcast. I wholeheartedly agree that the Civil War was never finished because Reconstruction failed. The Confederate flag waving marauders in Washington DC last Wednesday were a continuation of the battle for that Lost Cause, essentially Klan terrorists without hoods.

These long quotes are my takeaways:

Eric Foner

Well, the Klan begins in early Reconstruction - 1866-67. It spreads throughout the South pretty quickly. This is another reason why Reconstruction is important for us to think about because, you know, to use a modern term which didn't really exist at that time, the Klan is the most striking example of home-grown American terrorism. This is our terrorist history - not from abroad, not Islamic fundamentalist. These were good Christian people, at least in their own self-image. But they murdered, they rode at night, they beat people, they whipped them, they destroyed property, they attacked innocent civilians. And their purpose was to deprive African Americans of their rights, both the right to vote, the right to access to land, the right to education. And they were very effective, unfortunately. These local governments were not able to put down this kind of violence.

And this:

Eric Foner

Well, I think we need to - you know, we still have a fairly serious racial divide in this country. Obviously, we're not living in the 19th century. First of all, the racial configuration is entirely different today. Hispanics outnumber blacks now for the first time. We can't any longer think of, you know, American society as just black or white; there are many other groups as well. But nonetheless, if you take the black population in any index that you want - whether it's life expectancy, health, housing, wealth, income, education - there is still a significant gap between blacks and whites.

But part of the "white grievance" is that that gap is closing as working class whites face declining life expectancy bringing them closer to the conditions of Blacks (including the aforementioned health, housing, wealth, income, and education too), most prominently among men, due to drug overdoses, alcoholism, liver disease, suicides, lack of access to health care, mental health breakdown, etc., etc. The U.S. is perhaps the only advanced industrial country experiencing this phenomenon. Hence unless whites unite and engage in class struggle against capital with their Black and people of color working class brethren, this racial rift will fester and lead to future civil war-like explosions. Sorry if that's not coherent, but that's what I'm thinking. I look forward to hearing what others think.

Further thoughts: in February of 2020 a dozen of my comrades and I launched a study group to read W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. We'd barely started when the COVID-19 restrictions forced us to continue meeting by Zoom. And then George Floyd was murdered and what we were reading about in the period after the Civil War, like voter suppression and homicidal campaigns -- led in the 19th century by hooded Klansmen riding horses and today blue uniformed cops cruising around in squadcars, was almost exactly the same as what's happening today. We've done a slow, methodical reading and aren't finished yet. But the book is one of the most important U.S. history books I've ever read.

Here's an example:

Du Bois

In Philadelphia, he [President Andrew Johnson] declared that God was a tailor, like himself. At Cleveland his audience became a mob while the President himself increased the hubbub. The city authorities had made preparations for a polite reception, but as he proceeded with his harangue, the mob took complete possession of the crowd. Someone cried, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” “Yes,” yelled Johnson, “why not hang them?(p. 427)

Johnson was on a campaign tour through the country as far west at St. Louis in the election of 1866, not as a candidate himself (which was a presidential first), but stumping for his anti-Reconstruction allies running for congress and state legislatures. Sounds exactly like Trump in Georgia campaigning for Purdue and Loeffler for last Tuesday's election!

There's an excellent Huffington Post article making a comparison of Johnson and Trump, called "Donald Trump’s Racist Midterm Pitch Is His ‘Swing Around The Circle’", with the subtitle "The president is closing the 2018 midterm with a campaign of paranoid racist incitement echoing President Andrew Johnson’s 1866 message."

Lastly, yesterday I drove my partner to a medical appointment two counties away. As I passed under a freeway overpass (in Lafayette, in a wealthy white and suburban part of Contra Costa County), I saw some giant Trump and American flags attached to the fencing, along with "Stop the Steal" signs, all visible from the highway on both sides. Then I noticed 4 people on the brige with small, illegible handheld signs. I realized that despite the dangers of Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and various neo-Nazis and Klan groups, these suburban buffoons are promoting a massive, unsupportable lie. They're meek and clueless, and a thought hit me: "their bark is louder than their bite." An apt metaphor for most of these suburban QAnon zealots.

Thanks for replies. Though the US situation is in some ways unique due to its gun culture and armed populace I assume increasing armed clashes wouldn’t become actual civil war without a substantial defection from the police and army - otherwise no one can outgun the state in a war.

If such a defection occurred the mind boggles at the possibilities. A mainland insurrection bursting out of, eg, California or Texan army bases, could carve the country up. The Spanish civil war was launched from military bases in Spanish Morocco; though the idea that there could be a far right military faction launch a coup from, eg, a US airbase in Hawaii seems incredibly remote at present.

The U.S. has an all-volunteer military, essentially a "poverty draft," drawing almost exclusively on the working class and heavily on non-whites. So there's no loyalty there for Trump's white nationalism. The cops are different, since their unions are the only faction of workers that unanimously supported Trump.

But you're right about gun culture and the willingness to use guns.

Hieronymous

The U.S. has an all-volunteer military, essentially a "poverty draft," drawing almost exclusively on the working class and heavily on non-whites. So there's no loyalty there for Trump's white nationalism. The cops are different, since their unions are the only faction of workers that unanimously supported Trump.

But you're right about gun culture and the willingness to use guns.

AFAIK the officer corps is disproportionately white and evangelical Christian. Also the Special Forces are pretty much exclusively white.

See this for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/us/politics/military-minorities-leadership.html

So would the troops follow their officers in mass violence against the civilian population?

bastarx

So would the troops follow their officers in mass violence against the civilian population?

Good question.

That article says 43% of the U.S. military is non-white; with the class difference between them and the white brass, would the grunts refuse by fragging their officers like in Vietnam?

would the grunts refuse by fragging their officers like in Vietnam?

in a dangerous counter-insurgency where the troops didn't know who or where "the enemy" was, this is a high possibility. if US troops were deployed (illegally, although that wouldn't stop an insurgent military rebellion) domestically to put down some kind of "insurrection," it's hard to know if grunts would obey orders to shoot other Americans. the Bolsheviks had to deploy troops from central Asia and Siberia to put down the Kronstadt Mutiny to minimize appeals in Russian being understood. the CCP deployed PLA troops from outlying provinces to put down the Tienanmen Square occupation to prevent fraternization. but all US troops speak English, just as a vast majority of Americans do. that tactic is therefore off the table.

Crimethinc.s world-view is an endless series of self-mythologizing responses to events that are always set into play by others.

It's breathtaking to see a tiny gaggle of self-marginalizing, invisible to all the world fringe leftists talking blithely about 'civil war' here.  I see no evidence anywhere that Crimethinc. has ever done anything to assert its/their perspective other than show up wearing black at an infinite number of easily ignored demos and short-lived riots.  CrimethInc. have been very effective at projecting their message inside the US anarchist subculture for about twenty years, but CrimethInc. is virtually invisible to all the world outside of this easily ignored, exclusively self-referential subculture. 

On the other hand, the far right overlaps heavily with the cops/law enforcement, for obvious reasons. And since, unlike Crimethinc, they believe in their garbage enough to put time and effort asserting it outside of their immediate social set or subcultural penumbra they've also made some inroads -- who knows how many or how deep -- among enlisted people in the Armed Forces.  In some form or another various permutations of the far right have been at this since the 1970's.

It's a testament to the total absence of credible opposition to capitalism in an ever-more rapidly speeding towards collapse United States -- and the total lack of real-world credibility of the compulsively juvenile and asinine United States anarchist subculture that CrimethInc. obediently swims in -- that although bare-knuckle resistance to the military itself by enlisted people during the Vietnam War era helped to massively mess up the war-fighting goals of our rulers, may actually have had a negative impact on their larger strategy, and in most cases did this with subjectively left-wing or at least nominal left-wing perspectives there has never been any ongoing credible effort to follow up on this in the half-century since by supposed enemies of capitalism in the United States.  What has Crimethinc. been up to on this front?  Let me guess...

In this piece CrimethInc. operates under an assumption that everyone who is not a foam-spewing armed rightist or a wealthy neo-liberal can somehow rapidly coalesce into some kind of effective nationwide mass resistance movement against a violent mass uprising of the armed right. Can this happen without a long period of mass self-organization emerging out of large scale social struggles? These social struggle are not yet taking place on the unprecedented huge scale they have to be occurring on, and no matter how rowdy, a protest march here or there is not a social movement.

Ranging far afield now: you cannot have a credible chance of prevailing in a civil war without bringing about the collapse and dispersal of the state's armed forces. There is no awareness of the need for this in this CrimethInc. piece, let alone evidence of sustained credible real world action -- action that gets taken seriously by friend and foe -- aiming to bring this about, by CrimethInc. or anybody else. In the event of a civil war between the US National Security State in alliance with loyal law enforcement forces versus the armed right, it becomes a very different matter, one where the vast majority of the populace have no role to play other than to stay down, keep out of sight, and hope for the mutual ruin of the contending forces.

The political instability on display now in the U.S. is what happens when a social order is speeding toward collapse.  Ever-more extreme levels of inequality and mass impoverishment, and the impossibility of profound change within the system, are setting the table for a mass movement against the owners and rulers of this social order, against all factions of their political apparatus, and against capitalist social relations themselves. The circumstances for this have never been more promising.  But there is at present not even the faintest visible public ongoing collective action being taken in the United States on this score.  We need something analogous in 21st century terms to the real IWW of the early 20th century -- an anti-wage labor social movement of the wage-earning class.  Class against class, bare-knuckle collective direct action emerging from the everyday realities we face as working and poor people in commodity society will eclipse and defeat the extreme right more effectively than cluelessly and repetitively meeting these toxic fools on their own terrain.  Along these lines, if -- and this is a very big if -- some kind of mass permanent refusal to pay back rent movement, on transparently clear, high profile, implacable terms, by a majority of everyone who hasn't been paying rent during the current crisis emerges in the very near future, this might make a difference -- an explosive difference, with the potential to spread rapidly to other aspects of what we endure under the dictatorship of the market.  Is Crimethinc. doing anything with this? Among the high ninety percent of several tens of millions of oppressed, repressed, depressed people who aren't paying rent right now, and who have a powerful immediate stake in this -- in remaining housed, for fuck's sake! -- and who quite obviously have no engagement with or interest in leftists or anarchists, and who will never see me posting this thing right here?  Or is CrimethInc. only a tail endlessly wagged by a series of dogs?

PS: Regarding the Jan. 6th Slobber-dämmerung: It is possible that Trump has finally maxed out his card as a post-Presidential far-right leader, less by the ineptitude of the Mook-apalooza at the Capitol than by his surprising ham-fisted denunciation of his loyal followers. Trump has a low reptile cunning but he doesn't have the smarts to play a long game -- even as long as a few days.  Trump's infantile attention span makes him an appropriate Citizen Capet for a fast-declining U.S.  He may also simply be too lazy to play any further role once out of office. A big question now is what the far-right will do on or in relation to January 20th. After that, outside of small scale terrorist acts, without Trump to goose them Trump's loyal followers may be largely directionless as a large scale political force until another more capable charismatic nullity with a strong pimp hand can step up to bib them and burp them. On the other hand, given the magical thinking on crank and political psychosis on display with today's gibbering drooling US far right, Trump's followers also may have short memories that will allow them to forgive and forget; some already claim that his video denunciation of the mook riot, making dire promises of prison time for his mob of slobs was a 'deep fake.'

This is obviously the long-ago banned Kevin Keating attempting to circumvent his exclusion in a desperate attempt to re-insert himself into something relevant. Because without berating radicals for not being radical enough (according to his peculiar and idiosyncratic so-called logic), his life has no meaning.

Admins: please rid us -- again -- of this delusional creep, thanks.

Black Badger

This is obviously the long-ago banned Kevin Keating . . .

Admins: please rid us -- again -- of this delusional creep, thanks.

Robert Vaughn

Trump has a low reptile cunning . . .

This is clearly a reference to the lizard people. Are you sure this isn't David Icke?

Are you sure this isn't David Icke?

i almost wish it were, if only so that unsuspecting real radicals wouldn't be hoodwinked by Keating's leftist jargon

You’re probably right. But the author either didn’t read the Crimethinc piece or has terrible comprehension skills. Nor do they seem to actually know anything about Crimethinc. It just seems like a one-size-fits-all generic smear.

Their understanding of the Trump phenomenon seems equally flat, one dimensional and unconvincing. I just watched #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump and agree with their diagnosis that he’s a “malignant narcissistic.” The most revealing parts were comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini, which I found compelling. They quote Trump’s first wife Ivana saying that The Donald studied texts of Hitler’s speeches carefully and even adopted der Führer’s practice of repeating key phrases three times. Scaramucci does a pretty good job of explaining how expertly Trump feeds conspiracy theories to “blue collar” whites (relating how he grew up in a similar working class deindustrialized community himself). Well worth a watch.

has Keating ever carefully read anything that he already knew he'd dismiss? his pathological hatred for any kind of anarchist has been in evidence for the better part of nearly three decades. all of his smears are one-size-fits-all. invoking "the wage earning class" and "enlisted people in the armed forces" as the Revolutionary Subject and complaining about some vague "subculture" and "marginalization" are the usual giveaways about who the author is; they are Keating's rhetorical tics.

Against my better judgement, before work this morning I surfed the 'net and caught some of the spectacle in Washington DC for Joe Biden's inauguration. I caught a livestream of Trump getting off a helicopter at an airbase for a flight to Florida. As he finished speaking and walked to the plane, speakers blasted the Village People's "YMCA." I kept thinking about talk of him staging a coup and sparking a second civil war. As I said above, the event at the capitol on January 6 was a riot. The attackers seemed pretty confused and without clear goals. Almost as though they were surprised they got so far into the building. But I also got to wondering that if the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in office had succeeded, would "YMCA" have become the soundtrack of the movement? Which would have been pretty bizarre, an anthem to gay sex being used by a bunch of bigots in their attempt to crush everything deviating from white nationalist heteronormativity. It's an absurd image, a MAGA hat wearing homophobe waving a Confederate flag and singing "You can hang out with all the boys./It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.," a disco tune in homage to the queer cruising scene in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. Perhaps the foot soldiers of this neo-fascist movement can be renamed the Proud Village-Idiot Boys, to emphasize their backwards origins.

The right doesn't really have a good record of analyzing music correctly. There's also RATM, Springsteen ("Born in the USA"), and probably other stuff

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-fbi-informant

1/27/2021 episode of the antifada podcast interviews Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti of Hard Crackers Journal (related to Race Traitor). Part of this talks about the January 6th storming of the Capitol. https://fans.fm/p/kPE5AKE

[youtube]BVUs4dS30c0[/youtube]

Yesterday I was listening to my local community radio station's broadcast called "Media Roundtable: Trump′s American Carnage & The Plight Of Central American Refugees."

There was an interview with director Michael Kirk about his documentary (above) Trump's American Carnage. Granted PBS's Frontline is mainstream corporate-sponsored quasi-public journalism, but all the clips of Trump's racist dog whistles and shrewdly delivering his base the reactionary "red meat" they want to hear are pretty damning. Well worth a watch.

This is a nice collection of sources on the events of the 6th (probably should have grabbed screenshots of some of the now-removed tweets though). Not really a fan of Crimethinc. however. I particularly dislike how they tend to invoke whomever to support whatever they're writing about at the time, such as Nietzsche, Marx, and here Walter Benjamin, as if there's any continuation of thought between those people. It just reflects an absence of any sort of developed and consistent analysis on their part. Then there's also how they continue calling stuff like Days of Wars, Nights of Love their "flagship" book (after supposedly maturing from their, not really sure who runs the Crimethinc. sites/pages or writes up Crimethinc. content these days, earlier writings). Much of the non-reporting aspects of this piece just seems like speculations and conjectures, separated from any kind of deeper analysis of the world/global capitalism, reducing things instead to the actions of just people (the same kind of naivety that thinks people/workers can manage capital themselves etc.). The use of pluralized language in this piece like "our movements" (what is "our movements" and who is "we"? CHAZicans?) also gets under my skin. See for example here where they seem to suggest "we" should have had a presence at the Capitol:

"We are already seeing our former allies [sic] withdrawal from the streets in the events of January 6. Liberals urged people not to go to DC, counting on the authorities to deal with Trump supporters. This was a miscalculation. Security forces are not particularly inclined to stand up to the part of the population they sympathize with most—and even when they choose to do so, their hands are effectively tied by the deeply engrained institutional habits of treating conservative white people much more respectfully than they treat people of color, poor people, and anti-capitalists."