so now that there has been a spike in antisemitic hate crimes (in some areas rising over 1000%), synagogues have been vandalized, firebombed, and literally razed, jews have been assaulted in public, jewish businesses have been vandalized, jewish homes and businesses have been marked with the star of david, and a man broke into his jewish neighbor's home intending to murder the entire family for being jewish, are we gonna get an apology from the people who were mocking jews for being afraid of an increase in antisemitism after oct. 7th?

(this is, of course, a rhetorical question. we all know that those people never cared about jews.)

Insurgent Supremacists – a new book about the U.S. far right By Matthew N Lyons |  Sunday, April 01, 2018 

My book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire is due out this May and is being published jointly by Kersplebedeb Publishing and PM Press. It draws on work that I’ve been doing over the past 10-15 years but also includes a lot of new material. In this post I want to highlight some of what’s distinctive about this book and how it relates to the three way fight approach to radical antifascism. I’ll focus here on three themes that run throughout the book: 1. Disloyalty to the state is a key dividing line within the U.S. right. For purposes of this book, I define the U.S. far right not in terms of a specific ideology, but rather as those political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. That includes white nationalists who advocate replacing the United States with one or more racially defined “ethno-states.” But it also includes the hardline wing of the Christian right, which wants to replace secular forms of government with a full-blown theocracy; Patriot movement activists who reject the federal government’s legitimacy based on conspiracy theories and a kind of militant libertarianism; and some smaller ideological currents. Insurgent Supremacists argues that the modern far right defined in these terms has only emerged in the United States over the past half century, as a result of social and political upheavals associated with the 1960s, and that it represents a shift away from the right’s traditional role as defenders of the established order. The book explores how the various far right currents have developed and how they have interacted with each other and with the larger political landscape. I chose to frame the book in terms of “far right” rather than “fascism” for a couple of reasons. Discussions of fascism tend to get bogged down in definitional debates, because people have very strong—and very divided—opinions about what fascism means and what it includes. Insurgent Supremacists includes in-depth discussions of fascism as a theoretical and historical concept, but that’s not the book’s focus or overall framework. As a related point, most discussions of fascism focus on white nationalist forces and tend to exclude or ignore other right-wing currents such as Christian rightist forces, and I think it’s important to look at these different forces in relation to each other. For example, critics of the Patriot/militia movement often argue that its hostility to the federal government was derived from Posse Comitatus, a white supremacist and antisemitic organization that played a big role in the U.S. far right in the 1980s. That’s an important part of the story, but Patriot groups were also deeply influenced by hardline Christian rightists, who (quite independently from white nationalists) had for years been urging people to arm themselves and form militias to resist federal tyranny. We rarely hear about that. 2. The far right is ideologically complex and dynamic and belies common stereotypes. Many critics of the far right tend to assume that its ideology doesn’t amount to much more than crude bigotry, and if we identify a group as “Nazi” or as white supremacist, male supremacist, etc., that’s pretty much all we need to know. This is a dangerous assumption that doesn’t explain why far right groups are periodically able to mobilize significant support and wield influence far beyond their numbers. Yes, the far right has its share of stupid bigots, but unfortunately it also has its share of smart, creative people. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. For example: because of the history of fascism in the 1930s and 40s, we tend to identify far right politics with glorification of the strong state and highly centralized political organizations. Some far rightists, such as the Lyndon LaRouche network, still hold to that approach, but most of them have actually abandoned it in favor of various kinds of political decentralism, from neonazis who call for “leaderless resistance” and want to carve regional white homelands out of the United States to “sovereign citizens” and county supremacists, from self-described National-Anarchists to Christian Reconstructionists who advocate a theocracy based on small-scale institutions such as local government, churches, and individual families. One of the lessons here is that opposing centralized authority isn’t necessarily liberatory at all, because repression and oppression can operate on a small scale just as well as on a large scale. This shift to political decentralism isn’t just empty rhetoric; it’s a genuine transformation of far right politics. I think it should be examined in relation to larger cultural, political, and economic developments, such as the global restructuring of industrial production and the wholesale privatization of governmental functions in the U.S. and elsewhere. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. As another example of oversimplifying far right politics, it’s standard to describe far rightists as promoting heterosexual male dominance. While that’s certainly true in broad terms, it doesn’t really tell us very much. Insurgent Supremacists maps out several distinct forms of far right politics regarding gender and sexual identity and looks at how those have played out over time within the far right’s various branches. Most far rightists vilify homosexuality, but sections of the alt-right have advocated some degree of respect for male homosexuality, based on a kind of idealized male bonding among warriors, an approach that actually has deep roots in fascist political culture. In recent years the alt-right has promoted some of the most vicious misogyny and declared that women have no legitimate political role. But when the alt-right got started around 2010, it included men who argued that sexism and sexual harassment of women were weakening the movement by alienating half of its potential support base. This view echoed the quasi-feminist positions that several neonazi groups had been taking since the 1980s, such as the idea that Jews promoted women’s oppression as part of their effort to divide and subjugate the Aryan race. This may sound bizarre, but it’s a prime example of the far right’s capacity time and again to appropriate elements of leftist politics and harness them to its own supremacist agenda. 3. Fighting the far right and working to overthrow established systems of power are distinct but interconnected struggles. A third core element that sets Insurgent Supremacists apart is three way fight politics: the idea that the existing socio-economic-political order and the far right represent different kinds of threats—interconnected but distinct—and that the left needs to combat both of them. This challenges the assumption, recurrent among many leftists, that the far right is either unimportant or a ruling-class tool, and that it basically just wants to impose a more extreme version of the status quo. But three way fight politics also challenges the common liberal view that in the face of a rising far right threat we need to “defend democracy” and subordinate systemic change to a broad-based antifascism. Among other huge problems with this approach, if leftists throw our support behind the existing order we play directly into the hands of the far right, because we allow them to present themselves as the only real oppositional force, the only ones committed to real change. Insurgent Supremacists applies three way fight analysis in various ways. There’s a chapter on misuses of the charge of fascism since the 1930s, which looks at how some leftists and liberals have misapplied the fascist label either to authoritarian conservatism (such as McCarthyism or the George W. Bush administration) or to the existing political system as a whole. There’s a chapter about the far right’s relationship with Donald Trump—both his presidential campaign and his administration—which explores the complex and shifting interactions between rightist currents that want to overthrow or secede from the United States and rightist currents that don’t. During the campaign, most alt-rightists enthusiastically supported Trump not only for his attacks on immigrants and Muslims but also because he made establishment conservatives look like fools. But since the inauguration they’ve been deeply alienated by many of his policies, which largely follow a conservative script. Three way fight analysis also informs the book’s discussion of federal security forces’ changing relationships with right-wing vigilantes and paramilitary groups. These relations have run the gamut from active support for right-wing violence (most notoriously in Greensboro in 1979, when white supremacists gunned down communist anti-Klan protesters) to active suppression (as in 1984-88, when the FBI and other agencies arrested or shot members of half a dozen underground groups). This complex history belies arguments that we should look to the federal government to protect us against the far right, as well as simplistic claims that “the cops and the Klan go hand in hand.” Forces of the state may choose to co-opt right-wing paramilitaries or crack down on them, depending on the particular circumstances and what seems most useful to help them maintain social control. Insurgent Supremacists isn’t intended to be a comprehensive study of the U.S. far right. Rather, it’s an attempt to offer some fresh ideas about what these dangerous forces stand for, where they come from, and what roles they play in the larger political arena. Not just to help us understand them, but so we can fight them more effectively.

The Wave....

Okay, so I have now seen the posts about "The Wave" experiment cross my dashboard in the last couple days several times and I feel like people are missing some salient points here. The Wave proved very little about human behavior; yes humans are exceptionally prone to tribalism, we've always known that. What we HAVEN'T ever really figured out is how to eliminate that tribalism (the Us v. Them that we so easily fall into...because really, why do Yankees fans suck? But I'm pretty sure they do.) The insidious story of the Wave was not that he was able to turn the school into a mini-gang or even that they turned on outsiders so easily, it's what comes next. Part of the reason the Shoah (or Holocaust ) was so bad was that, over the top of literally generations of racial and religious hatred towards the Jewish people, things in Germany had superficially improved. Berlin, Munich, Vienna were centers of Jewish culture in Europe because, for about 50-75 years, things had been better there then other places for Jews. Jews from Eastern Europe, where antisemitism was still much more obvious and overt had fled the east to move into Central Europe because it was believed to be safer. There, the gentiles were friendly, they were their neighbors, they were *safe.* The Holocaust did not happen because Hitler was a despotic leader with an enormous cult of personality who brought the Germans under his magic spell; it happened because he took advantage of those generations of hatred towards Jews to kick through the veneer of civility that had lured so many Jews to their borders. BEFORE the Holocaust, most Germans would not have believed that "that" could happen here, but they did know and they didn't act. But, what is also true, is that before the Holocaust, many Jews in Europe also thought "this couldn't happen here" (partially because nothing like the Shoah had ever happened before or since) but also because "these are friends, these are our neighbors." Stop me if this sounds familiar. Now, some really terrible, horrible, very bad people look at this story and say "well, see, that's why "the races" shouldn't mix.....its inevitable." Well, buckaroos, put your fucking big boys pants on because it literally does not matter how you arrange human populations, tribalism still fucking happens. As Jews disappeared from, German society behind walls and on trains, Hitler had to continually find new groups to target. YOU'VE READ THE POEM. You know....first they came for the Roma and disabled but I wasn't either of those...yeah that one (though I think he skipped those two.) And no one who is honestly looking at American history can say our history is any different; we (and I'm talking to all my fellow White Americans right now-I don't care if your family got here in 1870 and never owned a slave) have tolerated and benefitted from generations of genocide, slavery, tribalism, Jim Crow (which has been called by a lot of names over the years around the world - the Jews were put in the ghettos and South Africa had apartheid), and lots and lots of racism (yes, in the North too, you know...I don't think the bussing desegregation battle in Boston is part of the public school curriculum here.). We continue to this day. And nothing is going to change until we start admitting and addressing that in a legitimate and active way. Oddly enough, you can also look at Germany as a lesson on what to do after the fact. Because, what I found fascinating when I traveled in Germany (admittedly from the viewpoint of someone who studied Jewish history and wrote her thesis in college on Nazi Germany and the role of the Hitler Youth) is that you won't see a single Swastika. The Nazi salute and Mein Kampf are illegal. But you cannot visit Germany and not realize the Shoah happened. They mention it in tours, there are monuments and memorials big and small, and less then an hour from Munich (when you've dried out from the beer) you can visit Bergen-Belsen where they maintain and show detailed evidence of their historical shame. They don't GET MARRIED THERE (looking at you creepy Plantation weddings.) Present day Germany has been one of the most welcoming nations to the refugees coming out of Syria and Iraq and it's not because racism has disappeared and they are all one big, happy family; it's because their government continues to do the hard work of addressing and combatting racism in their midst - as do many Germans who (magically) can remember the lessons of the 1940s *without* attending Heinrich Himmler High School. So, this idea that if we take down Confederate monuments we will forget the lessons of the past is problematic for a few reasons (1) they're monuments, not memorials, and they provide no context for the viewer to learn any lessons, (2) until we start adding that context, we aren't learning shit as a country, (3) the lessons AREN'T the lessons of our PAST unless we can admit they are also the truth of our present and (4) even if we did add context, the MONUMENTS should still come down because our black friends and neighbors (hey! where have we heard that term before) are asking for them to come down, and there vote counts more then ours as the actual human descendants of the people Robert E. (not really a Southern Gentleman) Lee fought to enslave. So please, don't look around you and say "this isn't my America. This couldn't happen here..." It can. IT IS. Looking away, pushing it under the surface and pretending it doesn't exist, THAT is how you end up "shocked and amazed" that your government murdered six million innocent children. TL;DR, tribalism is not our problem, it's how we address that tribalism that is.

So I'm mostly over the whole CDM mess at this point, but some of these defenses are truly incredible. I...I really should stop reading them, but I can't fully look away.

In fact, out of morbid curiosity, I checked @projectqu*er's blog to see if they'd said anything further on the matter---and they'd actually posted a statement "in solidarity with Chicago D*ke March" from an affiliated Jew who is attempting to stick up for them, you know, so the white goy running that blog can feel justified in talking over the rest of us.

First of all, it's nothing short of absurd that people are seriously giving CDM the "solidarity" they've been calling for (SOLIDARITY!), as if they are somehow being oppressed or in any way mistreated by being widely held responsible for their antisemitic actions, which they still haven't apologized for or even acknowledged.

Secondly, I'm...I'm really just fucking floored by huge swaths of this statement, wow. I mean, it pissed me off at first, but now I mostly feel sad for this person and all the antisemitism she seems to have internalized, which is pretty easy to do in that sort of environment from what I've seen (sadly). I hope someday she can truly, unequivocally *know* that it is possible to support Palestinians as an unabashedly Jewish person---without forgetting all our Jewishness entails, without rewriting our histories or glossing over so many legitimate realities of the diasporic experience. I hope she can reconnect with her own Jewishness someday. I hope she's okay.

I mean, she basically frames the whole thing as if wanting to exist as a Jew in public is seriously akin to White Fragility, as if *public existence* is actually a thing that fucking white goyim would *ever* have to worry about...ever, in any fucking universe, at least on the basis of being white goyim. Like?! When is the last time anyone was kicked out of an event because of an explicitly pro-LGBT cross, even though white Western Christianity has persecuted and oppressed countless groups of people pretty much since its inception (DEFINITELY including Jews)?

But the MAGEN DAVID is ALSO on THE ISRAELI FLAG!! Yeah, and as much as plenty of leftists (myself included) might verbally shit on the American flag or whatever, CAN YOU IMAGINE a white goy EVER actually being expelled from an event because of an American Pride flag, the likes of which can literally be seen at comparable fucking events constantly, even though this country is itself undeniably violent and imperialistic?

Anyway. She also attacks both Ellie Otra and Lauren Grauer on a personal level, effectively demonizing both of them, characterizing and dismissing both of them as Fragile Whites obviously---acting as if they were both affiliated with A Wider Bridge (and as if A Wider Bridge is something much more insidious than it really appears to be) when only Lauren Grauer is actually affiliated with AWD, and this was discovered after the fact as far as I know, and it was not brought up by her as far as I know, and it definitely had nothing to do with her flag or why she was fucking there---ignoring the Persian part of Ellie Otra's Jewish background and all the ways in which that could further complicate goyische perception of her, especially white goyische perception of her---and mysteriously making no mention whatsoever of Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson, the Iranian Jewish woman who would most certainly be considered a woman of color by anyone's standard, who also had a Jewish Pride flag with a [*gasp*] Magen David on it and was booted precisely the same way, you know, for having *the audacity* to be visibly Jewish. She is just...unnamed, forgotten. Erased. How convenient.

And like...fuck, you know? Fuck.

It's hard to know exactly what to believe at this point, since CDM's Official Story has changed several times now. But this person does also assert that Magen Davids, arguably the mostly widely recognized symbol of Judaism and Jewishness in general, were effectively banned because Palestinian marchers were triggered by seeing them on a few rainbow flags.

Um. Okay. Giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that isn't just a bullshit excuse, like assuming there really were Palestinians there who really were triggered by that image, triggered as in legitimately having a *trauma response*...I can think of at least a few alternative means of supporting them without infringing on anyone else's rights (you know, just off the top of my head):

-They could have explicitly reassured the triggered marchers that they were safe and supported there, reminding them of where they were.

-They could have marched alongside the triggered marchers and made space for hearing them out---directly, intentionally making themselves emotionally available to the triggered marchers if they needed to talk through any thoughts or feelings.

-They could have physically helped the triggered marchers stay away from the triggering images---marching around them, in front of them, or behind them as the case might have been, you know, whatever---just making sure the flags weren't especially visible to them or at least trying to block those triggering images from their direct view(s).

Did they even *try* taking any of these sorts of measures, by any of their own accounts? No. Of course not. And as far as I'm concerned, it is still indefensible and completely uncalled for to just...jump right to interrogating and booting people for visibly taking pride as LGBT folks within their own marginalized cultural background, ethnicity and religion, you know, to *literally expel* them for being visibly Jewish. Fuck.

I used to be pretty frequently triggered by people grinning at me the wrong way, bringing me back to a sexually traumatic incident from my adolescence, but I would never tell any of the people around me they're not allowed to smile.

Sometimes I'm triggered by the sight, smell and taste of bananas because my abusive ex forcibly shoved one in my mouth before dragging me across the kitchen floor, but I would never banish anyone for eating a banana.

Sometimes people in ED recovery are triggered by the mere sight of Very Thin or Very Fat bodies; and if you knew this was the case for someone in your space, would you *actually* tell someone else to "cover up or get out" because you knew *their physical form* could be triggering? I would sure as fuck hope not. Because that is no way to behave.

And despite the particular form of hypocrisy that I mentioned earlier, I *could* understand kicking them out if those flags had in fact been Israeli flags at an explicitly anti-Zionist event, if those flags were *actually* supposed to be making any kind of statement about Israel/Palestine or if those flags had been, hm, I don't know, anti-Palestinian in any way.

But the fact remains that they were Jewish Pride flags. They were quite obviously Jewish Pride flags. And goyim have absolutely *no right* to decide what an ancient Jewish symbol means.

That's the thing, though: any awareness of more general goyische/Jewish dynamic seems to immediately evaporate in these sorts of anti-Zionist spaces, if it was ever there at all (which ultimately helps no one). Suddenly there is no discernible memory amongst *non-Palestinian* goyim of the Crusades, the blood libel, the Inquisition, the countless murders, the multiple expulsions, the pogroms, the forced assimilation, the Venetian ghetto, the historical segregation in numerous countries, the Holocaust, the Farhud, the discriminatory laws, the ongoing hate crimes, all the current ways in which our religion most definitely isn't regarded as the default in *every country except Israel,* none of it. None of it at all.

Because having or maintaining any active awareness of that sort of stuff makes all the most accepted narratives too messy, too multi-faceted. So suddenly all Jews (or "Zionists" as thinly veiled code for "Jews," as the case *sometimes* legitimately is) are framed as privileged oppressors in every context *in the world,* and I have literally had this kind of thinking espoused to me by people whose ancestors very likely persecuted mine at some point.

But it's fine in the name of anti-Zionism, right? It's all just anti-Zionism for sure!! Because Jews have ~never~ existed before the contemporary state of Israel and still don't exist outside of it, clearly, except in Evil Zionist Cabals. In fact, I am pretty obviously typing this from the Globalist Zionist New World Order Illuminati clubhouse. Duh.

From this person's statement:

"...Zionism is a system of power and control places Jews in a position of privilege vis a vis Palestinians.

This means that when Jews enter an anti-Zionist space, we accept that we are entering it under certain conditions. As beneficiaries of the system of power and control that those spaces were set up to combat and dismantle, we may be held to a higher political standard. We may be required to affirm certain political positions in order to remain in the space. We may be asked certain questions about our politics because of our positions of privilege. ... That is our role as accomplices, and privileged people in that space. Other privileged groups of people are treated the same way in social justice spaces, and that is the norm in our corner of society."

As beneficiaries. As ACCOMPLICES. I just. Wow. WOW. Other privileged groups of people? That would all be well and good if *all Jews* were in fact "the beneficiaries of the system of power [of Zionism]," (holy fuck), but that is certainly not the case. I mean, *how* are any Jews *here* at all privileged on the basis of "Zionism's" existence, or on the basis of our Jewishness specifically? Name one way! One fucking way! Without relying on those good old antisemitic tropes!!! I bet you fucking can't?!!

Of course some of us *are* privileged on the basis of our (debatably conditional) access to *whiteness* which is important to remain cognizant of, but we're certainly not privileged in any way specifically *because* we're *Jewish*---and the access some of us do have to whiteness is really in spite of our Jewishness, not because of it.

Of course we would have privilege as Jews in Israel. Israel is the one nation-state in the world where we would be privileged specifically on the basis of Jewishness, but we are not living in Israel. This is not Israel. Regardless of how any individual American Jew may or may not feel about it, we are not living in Israel. Even in radical circles, even at an explicitly anti-Zionist American q*eer event, this is still the United States---and the actual implications of our Jewishness here in this "Christian nation" don't magically vanish when we enter an "anti-Zionist space" for one LGBT March or any other kind of event.

Pretending otherwise to suit your agenda, however well-intentioned it might be in regards to supporting Palestinian folks, is really bizarrely dishonest if not outright absurd. It is not just forcibly, violently rewriting our people's entire fucking history, it is also erasing the ongoing context of how diasporic Jews very much do still exist as a marginalized ethno-religious group in the entire rest of the world (including here, unfortunately, as we are being so blatantly reminded of now with the emboldenment of literal Nazis). And would you deny this completely? Or do you somehow truly believe that it can be ignored?