It's Fascism. New Rules. |by Esmée Streachailt
Part 1 | Is this goal possible? I don't know. Are they dreaming it? Yes. Should we assume we are in a fight against men who want to reprise the 13th century? Yes, I think we should.
Some of you, sisters & readers, are aware of a very poor philosopher (the kind who is happy to be called a ‘thought leader’), Curtis Yarvin. I won't go into detail here, but the other night when JCJ and I were chatting we agreed he's one of that kind who falls into the wrong reading of Nietzsche and runs off a cliff from there. She has some excellent analysis and imagination in the works, as for example this recent essay on the brittleness and fragility of the authoritarian (toxic masculine) ego. :)
What's happening here in the US right now is relevant to world-wide feminists because these men have designs on the planet, not just the US. Because their historical errancy here is already harming and killing women in the world's most vulnerable corners. Where I was imagining before the election that we might have time to unfold a RadMatFem world, we don't. How we build coalition and establish trust networks globally will just have to happen in this compressed and chaotic time.
Summary: It's fascists. New Rules. Everyone against the Fascists.
I know. I'm not ready to make nice either. (See Part 2 of this series soon.)
I am not excited to make deep common cause with either Patriarchs 1.0 (regretful MAGA) or Patriarchs 2.0 (humbled TQ identarians), but this 3.0 version is Patriarchy 1.0 but with shiny, powerful, totalizing, invasive technology and private equity salivating to buy up our ranches and homes. It's got potential to become nation-level mass enslavement managed by AI.
Is this goal possible? I don't know. Are they dreaming it? Yes. Should we assume we are in a fight against men who want to reprise the 13th century? Yes, I think we should.
This is, I fear, the historical equivalent of the Yamnaya rolling into Europe and subsuming the Goddess Civilization and all Her women. RadMatFems alone, Democrats alone, hell even just casual adherents to Enlightenment principles alone will not be enough to stop this … hostile takeover. I fear. I could be wrong. I like to prepare for worst cases and adapt into ease from there.
Please read this Medium post by Erica Verillo reprinting this Evidence Brief by current federal employees (on Scribd). The brief is essential. It's a lot of homework. Very in the weeds but vital. It connects the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ to the Neo-Reactionary/Yarvinist agenda in compelling ways.
Between them you get the quickest sense of context of the aggressive ambitions of these Neo-Reactionary(NRx), anti-Enlightenement, monarchists to divide the world into fiefdoms for their own rule and enjoyment. This is how a coalition big enough to hold puritan Christian Evangelicals and the sex-trafficking Tate brothers can exist. I think memo's authors are right that this is the context that makes all those non-sensical blasts of noise come together as a signal.
They have a goddamn flag. In the biohazard and nuclear waste colors. The fact it's got a triskele on it really chaps my Celtic ass.
Coming off of my series on sisterhood and coalition, I was going to think with you about democracy and positive freedoms/rights and what that means in a RadMatFem context. I still will, just in the light now, of … let's call it The Emergency.
And then I was going to think with you about Moving from Center to Margin, developing solidarity economies (something Victoria G and I have been talking about for months), and how we might envision and actually make another kind of world. In my mind it's called Hyper-Lithic, a new Goddess Civilization. At Accidental Gods, they're calling it Thrutopia. In the language of Integral Studies, it used to be called Reality.
This is not hard for RadMatFem. Fascism and Patriarchy are forever entwined, essential to each other, each the heart and the expression of the other. Feminism has always been an anti-fascist project. We have the tools both to analyze and to out-dream these quivering alphas.
As you can see, the gap between The Emergency and Hyper- Lithic is possibly a crumbling of the current order and all the misery that means. That crumbling will happen if these NRx pillagers succeed in turning the US into a few, huge, neo-anti-bellum plantations. RFKjr's fantasy of what do with the depressed among us makes more sense in this context. He'd like to take people coping with late capitalism's inhuman grind by taking SSRI inhibitors and place them in ‘organic farming camps, no anti-depressants, no screens, no contact with family, just lots of sunshine and physical work to cure’ us of our ‘addiction’ to being able to get out of bed in the morning. Work camps. In 3-degree hotter world, with sewage in the water, no health care, no education …
People have been preparing for the collapse. We can share knowledge and practices that will get some of us through. Yes, in this moment, we are facing both global climate emergency and rampaging fascisms eager to get their claws into the EU, UK, Australia, Latin America.
The people Manda Scot talks with on her Accidental Gods podcast come at these two problems from nearly all the angles, from adapting our food and governing systems to very woo-wooiest integral practices for grounding into this world. They have recently published a handbook/manifest called Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still (Just) Possible.
That medium article, this little book, and the pithy trilogy by Heather Marsh that starts with Binding Chaos make a great core.
The center is rotting, going nuclear. This era we've lived from the end of WW2 to now is an aberration of democracy and enlightened good will compared to all of patriarchal history. The post-War project was always pulling against a gravity well of 5000 years of history. Curtis Yarvin, Musk, Trump, Theil, Putin and Pals and most of the far right think that history is the natural state of human life. Necessary. We know those 5000 years are the weird exception.
As shit as the era of human rights has been, as hypocritical, flawed, incomplete, and still muddled with the deadly influences of racist-capitalist-sexist-patriarchy it has been – what these ass-souls have planned for us is worse by leagues.
Back in the 1990-2000s when I was writing my dissertation, I was dreaming this groovy Irigarayan utopia of sexed subjects capable of integration and reciprocity of being and becoming (that Hyper-Lithic). Back then, George W Bush was coming out of Texas to try to cut off the paths to that world, or any world that didn't want cheap oil more than survival. Newt Gingrich had already announced his ambition for a Permanent Republican Majority. Those dour, miserable fucks inspired me to argue in that book that we have to be having more fun than them, have to thrive brighlty, have to develop gorgeous wells of mutuality and care in which we make riots of joy and easeful rest. We have to show them that our way is better for human beings.
Well, now that the NRx are here to triple down on the dour fuckery, harm, damage, and civic and geopolitical destruction – the historians of anti-fascist movements are here to tell us the same thing. The thing Audre Lorde knew in the face of the race fascism of US: your joy is both your own healing and a weapon against their doom lust.
Crank it up. :) … Maybe nap first. This is exhausting. But then, crank it up!
♀️ ♀️ ♀️
If you have thoughts you want to share with us about all this, please send them to us. Especially (but not only) if they are grounded in the Manifesto for a Radical Materialist Feminism.
And send other things. We will need poems, fictions, introspections, beautiful discoveries. We can't let any part of our humanity wilt.
I hope to digest and alchemize all this with you in real time. With these recommendations, you are reading my current reading. Let's go. Stay rad.
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