2015 In Review: A Memoir On The Fascist Resurgence

It’s 2015 and I’m sitting on a couch with my roommate, gazing down on another Fuck The Police riot turned street party. The day has been long, the bars have already closed, and we’re both back in our rent-controlled collective house in San Francisco’s Lower Haight, too exhausted to go out and join the rowdies blaring music beneath our window.

A year since the start of the Ferguson Uprising, months into the latest since Freddie Gray was murdered in Baltimore, and my friends and I have grown tired and perfunctory about the whole thing. Get burritos. Gossip about Boots Riley after seeing him in line. Then follow the helicopters to join the action. Make snarky comments as the inevitable nightly argument breaks out in the bloc at MacArthur and 40th about whether to go to West Oakland or Berkeley this time. The nights blur into one another. Remember that cop pulling his gun and then tripping? …No, I meant the other time.

As my roommate and I look tiredly down at the folks in the street laughing and cracking beers, she starts gushing about some politician she’s weirdly gotten into. I’m perplexed and embarrassed for her. You mean that one old Senator in Vermont?! I mostly just know him as the off-color tile in senate infographics: gray but functionally just another blue tile. You don’t understand, she tells me, he’s making socialism cool! Everyone has just discovered him. He’s the hip new thing. It’s all anyone our age can talk about. You’re missing out.

Oh, god, have the hipsters discovered politics? A nightmarish prospect. The last thing we need is for all those IPA-drinking yuppies who have long sneered at us for giving a fuck about anything to rebrand as marxists.

I change the topic, searching for a way to go back to making fun of electoral pretensions.

Has she seen that wacky news story about a reality show host declaring his candidacy?

She has. We laugh about the absurdity of it. A universally disdained loser more famous for pretending to be rich than actually having any money, going down what looked like a mall escalator to applause from bored extras he paid to be there. And then blathering batshit racist nonsense. A scandalous display of the Boomer id.

…It’s troubling how the media reported on it, though.

I mention the wave of excitement I’ve seen from 4chan nazis and twitter neoreactionaries.

Everyone looks at me sideways when I mention anything “online,” and she’s no different. It’s neither cool nor couth to admit the internet exists, much less social media.

Reactionary politics seem to be bubbling up everywhere I look, but I feel insane trying to persuade anyone that they’re a threat. So I moderate my concern and trail off mumbling about the fascists praising this nobody’s candidacy as a way to bypass and erode prohibitions on saying racist shit.

If the liberal establishment has proven so invulnerable to those of us in the streets for black liberation, surely it’ll prove invulnerable to some random joke who wants to tank the economy with tariffs and deportations.

. . .

2015 feels, in retrospect from 2025, like an inflection point. People fetishize it, dream of returning to it. And I can’t help but nod along. It really does feel like the last frail moment of anything like “normal” before reality was suspended and the horror movie started.

I know, I know, shit has always been bad and I’ve lived through other historical shifts: My leftist parents processing the fall of the USSR. The sheer terror everyone in the counter-globalization movement felt when The World Trade Center in NYC came down. We thought we were going to get rounded up that afternoon.

But I keep going back to 2015.

In The Water Knife, published in 2015, the main character lives in a shattered United States where internal borders, desperate resource conflicts, unchecked corporate power, and exploitation from external state powers have instilled a new logic of survival. She cannot understand the soft old folks from prior generations who still cling to moral values and aspirations for justice, egalitarianism, liberation. Hers is a world of zero-sum competition, where basic empathy—to say nothing of utopianism—is an unthinkable mental illness. Or maybe just a failure to update, to throw off old delusions, to grow and get with the times. Readers are forced to consider a future where everything we value at the core of our being, even having any compassion whatsoever, marks us as dinosaurs whose age has passed.

In the middle of 2015 I publish a couple long-form pieces on science and primitivism, garnering my first real collection of death threats, and a more tolerable primitivist I argue with breaks our disagreement down for me with a certain desperation in his voice: “I don’t care about ‘liberation for all’ or any of your fancy dreams; I just want to secure my daughter from rapists and marauders in the world to come.”

Survival has always had long-odds.

I grew up doing drills for how to evacuate the city, how to access hidden resource stockpiles, how to cling on to life for a few years longer than anyone else in the coming collapse. Chances are none of us are making it out. However you face the darkness, you will be making a gamble.

But in 1999, in the streets of Seattle, under the hail of tear gas canisters, I decided that you can either spend your life mewling and clawing for a few extra minutes of barest life, or you can light your life on fire for the highest ideal, the most beautiful idea. Sure, the odds are worse, but the potential payout is better. And you stay warmer along the way.

In 2015, I try to tell the primitivist all this, but he’s more optimistic than me, and as a consequence more shell-shocked by the horrors of our dying world. He just wants to curl up and die in a hole.

By 2025 a lot more folks will sympathize with this. The urge to slowly lick your wounds as you grow cold in the fascist hellscape. Every morning will bring the normalization of some new unthinkable atrocity. There is, of course, nothing fundamentally new in a state founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism, but the frontlines change and the brazenness of our enemies reflects real advances. The Patriot Act was right out of an airport thriller novel and Obama used flying robots to bomb citizens, but the headlines keep getting more cartoonish. Today’s attempted parody is tomorrow’s status quo.

• Supreme court rules that chattel slavery is still legal, and we owe reparations to the pure aryan descendants of former slaveowners.

• The lead contender for the Democratic nomination, Gavin Newsom, promises that he will ritualistically slaughter his firstborn on Ben Shapiro’s podcast, to prove that he’s not committing “the sin of empathy.”

• Trump signs an executive order revoking citizenship from orphans (“losers”) and foster parents (“cucks”). ICE furnaces to be opened in local strip malls to speed up removals.

• Pete Hegseth showcases to reporters a series of missile strikes by “Right Wing Death Squads” (the renamed Army) on the prime minister of Spain and his family following some instagram posts that were deemed inappropriately happy while conservative media influencers were eulogizing the canceling of a flavor of mountain dew.

• RICO charges with terrorism enhancements opened against the entire goth subculture. The FBI deputizes a batch of podcasters to oversee hiring the shapely models that will announce the arrests.

By 2025, the storytelling will all be completely hamfisted. The sort of environmental detail they put on discarded newspapers to signify to viewers that in this timeline the Thousand Year Reich has been established, with all empathy, morality, or intelligence to be permanently expunged from the species.

2025 is the ghost of futures lost. It’s an extreme vision that haunts you in 2015, promising the absolute worst. The machinery of an unchecked police state fully funded. The convulsing corpse of an empire dragging the rest of the world into its grave.

Go hide in a hole and wait for the death squads to process you. Dream small. Dream meekly.

And you know, maybe.

Maybe 2025 will prove to be simply past the event horizon.

If so, future historians, picking at the rubble, might ask how the end started.

. . .

At the end of 2015 I move to Portland, intended to be a couple-month stop-over on my way to Greece to join a friend organizing against Fortress Europe. I’m sick of my latest bout of writing and there is tangible direct work to be done helping refugees get past borders.

In a bar in my old neighborhood, I meet a former Occupy organizer who has abandoned anarchism for marxism, one of a few putting the once esoteric phrase “left communist” back into circulation. He’s joined academia, he has a child. He is furious that a friend of his was canceled by anarchists for being a patriarchal sex pest. Any anarchism that would exclude his friend, he lectures to me, is electorally dead on arrival; you will never win a majority with that approach! I wonder how he could have ever identified as an anarchist.

Truth be told, at this moment the Bernie wave concerns and distresses me a lot more than the Trump wave. It’s one thing to watch boomers cannibalize themselves into rabid fascism under a laughingstock figure, but radical leftists (and even some post-leftists) keep jumping ship for this tepid reformist “socialism” stuff. A giant wave of preference-falsification collapse. It turns out that a ton of people were only pretending to be aligned with anarchists (“oh I’m basically an anarchist; I just prefer the phrase ‘anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist’; I’m in the Movement Of Movements”) when we were the only game in town.

Bernie echoes the exact same closed-border anti-immigrant nonsense as Trump, yet leftists who once fought in the streets alongside me shrug, unconcerned. “We’re so close to getting universal healthcare!”

They taste establishment power and it’s apparently beguiling. Struggle for decades has been long and hard, building a broad resistance movement is exhausting. Every win or advance we make requires constant diligence, a grinding pressure of individual responsibility. But what if you gave up and came in to the electoral system? What if you could just sit back and let something else, something big, protect you, fight for you?

This is the year that the long-running anarchist cafe in my hometown folds. I grew up going to it, organizing out of it. Eating dragon noodles on sagging couches, reading the latest reportbacks and communiques while pickled in caffeine. A third of the activist scene boycotted it after the collective sided with Rose City Antifa against a prominent holocaust denier in the local left. Now he’s back at events and the cafe is gone.

One of the interchangeably irrelevant state socialist groups, the “DSA”, is suddenly aflood with members and doing socials at bars.

The wind is certainly behind their sails.

Legions of formerly apolitical people are developing “political” identities rapidly online, in a way that operates more by the logic of fandom than organizing or subculture. Bernie’s recuperation of the “socialism” word has led to a jaw-dropping resuscitation of state communist identifications. It’s all transparently paper-thin, just grabbing onto the aesthetics of the USSR and Maoist China for edge points. A wave of kids who don’t want to studiously earn their wings in the existing punk or activist milieu and think they can bypass that and build their own “radical left” on vibes and skimmed wikipedia articles.

Hilariously, they frequently don’t realize that every existing org or project doing anything substantive is primarily made up of anarchists.

We start seeing extremely-online looking folks applying to join organizations and projects, confident that we must all be Stalinists or Maoists, identities they’ve just adopted and barely understand. A cursory skim through their social media invariably reveals a speedrun from apolitical to Bernie campaigner to “kill all anarchists” tankie in a matter of months.

Older activists recoil when I show them, but still reflexively consider such people a bemusing aberration. Everyone knows the internet is unserious. They treat it like a cringe fad. Normality will reassert itself. These kids will get bored, they’ll go back to their videogames or whatever it is people who use the internet do instead of politics.

But the internet is seeping into everything.

. . .

By the end of 2015, smartphone adoption has rocketed up to over two thirds of US adults. This is no longer the era of checking Indymedia and Myspace for 10 minutes a day on the collectively shared computer in the corner of the punk house.

In my personal life at least, this is amazing and wonderful. Finally having Open Street Maps in my pocket supercharges urban exploration. Wardriving is still easy and makes hopping from one city to another smooth. I can have encrypted chats on the bus with comrades who had to flee far away. Rather than grovel for someone to teach me or hope to stumble across a zine, every DIY skill is immediately available in easy instructions. They put bus passes on phones and mistakenly leave the database of tickets unencrypted, enabling hundreds of punks to ride free for years.

But it’s the ubiquity of fact-checking on-demand that’s truly revolutionary.

For the first time in my life I start to see headway on old intractable arguments within the radical scene. For something like the fiftieth time, a punk bemoans how antifa are a bunch of thuggish Thought Police who don’t understand art or Death In June’s complex ironic stance on fascism, and in frustration I violate social mores by pulling out my evil technological device, doing a quick google search and reading aloud an antifascist write-up with receipts on the band. “Oh,” says my interlocutor, visibly shocked, “Well, okay, that changes things. But no one ever told me all that.”

Within my old circles, it feels like the floodgates have finally opened. Friend after friend recant their once strident anti-vaccine positions, in many cases suddenly pretending they never held them. A Crimethinc kid with zines on a blanket in front of the bookfair aggressively holds her own defending GMOs, forcing the other anarchists gathered to back down from the pop pseudoscience ubiquitous in our circles for two decades. Genocide deniers are exposed. Conspiracies debunked. Lazy half-remembered conspiratorial claims suddenly face the sharp steel of smartphone pulled from a pocket. It’s partial and incomplete, of course, but the ocean of bullshit that characterized the long ’90s is finally parting.

Back in 2001 someone posting the most hesitant anarcha-feminist takes on Indymedia would get screamed at in a deluge of abuse, decried as a “fascist man hater.” But by the 2010s the tide had turned, the once-fringe antifacscist and radical feminist blogs I read voraciously were getting exposure for their arguments, discussion of such ideas was super-charging to a daily affair, and the result was was a blowout in radical spaces.

When a grotesque “accountability process” was used by red organizers in Portland to attack and besmirch a survivor while covering for her violent abuser—like so many had before—folks rapidly counter-organized and crushed the Old Boys.

When Cathy Brennan’s TERFs and SWERFs raised hell over the 2013 San Francisco anarchist bookfair I showed up with trans and sex worker friends, ready for a fight in a big moderated discussion; we found the battlefield virtually abandoned. There was no question, the radical milieu was ours.

The internet was fulfilling its promise of providing voice to the once marginalized. Factual reality and better arguments were winning. The ableist cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist status quo was simply crumbling in the face of our arguments. They had no counters that weren’t transparently false, vapid, incoherent, or evil.

To deny our points you’d have to be impossibly thick, or even reject the core moral values of anarchism itself. And no one who mattered could be so craven, so utterly beyond the pale.

. . .

In 2013 a stranger walked in through the doors of my anarchist tech collective and asked for help. Her website was suffering under an endless barrage of attacks. This totally normal Anita Sarkeesian person made videos with the softest most inoffensive 101 introductions to liberal feminism. The sort of pop culture criticism you feel safe handing to a kindergartner, with gently rounded corners to make sure even the most bumbling baby could not get hurt. …And she was receiving a constant deluge of serious death threats.

At the time, anarchists, by and large, didn’t pay much attention to Gamergate. In part because it was an era when punks still felt like computers were cringe and evil.

But also because activists were used to a default model of the world wherein almost no one had agency besides us. To be an “activist” of any stripe more or less meant being part of a single culture, a single milieu, a single politic. Turtles and teamsters, we had our divisions but were all one extended community.

In the paradigm of the long ’90s, 1% of the population ruled while 1% of the population collectively resisted, and everyone else was a featureless apathetic gray blob, complicit and unthinking.

If liberal normies were drones, those who explicitly identified as “video gamers” were even less agential, deliberately hooking themselves up to the megamachine and its digital heroin, irrelevant to the world and the grand contest of history.

I honestly don’t think I ever heard anyone in the activist world even hypothesize that such faceless NPCs could revolt against us, much less organize or take action. We faced the occasional minor backlash from among the brainwashed masses—drunk loggers going out to the tree sit, fundies chanting outside a Planned Parenthood, veterans facing us down outside a military recruitment center… but they were always a scant handful of people, acting more like confused zombies. And “gamers”? If you had told someone that neonazi boneheads would try to convert and mobilize them the response would have been laughter: “they’re welcome to them!”

What sort of activism were “gamers” going to do? Lock themselves on tripods in front of a Gamestop? Paddle out in a kayak blockade of a port until Playstation prices come down? Distribute dumpstered doritos and mountain dew to the homeless in parks?

On November 15, 2015, Minneapolis police killed unarmed 24-year-old Jamar Clark. The community responded by occupying the police’s 4th Precinct. On November 23rd—just as I got back to Portland—I received frantic messages from friends there: four scrawny racist nerds who lived on 4chan had shown up, tried to pick a fight, and unloaded bullets into the encampment.

Minneapolis is no stranger to fascist violence—the Baldies were founded there!—but this was something new.

. . .

A minority of anarchists took the internet seriously. We built encryption tools, blogging software, even the original foundation of Twitter (certain comrades are still apologizing). It’s hard to convey to younger generations how much the global Indymedia network shook the world for nearly a decade. There are still countries where IMCs keep chugging as important tools, helping keep local activist struggles afloat, providing a certain connection and unity.

But—at least in the Anglophone world—this viscerally changed after Occupy.

In many ways, Occupy was the vanguard of the normie intrusion on activist spaces. What could be more despicably normie lib than Adbusters? Yes, yes, yes, Graeber and older activists tried to steal their little Wall Street protest from them and do something more effective with it, taking inspiration from the UC occupations. But—with the partial exception of the more militant Oakland Commune—Occupy resonated with normie libs in a way that the existing activist milieu was completely unprepared for. Camps were not just flooded by random people “from the internet” who had zero protest experience, they were often set up and run by those folks.

And the very first thing they inevitably wanted to secure was internet presence.

“Occupy” was a precious brand, it was real estate, it had representational power and weight. So people scrambled to create Occupy groups on Facebook, bespoke local Occupy wordpress sites. Anything to be in control over what got posted. Anything to bypass the local Indymedia that reflected the old activist scene.

Newbies always derisively believe that all preexisting activists have been “doing it wrong.”

You don’t get it, if we all wear suits then we’ll look respectable on the nightly news and everyone will support us. You don’t get it, the mayor and chief of police have been really nice to us so we need to return the favor and clear the barricades. You don’t get it, why collectively edit video after actions to remove incriminating evidence when you can make money and a personal brand just livestreaming everything.

And so even though anarchists had pioneered everything, by 2015 our tools and platforms were dead, bypassed, captured, or drowned. But at the same time, aspects of what we had created spread like crazy, albeit in distorted and watered-down forms.

We had never really planned for things to catch on with normies.

So we won even quicker than many of us had dreamed. We won with all the projects to “democratize” the web and give individuals a voice. And we won when it came to our arguments. All the weird little utopian prefigurations and critical insights we had cultivated in the tiny corners of our milieu spread like wildfire. Pronouns and privilege and microaggressions oh my. We won and won and won.

The gray drab normie world had no immunities.

This was what fascists in 2025 will call “the great awokening.” The more evolved intellectual, cultural, and technological ecosystems that had long fermented in the radical activist milieu crashed out upon an unsuspecting continent.

If anyone had any intelligence or conscience whatsoever, we cut through them like butter.

At least if we were in a sufficient level of contact or proximity.

“Why shouldn’t there be a white student union too; feels unfair,” is an impossibly vapid argument. It’s deathly embarrassing to even deign to respond to it. And a real response would require either someone spending months hand-holding someone through the context of white supremacy in this country and some basic ethical philosophy, or it would require the person making it to have some autonomous curiosity and intellectual drive, a willingness, even eagerness, to turn hard against self-interest. When I was momentarily partially suckered by someone making that argument at age 13, I was being a stupid dipshit, and the dozen or so anarchist peers around me in my Portland school both ruthlessly bit my head off and pointed me towards resources.

When I mockingly made a seig heil at our authoritarian vice principle the same year, a mexican friend took me aside and politely explained how parody didn’t lesson the sting and promised to kick my ass if I ever did it again. We didn’t have to have in detailed conversation about the stakes of political symbolism, the pragmatic value of uniform cultural prohibitions or the ways in which irony can be corrosively turned into vehicle for entryism and normalization; I could rapidly work the proof of the argument out on my own, critically evaluate, and then verify it.

In short, I was the beneficiary of tactit knowledge and more complex arguments because I was embedded in meatspace communities where they were ubiquitous.

But imagine if I was less agile or inquisitive, more selfish and rigid. Imagine if I grew up surrounded by suburban normies, rather than anarchist punks and generally decent geeks. Worse—imagine if my friends had been a self-selected circle of the laziest and most defensively reactive assholes on the planet.

It’s time to talk about libertarians.

. . .

In 2004, three disparate camps organized a unified march to protest the US presidential debates: anarchists in black bloc, the Green Party (the DSA of its day), and the Libertarian Party.

While there’s some roots going back to slavery abolitionists and anti-new-dealers, today’s Libertarian movement congealed as a disparate coalition of wingnut hippies in the 1970s. They drew pretty much everyone of any stripe opposed to the war in Vietnam but marginalized from the mainstream left by their rejection of state communism.

Their early platforms were strident on border abolition, abortion rights, and sex worker rights. These old hippies still exist, scattered around, confused and befuddled by many developments. But by the 1980s they were eclipsed as a result of runaway ideological crossover with neoconfederates, the militia movement, the “leaderless resistance” turn among fascist ranks, as well as nerds in suits content to spend their lives sucking on the think tank teats of a few billionaires.

By the nineties there was widespread acknowledgment of a split between rural folks fixated on the feds raiding them to take their guns (but soft on racism), and city-dwellers focused on lower taxes (but soft on imperialism).

This changed a little in the 2000s, as the libertarian movement grew massively from backlash to the Patriot Act and the Bush wars. While the Green Pary became the meeting site of anyone vaguely environmentalist or anticapitalist (but scared of full-throated anarchism), the Libertarian Party became the meeting point of anyone vaguely focused on civil liberties and runaway state power (but scared of full-throated anarchism).

The scale of this growth cannot be overemphasized. An old libertarian friend of mine used to say that if you ran into someone wearing a libertarian t-shirt in the 90s, that was probably the only other libertarian in your state and you were instantaneously obliged to be friends for life.

By 2015, even one of the top voices in the exploding sphere of “podcasting”, Joe Rogan, identified with the term.

During the Bush wars I often scoffed that libertarians may have gotten a lot of folks to use the word, but they lacked anything like the organs of a social movement. They were all just random disparate individuals, driven by dozens of different motivations, barely in any sustained contact. But, by 2015, this criticism had been outdated. Libertarians copied many blueprints from the anarchist movement and unleashed a slew of summits and projects, building their own network of subcultural spaces and alternate economic venues. Cringe, hierarchical, and infested with grifters, but community spaces nonetheless.

They were so relieved and entranced by the taste of community that they broadly refused to do any of the basic gardening required. No one, however toxic or shallow, was ever shown the door. It was a club excited to have anyone.

Libertarianism massively expanded its footprint across college campuses via the funding of groups like Students For Liberty. But it likewise exploded from internet personalities packaging political critique as spectator bloodsports. Those recruited in this context couldn’t help but centrally identify themselves not in terms of unifying ideals or aspirations, but in opposition to the vaguely progressive political sentiment around them.

What resulted was an echo-chamber where what was reinforced was not a common valuing of liberty for all, but any and all lines of attack against progressives. “Libertarianism” migrated from the conceptual frameworks of people like Nozick, Rothbard, Friedman, and Huemer (however incomplete or misguided those were), to a grab bag of responses to common talking points. Want to win a debate against liberal? Here are some easy tricks you can learn to crush them! Many of the constitutive facts or arguments involved were legitimate—minimum wage laws were instituted deliberately to hurt women and blacks—and your generic off-the-street progressive is easily surprised and flattened by such.

The result was mass recruitment of upper-middle-class white boys who were attracted to the power and status of low-level debate wins. Libertarianism promised one thing and one thing alone: owning the libs. This had always been an attractive factor to recruits, but its new populist social organs and recruitment projects, in conjunction with podcasts and compilation reels—intensified these dynamics.

As longstanding anarchist critiques of cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, etc won ground among normie liberals, the young white libertarians who would otherwise be dunking on liberals over gun laws, taxes, and zoning regulations, found it desperately pressing to have fierce counter-attacks. And so the racist drelk that had always been a part of libertarianism, like Lew Rockwell posting links to Stormfront, shot up in relevance. A fringe laughingstock among libertarian theorists, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, rose in circulation not through the respect of libertarian theorists or the think tank class, but among this base of angry white boys with only the barest of attachment to “libertarianism.”

Wanna genocide nonwhites and enslave women? Well, I hear they’re biologically incapable of understanding property rights, so honestly it’s a necessarily prerequisite to a free society. Wanna live in a draconian absolutist state as violently simple as your mind? Well, just relabel it a private company.

I’m jaded, but nevertheless the speed at which explicit fascism metastasizes across libertarian movement is stunning. Christopher Cantwell will achieve fame in Charlottesville as “the crying nazi.” The head of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, will declare that libertarians should reject universalism and do more to cater to “blood and soil” interests. And Lauren Southern, libertarian candidate in Canada, will massively popularize “white genocide” conspiracy drelk on youtube, when she isn’t personally trying to kill migrants in the Mediterranean.

In 2015, I would occasionally get lunch with a libertarian historian and argue with him about things like the black bloc and shoplifting. He was an oldhead libertarian, but he found himself increasingly withdrawing from the movement. He was visibly mixed-race and had recently been added to a public kill list pushed by some neonazis seeking to purge the movement of non-whites. Other libertarians would express polite dismay, but there was nothing in the way of meaningful action.

These neonazis were associated with a blog that I’d noticed a few years earlier attacking me and my market anarchist friends as “communist” infiltrators corrupting libertarians with our arguments. They started as precisely this sort of “libertarian” furious about the universalist “humanist morality” of libertarian theory. As they cast around looking for anything to justify rejecting caring about strangers, they had initially latched onto things like Stirner and Trad Catholicism. They named their blog TheRightStuff.biz—per a fad among libertarians at the time to grab .biz domains—but soon enough they were running the largest neonazi podcast, The Daily Shoah.

They would have gone into convulsions if they’d learned of one of my friends in the Ferguson Uprising, a former libertarian of color who had started out as a fan of one Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux originated as an ancap focused on youth liberation, but when he used intellectual property law to silence a critic and lost much of his audience, he promptly pivoted to full-throated misogyny and white supremacy. In revulsion, my friend dropped all contact with libertarians, focusing on anarchist projects.

I encountered similar stories with some regularity as anyone with a conscience was driven out of libertarianism. Graffiti artists, black bloc streetfighters, antifa researchers, cryptography engineers, organic famers… they would thank me for showing them greener pastures, but they didn’t want anyone to know their shameful past.

Pinochet memes about torturing and mass murdering leftist dissidents fill libertarian forums. It’s plainly obvious how much of this is being driven by full-blown neonazis who have abandoned any remote concern with “free markets” or “universal rights”, but libertarians respond tepidly. They feel cultural and demographic affinity with these nazis, they’re often still personal friends with them, and besides their entire identity has become about combating the left. Whenever anyone criticizes the nazis, they immediately close ranks.

To give just one example in 2015, at Portland State University, the libertarian student org is busy getting hollowed out by a neonazi, Vlad, as he purges dissenters, organizes fellow racists in secret internal chats, and hangs a white nationalist flag on his wall, daring anyone to criticize. By the summer of 2016, Vlad will announce a “Fascist-Ancap Alliance” and invite Infowars fans to march with rifles through campus aggressively chanting “Build A Wall!” at any students of color they see.

The Right Stuff boys are at the center of it all. On their website they scream about how “humanism” has brainwashed people into caring about strangers and summarize their interests in “monarchism,” “crushing the urbanite,” and “pan-secessionist” “national-anarchism.”

. . .

In 2012, a wave of federal repression of anarchists in the Pacific Northwest had helped sent me to Oakland, where I was surprised to find a small circle praising a group of reactionaries in Mexico City, going by Individualistas Tendiendo a lo Salvaje (Individuals Tending Towards Savagery). ITS had once identified as anarcho-primitivists, but when Ted K publicly broke with John Zerzan—prioritizing opposition to civilization over basic anarchist moral commitments—they sided with Ted. The bay area had accumulated a collection of rejects bounced from other cities’ scenes and they thought ITS was the coolest thing. Cosmo Rydra, at the then popular podcast Free Radical Radio, took it the furthest in public, denouncing the inherent moty of anarchists and declaring that, like ITS, he and his ilk were no longer anarchists, they were “nihilists.” (No relation to the 1800s Russian movement, which was social democratic and rabidly pro science.)

ITS has weak tradecraft and lazy targets like poor university students. Their real passion is bombastic performative communiques where they lambaste the anarchist scene that has excluded their tiny crew. They eagerly declare themselves “worse than Hitler!” They urge readers to blow up nuclear power plants and “kill 200 million people in your local bioregion.” To underline their hostility to humanism and anarchism, they bomb a children’s hospital and try to set a bomb at an anarchist infoshop (it fails to detonate). They claim to have bombed public buses and get copycats in Chile and Brazil. “They sought to kill a comrade after he got out of prison,” a local comrade tells me in fury, “If we find them, we’re gutting them.” The communiques are desperate to be edgy. They start claiming murders they clearly had no hand in, anything in the news. Anything to desperately attach the moral that “you shouldn’t care about strangers you don’t know; doing so is unnatural humanist brainwashing.”

Eventually they find a provocation that will get them attention again: as the Mexico City Left mobilizes against a particularly heinous femicide, ITS will side with the chief of police, disparaging the victim as a drug-using slut who deserved it, and claiming the murder for themselves. This will finally get them the attention they crave, but it doesn’t go well.

Among their enthusiastic cheerleaders in the US, and connection to the bay area circle so ecstatic over them, is one Arturo Vasquez who goes by “Abe Cabrera”, a UC Berkeley lawyer married to a vivisectionist in New Orleans. (He will later get doxed by the insurrectionary anarchist website 325, and threaten to call the FBI about it.)

In 2015, Vasquez runs the infamous website Atassa, the english language press office for ITS, where he translates communiques from ITS into English. Later it will be alleged he gets in the habit of writing some of their communiques himself. Beyond “nihilist” broadsides against anarchists, Arturo is also big into the new wave of 4chan Trad Cath memes. He publicly backslaps with Aragorn, the main figure behind Little Black Cart, and in turn Aragorn is about to publish Art’s media project as a physical journal. After baiting feints and “they’re not technically fascists” smirking, Art and ITS will only be encouraged to double down, even praising the Christchurch shooter. And Aragorn will interview a “pan-secessionist” “national-anarchist”, Keith Preston, for his podcast.

Preston is a headline speaker at Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute conference. It will become most famous for the video of a room full of nazis seig heiling to the cameras while they chant “hail Trump!” But while ITS arose from edgelords in the primitivist scene who rejected Zerzan for Kaczynski, Preston’s origins are in IWW and Love & Rage.

In 2015, the Red ideologues of the anarchist movement are enchanted with a book, Black Flame, that aggressively writes out of history every other current in anarchism. Mutualists, individualists, greens, animal liberationists, feminists, “lifestylists”… all gone. “Identitarianism” that foregrounds issues of race, sexuality, and gender is a contemptible deviation. Anarchism, it declares, is not a deep philosophy teasing out the implications of total opposition to domination, but just the anti-state wing of the revolutionary working class movement.

One of book’s two authors, Lucien van der Walt, aggressively contributes to his own wikipedia entries, heaping defensive praise on himself and his work. But the other author?

Michael Schmidt is secretly a “national anarchist.”

By this point Schmidt has a long corpus of writing in platformist circles, trying to evacuate anarchism of any depth beyond anti-state anti-capitalism, while often heaping praise on any examples of anarchists tolerating nationalism of the oppressed. In South Africa, he has become notorious for pushing for racial segregation within movement organizations—with white anarchists to then take a leadership role over the inferior blacks—and disciplining female members for being interested in feminism. He embraces the hierarchical crypto-leninism of platformist organizations, and neatly plugs in white supremacy, branded as culturally-specific and national liberationist. And under his paternalistic influence, the South African anarchist group Zabalaza collapsed to only six white members.

But what’s semi-secret is Schmidt is an enthusiastic participant on the infamous neonazi website Stormfront, praising the “Good Guys of the Waffen SS,” openly posting his face, associating with real-life friends of his, detailing his tattoos as well as where he lives, identifying as a fascist skinhead, and trying to explain leftist movements to the other nazis. Meanwhile he posts on other websites using the same handle, spreading around virulent racism and lines like “ghetto the homeless & queers together.” The thors hammer he wears around his neck, the lebensrune tattoo, the red-and-black rebrands he makes of fascist symbols… His anticapitalism is rife with anti-semitic currents and he’s in love with the “national anarchism” of neonazi streetfighter Troy Southgate and the former darling zinester of AK Press, vicious racist and rape advocate, Jim Goad.

When Michael Schmidt and Arturo Valazquez are exposed—when anarchists draw lines of exclusion against ITS and national-anarchism, with many projects refusing to carry Atassa and Black Flame—there are paroxysms of outrage across myriad currents of anarchism. This is all beyond scandalous and enraging! Older generations among greens, reds, and even mutualists, leap to the defense of those who would be pushed out by those notoriously evil censors, the antifascists.

Since when did a le platforming of reactionaries become a bad thing? Surely every boomer conspiracy head or gen-x punk can agree that provocation and transgression are the entire point of anarchy?!

The platformists might have tried to violently write green anarchists out of anarchism, but the second that Schmidt was exposed as a nazi the inclination of so many isn’t to crow about The Platformist Bible being a actually fascist entryism, but to offer them assistance against The Real Enemy, The Real Fascists: antifa.

And when Aragorn publishes Atassa shortly after Schmidt’s exposure, he is sincerely shocked when his white edgelord lackeys get banned from bookfairs. He meant to provoke a few harpies to make fun of their shrieking, but he had no idea the scene would close ranks on him. Are the dastardly moralists really so vast in number outside his circle? He can’t believe that antifa crews and projects still exist, much less have support.

Because in 2015, for all the advances that the internet has facilitated, a great many older folks in anarchism retain sharp anti-antifa sentiments, where the insights of No Platforming or Three Way Fight worked out by antifascists over the last few decades might as well be alien language. Where they’re even sympathetic to racial segregation, fantasizing of the same patchwork of micro-nationalisms that Preston and Southgate promise will defeat the globalist universalism of humanist moralism.

They scrunch up their faces in horror upon learning antifascists have picketed Death In June shows.

What about free speech and open debate?!

. . .

In 2015, I accept an invite to a transhumanist political conference. Initially I think nothing of it: a throwaway event at the hippie Humanist Hall in Oakland, organized by a lefty activist. I’ll write something the night before and pop over for a few hours. But then a flier for the event has the name “Michael Anissimov” on it and I immediately call up an old antifa organizer.

Anissimov is a terminally online character prone to obsessing over anime and pledging his life to e-girls, wearing drag in the Castro and then declaring he’s an alpha male online. The sort of cringe dipshit who runs around asserting to everyone that he has an IQ of 180. Naturally, he haunted 2000s transhumanist mailing lists and the early Less Wrong forums. But by the early 2010s he had pivoted from transhumanism to advocating a total dictatorship to stop technology.

You see, Anissimov has been horrified to discover that poors, queers, and blacks can get their hands on technology and put it towards liberatory ends. As a result of this epiphany, a number of his circle start endorsing stanning Ted K and the violent collapse of civilization—anything to stop the transes from tweaking their hormones. Anissimov likes their tweets about becoming amoral uncivilized warlords raping all the liberals to death in the ruins, but he largely sticks with fantasies of a state so powerful and invasive it can stop everyone from tinkering or inventing. By 2015, Anissimov is one of the most notorious proponents of “neoreaction,” eclipsed only by Curtis Yarvin.

“Some people would say I’m a fascist…” he loves to cloyingly open, before going on a long spiel about how he’s actually a “monarchist” but “basically the same thing.”

The lefty activist organizing the event wants to put us together on a panel to debate.

My old friend, the antifa organizer, is exhausted but in good humor as I explain the strange subculture of the bay area rationalist scene. She laughs a lot, but she is used to helping strange subcultures fend off fascist entryism. There’s no way I’m legitimizing a fascist freak with some kind of staged debate, but we chatter about strategy and ethics for a while. I had expected her to desire more militant disruption, but she’s surprisingly in favor of me giving my talk separately, just tailoring it to dunk on Anissimov’s arguments in advance. “Obviously we should work to draw a line and push him out, but you have to be strategic about not ceding the entire space.”

I reach out to the lefty organizer and meet him in Sproul Plaza on campus at Berkeley.

A year and a half later this will be ground zero for street battles between Identity Europa nazis and protesters broadcast around the nation. The media will suddenly decide to hype bog-standard antifa work as brand new and an existential risk to normal republican grandpas.

I explain to the organizer that there is a firewall of No Platforming that has successfully kept fascists exiled to the fringes of society for decades. Putting Anissimov on stage will only legitimize and normalize him; additionally it will lead to an evaporative cooling effect as anyone with a conscience flees association with the organizers.

Surely he understands that if an astrophysics conference gives a Flat Earther the prestige of an invited talk their credibility collapses, and astrophysicists interested in more serious discussions will stop attending, leaving only inane debate bros and an increasing number of Flat Earthers. The mechanism by which free speech sorts through ideas innately and critically involves disassociation and boycotts.

Since Anissimov is now quite openly hostile to morphological freedom, the core value of transhumanism, to say nothing of other basic moral values, what is the point of platforming him at a conference for transhumanists?

I’m patient and soft, but it does not go down well. He squirms in the face of my arguments. Forget reason, he wants to hold onto a vibe of performatively open-minded and edgy nerd culture. To deny someone a platform would be a violation of that culture’s implicit rules, folks’ self-identity.

He refuses to uninvite Anissimov and says he’ll go forward with the panel regardless of my involvement.

I show up with a pile of antifascist zines, give my talk denouncing any non-anarchist transhumanism, and have conversations with as many people as I can about Anissimov. Folks start to walk out before the panel with Anissimov can begin, emptying the hall and obliging the organizer to conclude the entire event.

At the front of the hall a large body of people gather at the left side to chatter about how absurd Anissimov is. His string bean ass huddles at the right side, near the door, with two fans, trying to puff up and appear tough. It’s a stark visual.

But dinner with other attendees makes clear how low the bar of “better than an outright anime nazi” is.

National borders, IQ, transphobia… too many attendees think of these as delicious opportunities to burnish their edgy freethinker credentials. Not in the direction of anything liberatory, compassionate, or rational—of course not—the only metric that matters is of course, whether it offers to bind those present in the community of those smugly better than the SJWs. When another person with a physics background objects that some reactionary claim clearly falls apart as a deep account because of significant exceptions, the shallow engineers look perplexed. “It’s a rule of thumb. It just needs to kinda work well enough.”

“Okay, but if your account only works over an effective domain the will break down beyond some horizon. And if it prescribes shitty things as harsh necessities, then surely our effort should be on pressing beyond the horizon of its utility; we should be focused on how to it breaks down.”

Ah, the speaker has committed the cardinal sin. He’s acted like we should have values. He’s done a moralism.

. . .

When Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote Politics Is The Mindkiller in 2007, who but Anissimov was in the comments obsequiously fawning over it.

One of the marble pillars holding up the rationalist scene, Yudkowsky’s blog post had the effect of soft-tabooing contemporary political topics. You see, things with potentially pressing stakes or existing social camps cause people to just get too irrational, too emotional. There’s every pressure to cut corners, to treat arguments not as objective claims about reality, but as rhetorical soldiers, pragmatic tools to signal alliances, apply social pressures, misdirect and batter adversaries into submission.

What this is taken to mean is that talking about systemic oppression is suspect. But any political talking points that seem unfamiliar or new—in short, reactionary talking points—are obviously alien enough to have been arrived at dispassionately, stumbled upon in good faith.

Rationalists want a safe space for earnest epistemic diligence. They want to get serious about countering cognitive biases and pursuing the truth for its own sake. I have always been a fervent, passionate, and unabashed partisan of this. Beliefs should stem from reality, from what actually is, not what is convenient. (Yo-hoh.)

But subcultures are tricky things, and Yudkowsky is really bad at bootstrapping a healthy one from scratch.

In Berkeley, these nerds do a bunch of really healthy and well-adjusted things like forming collective houses, getting into polyamory, militant veganism, and taking HRT. But rather than riding the rails and getting drawn into decades-long fights about whether Green Day should be banned from Gilman for being fake punks, things take a nasty turn.

As with any subculture, belonging to the in-group of rationalism is ascertained by how much one performs belonging. The metric you choose becomes your goal. And rather than valuing epistemic rationality – which can’t actually be measured from outside someone’s subjective internal experience – the rationalist milieu decides to value performative vibes of “intelligence” and a code of civility.

Common, if crude, nerd instincts get enshrined as the foundations of citizenship with little to no critical interrogation.

Those who don’t integrate well with broader social norms tend to have a lot of trauma around getting excluded, and community belonging is so desperately precious when they obtain it, ostracism treated as one of the most dire crimes against humanity conceivable. We’re all so happy to have found one another, why ruin it by taking a hard line against genocide? Why can’t you just bracket consideration of all other values to avoid causing fractures?

They want to reserve coordinated social boycotts exclusively as a means of punishing those who engage in coordinated social boycotts.

Unfortunately for the rationalists, ostracism is always at the very foundation of anti-authoritarian societies: it’s the very core of norm enforcement among stateless peoples. And it’s inseparable from any enshrinement of agency and freedom of association.

Treating it like unspeakable superultra terrorism is like spreading roundup across your yard, then being surprised when your fruits are poisoned and the garden is overrun by the hardiest of weeds. Subcultures are ecosystems; to optimize them requires grappling with a ton of complex particulars, enshrining and protecting multiple values. You gotta be very proactive about kicking the civil nazis or you’re gonna have a nazi bar.

In 2015, I’m working in my local anarchist hackerspace, SudoRoom, when a skinny kid lurking around the fringes comes up to talk to us about the project he’s been working on. Something to do with medical kits, I think. He proudly tells us that this really cool guy, Peter Thiel, is funding him. When, again, anarchists, are weirded out by this, he looks disgusted with us. How could we be so base, so political, as to take issue with a reactionary billionaire.

. . .

Scott Alexander Siskind is basically the same age as me. We both went to liberal arts colleges of roughly the same prestige, him in New York, me in Minnesota. We were both nerds obsessed with ethics and feminism who tortured ourselves in fear of ever overstepping with girls. We both hated college, we both share a host of rationalist inclinations, and we both write ridiculously long self-indulgent blog posts.

But while I was going to endless anarchist meetings pausing only to glare at the Third Precinct in south Minneapolis (imagining it on fire every Thursday while eating Jalapeno bites at the next door Arby’s), Scott was getting canceled by other students for something fucked up he said (or did?). At least, this is the tale he obliquely shares.

It’s the foundational psychological trauma of his super-villain story. It’s why every fucking single thing he has ever written comes with an implicit “social justice delenda est” at the end.

As long as the furnaces might run, darkening the world with human soot, it will never eclipse the primordial sin of the feminists. Of what they did to Scott. Of how they started it.

What I see as pretty minor unfortunate inanities on pop-feminist blogs like Gawker—inherent transcription errors as opportunistic yuppie liberals copy slogans out of actual radical diourse—Scott sees apocalyptic world-ending threats.

Scott is also, deeply, emphatically, passionately, a pretty boring run-of-the-mill racist. The sort that think they aren’t like other racists because they rank The Varieties of Human Stock by “intelligence” and place Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians as more intelligent than whites. Bet you weren’t expecting that, a hundred thousand standard boneheads exclaim.

He was a boring run-of-the-mill racist when he went to Haiti as a young doctor and ranted about how stupid they all must be. And he was a boring run-of-the-mill racist when he bragged to someone in an email that he’s a secret racist, hiding his power-level from the woke mob, while intentionally platforming racists and neoreactionaries as he engaged in calculatedly tepid criticism of them.

In 2015, I have my inklings and suspicions of his reactionary inclinations, but I don’t fully see it yet. I haven’t read his entire corpus and the email admitting to his disingenuousness has yet to leak. “Scott is my favorite reactionary,” I joke to a trans anarchist professor who also reads many of his blog posts. It’s a joke, see, because he studiously presents himself as a liberal but there’s this unmistakable smell…

The founding blogger of neoreaction, Curtis Yarvin, loves to cultivate a reputation as an evil vizier behind the scenes of the tech world. And it’s true, he’s friends with Peter Thiel; that’s a connection that will certainly pay off when JD Vance becomes veep. But Yarvin is a fucking awful writer, his “patchwork” prescription is just a repackaging of national-anarchism and Hoppeanism with references to Sith lords, obscure monarchist essayists, and brags about secret inside knowledge of liberalism (they use Dr Bronners soap). His prose is a torturous slog and the only payout is if you wanna feel highbrow about snarling that the homeless should be executed. Unlike Yarvin, Scott Siskind is read by fucking everyone in silicon valley.

Scott will be responsible for more sympathetic eyeballs on anti-feminist and neoreactionary arguments than any other individual on the planet.

He will be a huge driving force behind James Damore, helping a broad crusade in silicon valley against any effort to be more welcoming to women, telling them all that women are somehow just biologically inclined against STEM things, never you mind how the cultural valences have changed or how gender ratios have shifted in different contexts, just don’t let the shrill bitches derail your perfectly fun frat culture.

But most of all, after Trump wins and an emboldened neonazi pulls a gun on me outside my house, Scott will assure millions of readers that fascists don’t exist in any appreciable number, that Trump is not a white supremacist, that claims that he is “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” are “made up,” and the jaw-dropping statement of proud ignorance that “I don’t see any sign that there are other official white supremacy movements that are larger than the Klan.”

This piece is so audaciously ghastly that a dozen or so rationalists will bounce off of it and go directly into working as antifa researchers and organizers, furiously driven for years by Siskind’s sneering denials of reality.

But unfortunately his popular impact upon most credulous rationalists and techies will be to firm up a decade-long counter-narrative wherein Trump is no big deal but the Left is an unhinged threat to civility and discursive practice.

“Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.”

This denial of the relevance and danger of movements smaller than full electoral demographic status totally avoided the antifascist critique of Trump: that he was supercharging fascists and bringing them into mainstream connection, influence, and capacity.

Siskind certainly never bothered to look up or read the antifascist theorists, activists, researchers, and scholars, never talked in depth with those with long term tacit knowledge. Never bothers to spend much time extrapolating or steel manning when it comes to the woke menace. He is, as always, studiously asymmetrical.

. . .

I almost went to high school with Andy Ngo.

Most of my friends in middle school choose Benson Polytechnic, but at the last moment I opted for something closer. I stayed in loose touch with a couple of them. As I organized walkouts and actions across Portland in the Student Activist Alliance, I ended up walking the halls of Benson more than a few times to meet up with fellow anarchists.

Years later, I will hit up some of Ngo’s classmates. What was he like?

“Who?” “Totally unremarkable.” “Boring.” “I don’t think he had real friends?”

In 2015, when he enrolls at Portland State, practically no one knows who Andy Ngo is. His parents grudgingly tolerate his unemployed ass in a plain cookie-cutter house a few blocks from where I once taught math to elementary students. The closet thing he has to a personality is fuming about fat people and muslims on reddit and attending a New Atheist student group run by Peter Boghossian.

Vlad is busy seeding his “Fascist-Ancap Alliance” in an overlapping student group, but Ngo remains indistinguishable from tens of millions of other gray, faceless nobodies.

By summer 2016, that will start to change. The first first flicker of attention will come when folks protest the murder of Philando Castile in Portland and a minor rightwing youtuber, Michael Strickland (“LaughingAtLiberals”), belligerently provokes the crowd before drawing a loaded pistol and muzzle-sweeping hundreds, including my mother. Some kid no one’s heard of at the student paper will cut video to hide Strickland’s aggressive start and imply he acted out of desperate self defense. With only a few RTs, it will nonetheless get embedded in articles on Strickland by some major newspapers, loathe to ever publish anything incidentally sympathetic to dirty protesters.

In 2017, he’ll be fired from PSU’s student paper for wildly stripping context from another video to imply a muslim student personally supported killing apostates. You can see the gears turning for the college student in his thirties. “Conservative journalist censored and suppressed” gets a little traction with an ecosystem hungry for such stories. Not a ton of attention, but enough to provide an addictive thrill of purpose and meaning.

In 2018, he’ll shove his way into the ranks of antifascist protesters to film their faces, and, when someone silly strings him in response, he will try to spin this as a “chemical attack.” But it’s too cringe for news outlets to cover.

In spring of 2019, he’ll team up with a group of portly fascists and wingnuts in attacking an antifascist bar I’m drinking at, and dox the woman his nazi friend Ian Kramer beats with a baton, breaking her vertebra. When he gets hit with mace alongside his buddies, he’ll try the “chemical attack on a journalist” thing again. No bites.

It will take some vegan milkshakes (and a helping hand from the Portland Police loudly announcing that an anonymous person had claimed the milkshakes everyone was drinking had concrete in them) to finally launch Andy Ngo to the rightwing stardom he craves, sniffling in national interviews about how the antifa terrorists hate free speech and journalists so much they will attack innocent little gay asian men (at least after being shoved enough). He will lean into a fake English accent.

…By 2025, he will be testifying before congress as an “expert” to direct the police state against random activists.

Everyone knows Andy Ngo is a breathtakingly dishonest grifter in bed with nazis. Even Claire Lehmann of the skull-measurers at Quillette distanced herself. There’s an unmistakable stink on him.

And there’s a story the ivy league legacy media class would love to tell, wherein obvious losers like Ngo are a symptom of the internet and independent media.

They always said letting the rabble in was a bad idea.

It’s hard to describe how much the establishment media violently loathed the once-ubiquitous Indymedia network, how much they still loathe small independent radical collectives. When CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX all marched in lockstep to slur protesters and spread audacious lies, the very existence of little independent IMCs, each running on dozens of volunteers, and collecting video evidence to the contrary of the capitalist press, was not just an insult to the profession, but an existential risk.

That so many right-wing figures like Tim Pool arose out of Occupy as streamers, that the now fascist-cesspool of Twitter was first birthed from the anarchist project of TXTmob, that animal liberation activists were sneaking cameras into places before Project Veritas and Laura Loomer were… allows these establishment journalists a certain “both sides” sneer.

The old world depended upon a respectable responsible centrist media establishment, and the collapse of their stranglehold since the 90s is the rise of “extremism.” Declasse losers like Ngo and anarchist collectives like Indymedia are thus two sides of the same coin—the devaluation of our betters.

If only readers hadn’t ignored their paywalls. If only there had been some kind of law preventing the existence of blogs. If only bay area tech billionaires had recognized the social standing of east coast ivy league graduates. Then “disinformation” might’ve been stopped. The center might’ve held.

But the truth is that they are the ones who built fascism. While Ngo languished as a loser nobody at Portland State, the New York Times and CNN were the ones breathing life into the faded reality tv personality doing a vanity run for president to boost his brand.

In 2025, Trump will return to the podium at the White House and one reporter in the establishment press pool will whisper excitedly to another, “We’re so back!”

However much you hate the media, it’s not nearly enough.

They did this.

And it wasn’t just center-right rags like the NYT, continuing their long sordid history of apologia for Hitler, lying about weapons of mass destruction, and rabidly protecting the class interests of brownstone retirees against the leftist rabble. Left-liberal media institutions participated just as enthusiastically. It was Mother Jones that fawned over Richard Spencer with “Meet the dapper white nationalist riding the Trump wave.” It was Portland’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Willamette Week, that by 2015 had repeatedly slurred Rose City Antifa as “the real fascists” and ran endless hagiography for Jim Goad.

Reporters all sit in the same group chats, play the same games of prestige, and they have a siege mentality towards those outside their subculture. If one of their number is so abysmally stupid as to fall for TERF or nazi shit, everyone in the chat has to close ranks against the foul outsider critics, disreputable savages who haven’t earned their right to have a voice. Forget 4chan, this is where fascism is being supercharged.

In 2015, star reporter on the hacker world, Quinn Norton, is surprised to find herself increasingly under fire. Not for freely using disgusting slurs or for openly talking to the Grand Jury prosecuting her ex Aaron Swartz—even as anarchists prominently went to solitary or fled the country to avoid testifying before other Grand ries. No, Norton is a longtime close friend of Weev, the sysadmin of Stormfront, and by 2015 his full chest swastika tattoo has finally started raising some eyebrows. The notoriously unprincipled hacker scene is starting to question whether it’s worth defending notorious rapists like Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum. And if even those titans of influence could finally fall, who’s gonna defend a notorious asshole nazi like Weev?

But Norton sees it as virtuous to be friends with nazis. “Weev is a terrible person, & an old friend of mine. I’ve been very clear on this. Some of my friend are terrible people, & also my friends,” she writes at one point. Having nazi friends is the most virtuous thing a liberal can do. For an impressive demonstration of open-mindedness and commitment to free speech, you have to pick out the most over-the-top nazi you can find and hug them close. It doesn’t count if you were to do the same with someone you disagree with on the radical left. In fact those associations would gain you negative points.

The New York Times will try to appoint Norton to their editorial page.

At the same time, Bari Weiss will publish a column in the NYT titled, “We’re All Fascists Now” decrying antifa as, you guessed it, The Real Fascists, and citing an obviously fake “antifa” account created by nazis.

. . .

In 2015 the antifa milieu is still internally debating whether paying attention to the reality tv person with a fake campaign for president is within their wheelhouse. Electoral politics is a far cry from busting up prison nazi gangs and picketing NSBM shows. There are technical debates on the line between reactionary populist and formal fascist, but there’s a vibe issue too: most antifascists at this time are anarchists and thus grossed out at the idea of being seen picking sides in an election.

There’s a quite reasonable concern that this will risk catalyzing broader support for fascists among conservatives. After all, antifa, like anarchists, are seen as rather orthogonal to conventional political dramas. We make a point to protest both sides equally. We don’t want to get lumped in with the accursed neoliberal center-right warmongering police-state empowering Democrats. When the RNC was to be hosted in St. Paul, those of us organizing the protests made a point to protest Obama when he came to town and to collaborate closely with anarchists protesting the DNC.

In 2015, Anti-Racist Action had folded and the Torch Network had been reformed by local groups in its place. Feminist critiques were taking a more central place and outside things like the shooting of Luke Querner or the Tinley Park fight, most antifa work looked like independent journalism, tightly organized and increasingly professionalized.

This is an era where antifa researchers could hand an expose of a secret nazi to a local GOP organization and get thanked while they expelled him. When the neonazi Dylann Roof slaughters nine people at a black church in Charleston, you don’t see major voices or accounts in the right-wing ecosystem heaping praise on him, the average conservative doesn’t identify with him.

Antifascists are not apolitical, but they benefit from being totally outside the two party system.

Business Bureau Republicans may be implicitly or even explicitly racist in a variety of ways, they may be instinctually authoritarian in a broad sense, but they’re not Groypers jerking off to gas chambers. They’re embarrassed by outright fascists. And the average conservative schmuck may have chanted “nuke the [slur]s till they glow” after 9/11 or fervently agreed with Limbaugh that it should be legal to run over protesters, but they are not yet activated. They have not come to a full awareness of what they are, where their values actually fall. They are still a jumbled incoherent mess, prone to shy away from full swastikas and not yet seeing themselves as an army. Many still sincerely echo things like “the Democrats were the ones who supported slavery; Lincoln was a republican.”

Decades into their work keeping the streets clean of boneheads, practically no non-fascist conservative is aware that antifa exists. And when they do, antifa is treated as weird particularity, something you go “huh” to.

And so antifascists wince and cringe as the media hypes Trump up and every single nazi forum blows up with hyperactivity. The fash are going to Trump rallies. They’re using him as a wedge to normalize outright racism.

Antifascists can’t do nothing, they can’t just allow boneheads to rally in public whenever they hold a big blue Trump banner like a magical shield.

Decades of experience cleaning fascist filth out of subcultural scenes has taught that you can’t afford to concede them any territory. Trump is enabling the fascists to gain ground like crazy. If this shit continues, then—as Richard Spencer promises in an absurd flight of ethnic cleansing fantasy—there will be military planes filled up with shackled brown Americans, running nonstop flights to other continents.

And so, at the end of 2015, antifascists begin to steel themselves. They would search, record, and expose fascist involvement with the Trump movement. They would confront the fascist streetfighters trying to return and refuse to give them ground.

. . .

I don’t think it’s contentious, from the vantagepoint of 2025, to say that antifa was totally unprepared for a media war.

They had cut their teeth for decades on boneheads and entryists, but they had little experience fighting the media itself. In a healthy anarchist movement there would be other projects capable of taking on that burden, but the unpopular yet necessary work of resisting fascist creep in radical spaces had left antifascists relatively isolated.

In 2015, many antifascists were or had been independent journalists. But they still take serious many of the field’s narratives. Where mainstream reporters were lazy and slapdash, antifascists prize getting the facts perfect, holding stories and doxes for extensive checking and confirming. Where mainstream journalists stole stories flagrantly (especially from radicals), antifascists are meticulous about sourcing and giving credit.

Many antifascists devoted themselves to achieving the supposed ideals of journalism, and in the process some began to partially look down on anything so crudely populist as to reach people. Sure there might be a lecture at a progressive church here, a neighborhood flier campaign there… but these were limited in scope in part because there was no sense that the enemy could suddenly and massively grow.

Perfect exposes were published to tiny sites th got dozens of views at best. Fine-crafted arguments found almost no traction among even other leftists. Their studiousness is, of course, to be commended. Dishonesty or rhetorical expedience would have created more problems. But there is a sense in which many antifa groups have grown comfortable, even virtuous, with a more limited purview, a more niche existence. And without the organs of a wider anarchist movement actively contesting or laying siege to the media, they’re gonna get completely drowned.

I say this with all the love in my heart, but as the mainstream media suddenly finds profit in promoting Donald Trump and the fascists around him, antifa suddenly look like bewildered nerds on the sidelines.

. . .

Over the coming years, a subset of Libertarians will repeatedly whine that antifa makes one core mistake and would instead win if only they were studious about absolutely never throwing the first punch in any situation ever.

This is absurd.

First off, media discipline is totally impossible for movements. The only way activist organizations have ever gotten anywhere close (and still pretty far away at that) is by becoming completely authoritarian monstrosities.

But secondly, such a picture is totally disconnected from how violence actually functions. If a neonazi group storms into a neighborhood to terrorize and antifascists square up to oppose them, conflict is already inevitable, the nazis will brutalize you, they will whip out knives and stab everyone they can, as they will in Sacramento in 2016. If the goal is to win, to physically stop them, then tactical choices have to be made midst constantly swirling pressures and contextual particulars, and good tactics sometimes involves taking the initiative.

Always waiting for the boneheads to act first, in every rung of the escalation ladder, unavoidably means losing the war they already started.

That is, of course, unless a choice has been made to lose the battle, to embrace a role as some noble victim. But this only works if there are cameras on you. Cameras that record the whole context. Cameras that aren’t immediately seized by the state. Cameras that will reliably broadcast to hundreds of millions, rather than just the home team or a buried report at 11.

If any of that doesn’t line up, you’re just getting stabbed for nothing.

And if you do manage to strike a sympathetic pose on the national evening news, while your blood sprays everywhere and your organs shut down, what does that actually tangibly win?

Sometimes the stars align, as they will with Heather Heyer’s murder, and a little bit of intangible shame will enter the national discourse for a month. But the stars will not align for so so so many other people.

When, in two years, from our vantagepoint in 2015, but before Heyer’s murder, Ricky John Best (conservative) and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche (liberal) will be stabbed to death, with Micah Fletcher (antifascist) bleeding out on a light rail stop, the three of them will be pitch-perfect martyrs of the fascist Jeremy Christian. Spontaneous good samitarians from across the political spectrum that did everything right and approached a violent racist with peaceful open hands. No one outside of Portland will learn their names. When the earnest nerds of Rose City Antifa provide security for the memorial, Portland police will openly scoffed in front of me about wanting to murder them and no real national media will show. No national conversation will be had. No polling numbers change. Not a single conservative, by then pickled in layers of hilarious delusions about antifa, will hear of it.

On and on the slaughters will inexorably march, across the country. When the furry nazi Benjamin Jeffery Smith will gun down June Knightly and Deg in 2022, hitting several others, no one outside of Portland will read about it, no matter how perfect of an angel June was, no matter how heart-wrenching Deg’s story. There will be no New York Times columns. CNN will not run a week’s coverage. Harper’s will not shop around some giant public letter bemoaning the fascist threat. No complicit politician will be pressed about it in debates.

Their blood will lead to fucking nothing.

. . .

There is another hypothetical universe in which the mainstream media reports this kind of stuff, takes it seriously, gives it attention.

But we do not live in that universe.

We live in the universe where centrist columnists will treat getting occasional pushback on twitter from vaguely progressive people as worthy of 24-7-365 national conversations. We live in the universe where the media elites will hyperventilate for years about needing to genocide trans kids more aggressively. We live in the universe where every newspaper and television channel will enthusiastically launder fascist lies at every opportunity.

Andy Ngo will become a thing because establishment media institutions will choose to make him into a thing.

When an anonymous email will be sent threatening to attack random conservatives at a parade in Portland, promising to have “two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push them out. You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads,” no national journalist will ever say to their readers, “this is beyond obviously fake.” When right-wing ecosystem tries to push it as a thing, CNN won’t spend days mocking the idea that a chud thought that was how any activist or antifascist would talk.

The NYT won’t lead national discussions about how such misinformation could spread, they won’t interview antifascists and showcase the ecosystem of established antifa sites with in depth reporting to their readers.

Of course not.

Structurally, every major media outlet is of course driven by capitalist interests, and has always been so, long before cartoon villain billionaires buy them all up and hand down edicts. In its entire lifespan The Oregonian, for instance, has never once reported positively about leftists, anarchists, or protesters, and it’s an absurd exercise to imagine it ever doing so. In the final leg of power, every newspaper is the press office of business alliance.

The people who staff these institutions, of course, don’t identify with the grubby money that funds them, and are proud that they sometimes press in different directions. But their interests are just as venal. East coast ivy league graduates are united in an old guard elitism that looks down at striving for money, but is even more violently hostile to any erosion of their prestige. As newsrooms fold and the internet gives voice to millions, they are forced to realize that there are other cultural and intellectual elites in America. What is anarchism if not such an elite? We have long looked down our noses from our squats and social centers at the hilariously ignorant centrists pickled in their own juices, sealed away in epistemic bubbles. We’re better than them in every way. We’re smarter, more moral, more educated, more informed, more advanced in discourse and language. We always have been. As the internet leaks into the ears of the old media elites, they fall into conniptions upon discovering there are people who smugly superior to them, and with every right to be.

The debate on pronouns, for instance, was had and conclusively ended in the 00s in the circles of the real culture elites in America: the radical left. It happened in the only places that matter: punk houses and queer blogs. If liberal centrists chose not to pay attention or participate, that’s on them. It’s too late now. The matter is as decisively concluded as the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Those fucking culturally uneducated ignorant deplorables in their backwater brownstones can either get with the times or they can sink into irrelevance, just like the babbling MAGA troglodytes they obsessively try to make common cause with.

Being polite about the situation, patronizing those who willfully refused to engage in the discussion for decades, would do grotesque damage to the truth. Physicists should obviously not bend over backwards to pretend flat earthers are valid discursive peers. And in no universe should anarchists lie about our superiority. Unlike the pretensions of the media elites, we actually worked to achieve it.

But even beyond the Ivy League elites ruling major institutions like the Gray Lady, the subculture of “journalism” as a whole has long been infested with inane delusions.

Journalists are indoctrinated in a worldview where everything important happens in one flat public record, one collective national conversation, that they are the professional stewards of. The investigative journalist gets out the truth. The anchor on the evening news explains it, making it palatable to the widest audience. And the columnists then argue in the genteel process of crafting a compromise that is then codified by democratic process.

The proper role of “activists” (if there even is one) within this framework is politely begging on the sidelines for a cup of attention from their journalist superiors. Perhaps holding signs tamely in large numbers to help underline a columnist’s claim to the popularity of a position.

Just as antifascist groups doing their own high-quality reporting bypasses the appropriate authorities, radicals developing expert analyses and more advanced social norms on their own is an existential threat to the media-complex’s monopoly of epistemic force. And activists simply taking direct action outside the democratic process of the state? An unthinkable danger.

In short, every single fiber of the journalism-complex has always been existentially aligned against activists, anarchists, and antifascists. There is simply no way to make them not hate us and instinctively work against us. It’s in their blood.

And so, in 2025, when the White House will cite the aforementioned random fake email as well-established proof that antifa is a terrorist organization, not a single fucking media outlet will even flinch or note the lie. And no one will be able to meaningfully hold them to account.

. . .

In my opinion, the great failure of anarchists and antifascists was not failing to more aggressively pander to the media, but in beginning to forget their centrality as our enemy. This was a mistake well underway by 2015.

In the 2003, in our many protests against the Invasion of Iraq, anarchists often took a more combative line: breaking the cameras of journalists, getting into shoving matches with them, and tagging their vans. It was the only sane or ethical thing to do. I still remember the grotesque audacious sins of each local channel. KATU, the notoriously evil ABC affiliate, loved to get out an unmarked map and try to quiz every single protester on the location of Iraq until they could find a couple who pointed incorrectly, for repeated highlight. Even KGW, the NBC affiliate and the best of the rotten bunch, would always delightedly join the rest in lying about crowd numbers. Sixty thousand protesters pack the entire waterfront shoulder-to-shoulder and make the bridges sag under their weight? “Several thousand.”

These people were always the vanguard of the war against us.

When fascists mobilize around the country and police brutalize marchers on May Day, The Oregonian will declare “Portland must be done with punk fascists” – siding with the police state and calling for more repression of anarchists. When Jeremy Christian murders two Portlanders on the light rail twenty one days later he will have spent the prior night on the light rail screaming about how antifa are “the real fascists.” The Oregonian will never apologize for helping radicalize him. Neither will Willamette Week.

These are not people who could ever be expected to tell the truth, they are not people who would ever platform or profile us. It should have been no surprise when they lovingly built up a fascist movement to exterminate us.

They look down on Andy Ngo, but they embed his disingenuously edited videos anyway. They look down on Trump, but they’re ecstatic when their puppet promises to torture trans kids.

By 2015, the die is already cast. There is no way to stop them. They will have the entertaining fascist dictator they so crave.

I emphasize this because while there’s a lot to learn from 2015, there is no timeline in which we prostrate ourselves hard enough and the media relents. Our mere existence is an existential threat to their prestige and power structures. Our correct and good arguments will always win over the diligent and decent and, in so doing, cause backlash from a media class.

The only way out was only ever total war on them, to commit to the information space and erode their standing and reach from all angles. Our survival has always depended on the total destruction of The New York Times, CNN, Facebook, and all their ilk.

We built a vast and potent global movement in the 00s, you would think that, by 2015, it’s time to grow it.

. . .

Once I get back to Portland at the end of 2015 and hang with some dear old friends, I mention that I think anarchists should try to contest Youtube, should try to make video content for those using it and then bridge to our own networked protocol-based alternatives. In particular, I’m very worried about young teenagers who are getting fed stuff like Molyneux and who don’t have local anarchist social centers to hang at. These friends of mine are storied and respected, international travelers, pillars of the movement, and they mostly scoff in disgusted horror. Why would we want to attract such horrible people or make our movement more transparent to them? And it’s bad enough that I write essays, but video is so much lower status than zines.

By this point Indymedia has long been functionally dead.

We pioneered putting video on the internet and now all the links are dead, the torrents have no peers. We burnt bright… and burnt out within a decade. Everyone is embarrassed that we ever tried to contest the internet. Where we once shaped and drove it, once created the tools and spaces that would shake the bones of media institutions, we gave up and resigned to being bit players in fringe corners of it.

In 2015 an anarchist in Chicago has been building a decentralized social media network for years, everyone scoffs at him. Riseup has been pushing an innovative new software stack for activist groups, everyone politely ignores it. Two relatively local projects, Unicorn Riot and Submedia, get some respect, Agency technically exists, Crimethinc continues chugging in their corner, but on the whole across our movement few push for broader engagement. Social media use beyond kvetching with a few friends or getting a passing dunk in is treated like a moral failing. It’s uncouth to try to win over normies or acknowledge they exist, even when that means leaving them to the media or the 4chan incels. When liberals on Tumblr take our ideas and run with them in imperfect silly ways we don’t really push back or take point, we sneer about “internet people.”

I have long diagnosed the toxicity of social network sites as a product of their unnaturally flat topology. You are given two choices: put yourself on lock to a small static number of friends, or hang fully out there in front of all of humanity, for literally anyone to show up and interrupt your conversation, stalk you, obsess over you. There is nothing in between. No organic space where the statistical likelihoods change. A punk bar filters the frequency of sorts of folks you encounter. Same with an infoshop or a Food Not Bombs. You are not given sliders to dissuade certain bystanders or ensure certain commonalities. All the mechanisms of being physically in the same room disappear. The only tool individuals have to shape who clusters into their conversations is verbal hostility.

2015 is the era of “it’s not my job to educate you.” Which is trivially true. I would go insane if I didn’t aggressively filter my notifications, if I bothered to read the unhinged rants and sincere messages of every random person on the planet, much less try to respond to them all. Even a couple million anarchists worldwide constitute but a tiny island in the sea of humanity. We cannot and should not spend all our time arguing with 13-year-old boys into Crusader Kings. Handholding dipshits is not an individual moral responsibility.

But in 2015, there’s a broad violent revulsion and active sanction of the very idea of anyone doing outreach or engagement. Anarchists largely react with horror to the inane masses on social media, and take it as a matter of faith that the spectacle, the discourse, does not matter and cannot matter.

When everyone decides to platform Donald Trump and old bonehead talking points we have nothing in the tank to contest them. No voice to even begin to push back at the national scale.

Those birthed in the internet are perhaps more nearsighted to it, too focused on spectacle and attention at the expense of tangible struggle and community, but they can still instinctively identify lines of pressure.

Some nazis on 4chan have no assumptions about how activist campaigns are done. They just want to win. So even while they stumble around in ignorance, they think “hey, people get socially and mentally pressured by lots of accounts, so let’s just manually create a bunch of social media accounts and seed discourse through them.”

Some dipshit baby leftists spontaneously cling onto Leninism without any real knowledge of it, but they know that meme pages get a lot of attention and influence, so they do infiltration campaigns and make up whatever lies can get their accounts appointed as mods.

Anarchists correctly turn up our noses at this crude brutish unethical stuff, but we failed to imagine alternatives. We didn’t have the hunger to win. We abandoned creativity, preferring to spend our efforts holding onto the amazing AFK communities we had successfully created over the counter-globalization era.

We stopped imagining that winning was even a possibility. We told ourselves that the real prize was the friends made along the way.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. When my friends scoff at the idea of anarchist video content, I pretty much entirely abandon writing 101s for youtube, never do anything with footage I shoot of activist campaigns, treat social media largely as a space for cranky kvetching into the void rather than friendly explainers. I would rather keep my standing in my circles than help explain things to newbies.

Two different orgs ask me to run their social media and/or answer press emails and I decline, because I would want to be to more proactive than canned statements and I know it will inevitably hurt my friendships to fight about it in consensus meetings.

I want my friends more than I want to win.

Everywhere in 2015, comrades are explicitly talking in such terms. Building land projects. Retreating, to hug close the social gains we made.

Community is beguiling.

A little earlier in the year, my roommate and I sit, looking out our window, down on the Fuck The Police street party outside our place. The cops are nowhere to be seen and yet nothing is pushed forward. Struggle has gotten performative rather than audacious. They’re content to laugh and drink together. She and I are content to talk to one another.

And all things considere 2015 is a pretty good year for me. I have amazing friends and live most of the year in a cute bohemian collective house in the center of everything. I take a ton of classes at Berkeley, get a ton of writing done, have long debates with famous people. I go to parties, I hang at social centers. I manage to get by without working very much, exploring the city for fun. I have complaints and adversaries, but I have community, and it’s hard not to revel in it.

But, in 2025, that euphoria will be remembered forebodingly.

Libertarians, having gotten a taste of community, will go crazy for it, abandoning their values for parasocial relationships with podcasters and posting buddies who ritualistically owning the libs with them. Socialists will hardly fare better, with their toxic cults and dirtbag idols. Both will platform the shit out of fascists and normalize evil.

Rationalists will throw everything on the bonfire for the taste of community, chucking epistemic diligence for inane civility norms that promise to secure their precious friends and social circles – while empowering and covering for fascists and billionaires.

And anarchists – after over a decade of unprecedented success and influence – turn inward. There are many reasons for this, but a non-negligible component is the succor of victory. We’ve collected all the good friends, why do anything more? Many among us throw tantrums rather than risk social friction kicking out the most extreme of reactionaries and entryists.

Meanwhile fascists, furiously apathetic normies and media elites build a broad coalition against creeping anarchist social pressures, however attenuated into “wokeness.” Their two planks are 1) hostility to the “humanist moralism” of ever caring about distant strangers and 2) hostility to the erosion of patriarchy and its sex/gender hierarchy. It is the resurgence of outright fucking nationalism. But it also looks like an existential freakout over trans people.

But of course this wave will break. The coalition of the bad will not have their thousand year Reich. Many of the horrors will get worse, of course, I’ve never been an optimist. But fascism will always stumble and falter. Whenever and however it comes, there will be a day when they are in retreat, there will come victories for us, victories even that we grow to take for granted, victories that we risk squandering, and then it will be necessary to remember.

I share all these personal memories because they should be written down somewhere, because our movement s been so focused on the momentary and ephemeral that the equivalent of entire libraries from the last few decades seem always in the process of being lost, discarded or rewritten. I have my grudges and I-told-you-sos, sure, but mostly I believe in order to win anything we have to try to retain what we learn. If the past is, as they say, a foreign nation, we should actively smuggle out word of its struggles. And, if we’re really lucky, we can pass such on to comrades in the foreign nations of the future.

While the me that lives in 2015 can only see 2025 as the cartoonish Bad End, we do not live in 2015.

Our present is birthing many futures. Some will make new mistakes. Let’s at least try to curtail the old mistakes.