Publishing this here for posterity.

It began life as an idea for a magazine, but then I realized it ran the risk of being shut down before its corpus was published (or mostly published). Therefore, I might take parts of this and report/write it out, in book form. Speed is a friend to work against fascism.

Please forgive the stream-of-consciousness format of this. It was meant to be notes for myself and/or collaborators. It’s only here now to ensure it persists no matter what.

-Brandon

Thesis: The United States has existed in some form of what we now call “fascism” since its founding as a genocidal settler colonial project. We believe and will show that both major U.S. parties today support fascism, in varying levels of overtness. What many call “democracy” in the U.S. is a veneer that keeps the working class thinking they have a say in what the ruling class is doing.

Definition of “fascism”: We define fascism as international experts define it, as a project of nationalism: national and/or race-based purity (which is to say publicly; at its roots it might accept differences in pursuit of grift); a project which places the desires of corporations and the ruling class above the needs of the public; a project which defines in-groups and out-groups, blaming the woes of a country on the out-groups; and which harkens back to a (likely fictional) time in the country’s past where greater purity allegedly caused greater prosperity. In a word, intolerance, as used in governance.

Mission: Antifascist Magazine exists to point at/point out, explain, and condemn fascistic or fascist-adjacent behaviors, or those that prove-ably lead toward fascism, in hopes the public will demand, from any party or politician (who always have the power despite their protestations), that these behaviors stop. And in hopes that the public will demand true democracy and distribution of political power throughout the public, a condition the U.S. has never had. The ruling class has an interest in creating our reality—the lens through which we see the world—and we seek to draw attention to that lens and to help our readers fashion their own.

Ideal collaborators:

• Brandon Smith: Publisher, Journalism Director
• Vaughan Nelson-Lee: Editor, Art Director
• Matthew Avery, Monograph Studio: Initial/conceptual designs
• Amy Schiller (“The Price of Humanity,” etc.): Fundraising Director
• Matt Topic: General Counsel
• Caitlin Johnstone: Resident Columnist
• Adam Johnson: Resident Journalist
• Chris Hedges: Guest Columnist
• Advisory Team:
  • Ed Marzewski, founder of Lumpen Magazine and many other businesses, many of them worker cooperatives
  • Lost Art Press
  • Raza Rumi, Director, Park Center for Independent Media; judge and coordinator, I.F. Stone award for independent media
  • Joel Bleifuss, longtime publisher of In These Times, founder of Barn Raiser
  • Suzanne Reber, founder of Reveal (radio, etc)
  • Nathan Fielder, creator, The Rehearsal, etc
  • Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corp, author of Copaganda
  • Cory Doctorow, prolific author and activist, EFF, etc
  • Jason Hickel, Marxian economist and expert on modern imperialism
  • Thomas Piketty, preeminent economist of inequality
  • Founders of Means TV
  • Founders of Upstream Podcast
  • Hampton Institute
  • Ken Klippenstein, independent national security journalist
  • Veterans Fighting Fascism
  • The General Strike (US)
  • Chris Smalls, founder of first Amazon union, activist for unions and Gaza

Possible sources of initial funding:

• Craig Newmark
• Yves Chouinard
• Jerry Greenfield, of Ben & Jerry’s, who recently resigned because of Unilever interference
• The Hollywood group who got behind “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Glazer, etc
• Viggo Mortensen
• John Cusack
• Adam McKay
• Stellan Skarsgård
• Al Pacino
• Natasha Lyonne 
• Boots Riley
• Jodie Foster
• Michael Moore
• Pedro Pascal
• Macklemore
• Seth Rogan
• Susan Sarandon
• Richard Gere
• John Cusack
• Tulsa Swinton
• Benedict Cumberbatch
• Gigi Hadid
• The Weeknd
• Mandy Patinkin
• Dua Lipa
• Billie Eilish
• Javier Bardem
• Chappell Roan
• Mark Ruffalo
• Bo Burnham
• Quentin Tarantino

Article ideas for Antifascist Magazine

• Defining fascism, with Charles McBride (modern writer/influencer) and other notable thinkers from history. It’s about *nationalism*, obsessed with national purity, defines in-groups and out-groups, blaming the woes of a country on the out-groups, and harkens back to a (likely mythical) time in the country’s past that it is trying to “get us back to.” (Hilarious that this time for Trump et al is the 1950s and 1960s, when we had our most socialist government ever, and taxes for top earners at or near 90%. So this movement doing the reverse is acting in bad faith.) Also, see Jason Hickel’s analysis of modern deaths from sanctions: I think it’s about a million a year. We are dead last in life expectancy among rich nations, by a huge amount; no one seeks to emulate us, so why should we be nationalistic? What ELSE can unequivocally be labeled as part and parcel to fascism? Paradox of intolerance. Why fascists want to erase shit things we did in the past. Why is “antifascism” and other “antis” (punks, antiracists, anticapitalists, etc) phrased as a negative? We can get a lot of guff from people thinking this means we are a “negative” ideology. “You should be FOR something, not just AGAINST something!” And there’s a little something to that. But on the flip side, these are actually “for” just about everything else but their targets of ire. In other words, they are for the freedom to do whatever you want, to create whatever you want, except if the thing you’re for (or the thing you create) has as its purpose to impede others’ being, or creating. That’s regard racism, capitalism, and fascism do. So, while these are phrased as “anti,” it actually means “we’re for virtually everything, the caveat being, we will defend to the death everyone’s right to be and do.” And the note that most people in rich nations don’t recognize fascism because if you’re in privileged groups, to you fascism appears not as oppression/tyranny, but as safety, normalcy, and tradition. (Paraphrase of a statement by Byron C. Clark)
• Intro column from Justin Glawe: “We were always heading here” and Brandon, maybe part 1 of series of 6. Defining fascism broadly, defining antifascism with the paradox of tolerance
• Why Antifascism is not exclusively a “leftist” idea. If the far left is socialism-into-communism and the far right is Ur-conservatism, which you might call fascism, do you have to be an advocate of socialism or communism to be against fascism? We argue no. We don’t mean “radical moderates,” which we argue are like the Ezra Klein Democrats, “nothing will fundamentally change” candidates, which lead to fascism. Rather, you can want something more akin to anarchism, with a dissolved central government, and be an antifascist. You can want something akin to Eisenhower Republisanism (which is very close to today’s “DSA” when you get down to brass tacks) and be an antifascist. Heck, you can want anything other than fascism and be an antifascist. (Though if you’re a corporatist, the logical extension of your beliefs leads to fascism.) Do note that we will point to the *science* of Marx, that is, his accurate description of what capitalism *is* and class/power differences *does*, as something that cannot be ignored, and through which most things of our time (as it was in his) can be much better understood.
• This is not just calling all conservatives fascists. There are so so many conservatives throughout history who became anti fascist. We hold them up, too. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And a big part of the Trump coalition who mostly just wanted to burn down the corruption already in place and thought this was the quickest way to do it. In the same breath we need to both call out Trump and the corrupt systems that so many people wanted gone and led them to vote for him. To be anti-fascist means to point to both the thing (fascism) and all the conditions that lead to the thing. Otherwise, it’ll keep coming back. So that’s why we have to point at the fascistic tendencies from Democrats and its party. What did Democrats lay the groundwork for? Indefinite detention (Obama signed into law). An unaccountable executive. (Biden). Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital. What else? At any rate, this is not us saying “these are equally bad.” Rather, we must address both the overt form AND anything that appears more polite, more moral, but which leads us back to the overt form.
• Bad faith exists in U.S. politics even more than nihilism. How to spot bad faith. (Connects to the “purpose of a system is what it does” conversation.) A good example: Harris calling Trump a “communist” (when her dad is a communism scholar) and shortly thereafter, Newsom calling Trump the “leading socialist of our time.”
• A deep “modern history” dive into the first six months of the pandemic: where millions of low wage workers got paid $600 a week to stay home (also we learned who was essential), and we all saw that the world doesn’t end if nearly everyone stops going to work. What this teaches us about how society really works. What big business wants to make sure never happens again (from our effort or from nature), and what they want us to forget, about this period it behooves us to keenly observe.
• The Palestine Exception. Why what you think about Israel-Palestine is such a good judge of whether you are for or against fascism. The huge shift of public opinion since Oct 7, 2023, toward sympathy for Palestinians, which is unprecedented since Woodrow Wilson’s time or before. And at the same time, a wild doubling down on support for Israel on the part of people with giant amounts of cash and power in big influential institutions like universities and mainstream media. What this stark divergence between them and the public says about fascism.
• Regular columns from Caitlin Johnstone and Alec Karakatsanis, occasional from Adam Johnson. Alec to describe how the recent cash infusion for ICE makes it a good contender for the worst regressive development in recorded history
• Whatever Ken Klippenstein thinks should go in such a magazine
• How could Nazi Germany have happened to an entire society, based on our own experience in the 2020s, and checked against historians’ viewpoints
• Investigation into how the 14 shit quotes ended up on the MLK memorial
• Who, and how, changed our city/town planning in the early 20th century toward an everywhere-is-suburbia ethos, all but ensuring alienation over togetherness
• “The purpose of a system is what it does” (and why this needs to be a foundational tenet of a new politics). The most powerful people in the world spend their days pretending they can’t do anything about the current situation; the current situation is, nearly by definition, the precise policy choice of those with power. They want it to happen; it’s not a series of decades worth of unforced errors.
• 6 part series on modern American fascism (roughly 1300 words each. Includes treatment of how we should think about cops)
• So fascists want to erase shit things we did in the past. Let’s talk to some German scholars to find out why it’s important to talk about the awful things we’ve done, and why this doesn’t have to lead to paralysis.
• Special insert: what policies we’d need to have a real democracy (~8,000 words)
• Is the lesser evil really lesser if it’s critical to the greater evil’s retention of power? The combination of “lesser evil” and “false equivalence” has worked to distract folks from the fact that, while Trump may be “worse” for some folks, or even most folks, than a D administration, it remains that the D party is fascist.
• How to have a good faith political party in the US (~5,000 words)
• Interview with Vincent Bevins, one of the more important thinkers in modern historical documentation of U.S. fascism.
• Interview with Jason Hickel, one of the few economists who understands and can explain the U.S.’ “soft power fascism,” which has killed many times more than its overt fascism.
• On violence. “No war but class war.” Interview with the author of “This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed.” Malcolm X and Assata Shakur—at whose trial a doctor testified it was medically impossible for her to have been holding a gun when she was shot—said that they were variously saddened and disappointed that this has come to war. That they took up arms in self defense, because was was foisted upon them, their people, black people. They also correctly identified it as a class war, with poor whites also being a target. Well, that dynamic has only increased, as in the last 40+ years the overt racism has had to move at least a little more underground. Now people are just recommending “involuntary lethal injection” for people without homes at the moment, on national TV, and not losing their jobs. To be clear, speech can be violent when it is clearly fascist, because the fascist position is that some groups should not exist. Which requires immense violence to achieve. As The Hampton Institute wrote, “If the working class masses have no right to land, food, housing, education, healthcare, and the basic comforts that centuries of our labor created, then the capitalist class has no right to peace.” Now, what is violence? Is cutting into the roof and fouling the clean room of a jet manufacturer arming a genocide, which allegedly stopped production for six months, violence? Absolutely not: in fact it’s the opposite. It’s preventing lots of violence. That said we must bring up the fact that Nazis, under Goebbels, held rallies in communist and social democrat stronghold neighborhoods to deliberately provoke physical clashes, so they could document and use them as propaganda that the Nazis are the victims. So one must beware of these kinds of traps. It’s all about functionality; what does your action do? De-arrests might be in order, for instance, but not random “clashes.”
• Conversations with reformed anarchists: why they decided to abandon their libertarianism for socialism/communism, and what of anarchism will always remain worthwhile?
• We need to talk about eugenics. When the Dept of Ed fires everyone in the office that focuses on children with disabilities, it results in no jobs, no income, and death. What other steps have they taken toward eugenics?
• Guilt and shame: they are DE motivators. You can get someone to stop doing something using them, but you can’t get them to start doing something using them. What is their place in Japanese culture, and Amish culture, versus here? Why did they stop working on US politicians? (Are all politicians here just organized crime, setting up the next grift?) Can we shame people out of being fascists? If so, what do we try to put in its place, and how? (Since shame doesn’t work.)
• Companion article: An interview with Tom Hodgkinson, on anarchism for the individual (see larger treatment below)
• Companion article to this: how the ruling class gets to write the dictionary, so to speak, through control of media and social media. It’s not just the word “freedom.” According to Twitter user @borkedsys, “To power, violence is never called violence. Beating protesters is “maintaining order.” Looting wages is “the market.” Erasing freedoms is “security.” The dictionary is always rewritten to disguise the hand that holds the baton.” And on and on. We will explore this re-defining of words to fit the narratives that help the ruling class. Words are, at least in some sense, how we think.
• Companion article: With a brief intro on how “homesteading” is just libertarianism (ignoring of the communities you rely on to source what you can’t make)… what aspects of it are worth it to do/try just to easily distance from corporatism, versus which are not
• A list of things that are happening where the people mean well, but they’re treating the symptom and not the problem.
• Interview with Ed Snowden. “The fact that it is considered legal for a corporation to compile perfect records of your private life simply because you had to “click OK to continue” to make your phone work is a perfect expression of who holds the power in society and why they should be cast into the sea.”
• An interview with Dustin Pace, who runs the account “Non Toxic Masculinity,” whose unofficial motto is “Read books, lift weights, fight fascism.” What is real masculinity? Perhaps also input, or a second interview, with the guy who edited the Fred Rogers doc, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
• The story of why the folk artist Rodriguez insisted on not taking another stage name, and ended up as a working person into his old age rather than a superstar
• “Crucial steps to take to prepare for a general strike.” Everyone needs to do these first, and now, before we try to use the immense power of “putting our hands in our pockets.” See series of social posts from General Strike US.
• We need to talk about nihilism and sociopathy. (This might be two articles.) Julia Steinberger wrote, “Every human population has a small percentage of sociopaths, people who just dgasf about others. Egalitatian human societies developed strong mechanisms to curb and expel them, due to the danger they posed to all. Neoliberalism and capitalism promote them to the very top.” Everyone who wants to ignore climate in favor of money, or even just delay climate action just a little bit longer, via whatever means accomplishes that, is a verifiable sociopath. And nihilism too: it’s quite obvious that the MAGA grifters are just looting what they can. But this started well before that. It was obvious in Biden’s term, and Trump’s prior term, but the nihilism of the Democrats set the stage. The last five primaries have been anti-democracy, for example. But also, for careful observers, a motto of Democrats has been “we don’t believe in anything!” (Except personal power, by appeasing rich donors.) Obviously MAGA folks have seen so many “This you?” posts and none lands. Because they don’t care about shame. They, also, don’t hold any coherent beliefs. (See: “free speech.”) This is nihilism at work.
• The trickle down memos: when the GOP thought a study could have fallout (and how the Dems’ policy is effectively the same thing)
• How we know what we know about wage theft. They say that wage theft dwarfs all other crime combined by more than a factor of 10. The researchers who determined this: what methods did they use? How sound is it? And if it’s true, what does that mean about “law enforcement?”
• The “other” modern genocides: Congo and Sudan. In 2013 the U.S. State Dept admitted that Eisenhower authorized the murder of the democratically elected president of Congo, Patrice Lamumba. CIA director Dulles set aside $100,000 for the act. From 1885 to 1908, under Belgian King Leopold II, 20 million Congolese were killed in forced labor and terror. Since the 1990s, 15 million and counting have been killed from the resource exploitation there.
• What we learned during the pandemic that the ruling class is hoping beyond hope that we (and trying to make us) forget. Learning actually who is an essential worker. (Kind of like the bank strike in Ireland in the 1970s; people learned didn’t need the finance sector. So now bankers never go on strike.) Learning that we can fund people to stay home. That they are happy to loan money to rich people and forgive it.  
• What do you GET for your tax dollars elsewhere? Versus what do you get here? And if we compare apples to apples, and call things that most other “developed” countries provide for tax dollars “taxes,” then what is our actual tax rate, buying all these on the open market and paying for the giant margins of the capital class? (Therefore: are “margins” theft? To be continued!) There was a study showing that our effective tax rate with these things included is in the high 70%’s. A good argument against claims of “government inefficiency.” Interview the study’s author.
• “Wage theft” (employers stealing from workers) is bigger by dollar value than all robbery, burglary, and larceny combined, according to researchers. Specifically, what are the practices included in “wage theft?” How to watch out for them and how to force a correction if it happens to you—because most likely it will
• “America didn’t beat the Nazis—it absorbed them.” First dozen NATO directors were former Nazi officers, how many scientists did the U.S. shield from prosecution, that sort of thing
• Gary Stevenson, from the UK, on his super simple “tax wealth not work” campaign to tax “the super rich,” which we call the ruling class. How he has found wild success for his message by stripping away politics and notions of morality from what is essentially dialectical materialism: the idea that the capital class cannot own everything—or nearly everything—and the lower classes still have enough for a dignified life. “You have to pick one (of these),” he recently said. The one eyebrow raise is that he keeps hammering on about how handing out lots of money during Covid and how that caused an inflation crisis. He should never say this without also saying where the money went to: only the rich and super rich. The working class didn’t get it.
• Frame for a recurring series: “What to say if someone offers you X argument.” Just the quickest, least contestable, most widely accepted/widely acceptable response
• Bullet point tips for how to build community in proximity. AKA, how to navigate small political disagreements with your neighbors to build community you and the others can rely on. But not just to rely on; to be around. More often than the kind of dysfunctional American way where we see a friend outside of work maybe every couple weeks
• How to hide humans from the government
• Recurring series: worthy art from the socialist/communist perspective. (Zardoz!)
• Why you should make “bad” art
• How to build and vet a network in your area to use as “rapid response” to gestapo presence
• Companion article: How to physically  and legally prepare to confront the gestapo
• An interview with an astronaut about “the lie”: the one we all live under, with many astronauts coming to the came conclusion. What is “the lie?” That we are all separate beings, separate from one another and from nature in the ways that matter. Rather, these folks who spend many months in orbit come to see us as one unit. Some go to work trying to erase political divides, borders, (are some silenced?), and cultural divides. What do they think, then, of the paradox of tolerance? Is intolerance not the ultimate divider? 
• What states interpret the ADA broadly enough to have a pet when your landlord doesn’t allow them (and legal docs online to use as you make the case)
• A modern leftist education book list (and occasional book reviews from it)
• Why 100% nonviolence is a losing (and dangerous) strategy
• List of the worst consumer facing companies. Those you want to make damn sure you never buy anything from. (Likely a few hundred.)
• Series of short hit pieces: Common things you shouldn’t believe in. Like that you should vote for the “lesser evil.”
• What would a system for accountability without a mass human caging machine look like?
• Dispatches from people with interesting perspectives or who have done interesting things. Inspiring of empathy, encouraging of intermingling with the world beyond your bubble
• Strategies to limit social media. Perhaps a list of a few news aggregation accounts with good politics to follow, and then you unfollow everyone else (or establish a way to section off those accounts so you mostly just look at them), and turn it to chronological feed to only show what they put out.
• What to do given the two party system (this is a huge deal, and needs to be super well researched)
• Steven Thrasher on what is happening to academia
• This American Life as Neoliberal propaganda 
• How to win people over to these ideas. Based on Gary’s Economics’ video of the same, posted 8-10-25. We don’t have a lot of money; we can’t buy these ideas into mass media. (Even if they’d let us.) But if each of you tells three or four folks who trust you, and explains it to them in a way that they buy in. And each of them does the same. Then in a few months the whole country will know. This is the most powerful method of spreading any idea. It’s what money tries to buy and usually fails.
• Companion article: How to overcome the sunk cost fallacy in, say, people who think the D party will solve things. Or heck, that Trump will solve things. If you are forced to reckon with this, or abandon, this idea, a lot of your world changes. A lot of what you had believed will be forced to change. So naturally you’re resistant to it changing. Naturally as in nature. Explore why, evolutionarily; and interview, perhaps, a negotiation expert (Kiriakou?) on how to help someone over the big hump that is sunk cost. And to not abandon them after: help them transition. ‘Cause it’s a long transition.
• Locations of all the manufacturers of weapons going to (slash that went to) Israel
• Direct actions one can take if one : from sugar in concrete and gas tanks to fouling up clean rooms of jet parts makers. But also the sneakier ones, like, if you have jobs in certain industries, ways to mess up the product repeatedly—longterm—without being caught
• Have people around the world known we (in the US) were under fascism for a really long time? If so, how? We wanna hear directly from them.
• What to pressure your local government to do to help ensure the influx of climate refugees in the coming 10-20 years is not a humanitarian disaster
• How to properly fuel your dopamine pumps so whatever fresh horrors of the day stand the least chance of killing function (and several good choices for analogue things to do)
• The “housing crisis” is not a housing crisis, but a crisis of unaffordability of all assets relative to wages and household net worth. 23% of Americans own their houses free and clear, the third lowest of developed countries.
• We need to talk about corruption. Obviously one party runs on being as corrupt as possible, as if it’s a good thing, but both parties seem to have abandoned the kind of public ethics that we had 50, 60 years ago. At that time it would have been unthinkable to do any of the hundreds of things we hear about daily, and if they had come to light, the politician would have resigned before they were forced to do so—by peers, media, and mass outcry. Now you have insider trading rampant and no will to stop it; Mainline Democrats & their insider saying billionaires (and catering to them) are good, actually; and just generally, grift all the way down. Dismantling the regulatory state to help your buddies ‘cause that gets you more power and ‘cause the Earth is fucked anyway. It’s like all or nearly all people in power have given up on society, and when you do that, the logical step is to go all-in for personal gain.
• Viggo Mortensen: “Socialism is the only way to fight fascism in America.” Maybe he wants to write something?
• Something so original, a style and talent so obviously original and top of the field, that it’s like Bo Burnham’s “Inside” was for comedy but for policy content, political analysis, and investigative journalism 
• The key images from Gaza: young man holding Palestine flag swinging sling with tanks in background; burning person with IV in their arm; burning building with silhouette of school child trapped inside
• People think the U.S. is #1 in life expectancy (we’re 46th), freedom of press (we’re 42nd), health care (we’re 30th), education (we’re 26th), happiness (we’re 23rd), and personal freedom (we’re 17th). We actually are #1 in military spending, number of billionaires, incarceration, bankruptcy filings, medical debt, and gun deaths.
• Speaking of “Freedom”: What would true freedom be like? We don’t mean the freedom to fuck with other people, we mean freedom if the capital class hadn’t successfully redefined the word over the last 70 years. This is an edited Q&A with the author of one of the coolest books, The Freedom Manifesto, Tom Hodgkinson. Also editor of the mag The Idler, which polished the reputation of non-productivity. What if you didn’t have to keep up with the Jonses? How else are we trapped in a prison of our own making, and how could we make our way out? Is his book the “how should an anarchist live on an individual level?” How can this be incorporated into a modern anti-fascism? Has technology as we mostly see it in 2025 been a net gain to our lives? (This could be a spin-off article, too, featuring Snowden, modern Luddites (who have always been unionists) and the person who wrote the book on them, maybe Jesse Lambertson helping edit, who saw this decades ago. Might also include reference to Bertrand Russell’s 1935 essay In Praise of Idleness, where he describes modern advances in production as giving no one any more free time, and lambasts it.
• Our big coalition: “How about if we believe in this world? How about if we believe in our future?” (Naomi Klein on Democracy Now, roughly Aug 4)
• The bifurcation of society: spaces that only rich people occupy, and they’re try to keep it that way. Private secondary schools is just the biggest example. An easy example of the opposite is “service” corridors and elevators in big cities. Only those who work to “keep the building running” exist in those spaces, but it’s also the lunch caterers, etc. Jobs that only feature people from wealthy families (media, increasingly; major law firms; investment banking for sure; central banking almost certainly; likely consulting, certainly political consulting)
• History will show that this period was one in which the systems we put in place made it possible for a few people who are making the decisions—say, 10,000 out of 7-8 billion—to decide to kill or risk killing everything on the planet so they could have as much power as they could get their hands on. Because what is a dollar, right, if not a measure of power? We need to kill these systems to ensure that these 10,000 don’t kill everything and everyone but themselves. And what we need to enshrine into history is that we never should allow these systems again. Because if they’re allowed, humans do have the power to kill everything and everyone on the planet, down to a few insects, resilient plants, and microbes. A few humans might survive too, but we’re not talking about a holocaust, the murdering of millions. We’re talking about the slow, “paperwork” murder of several billion. Where almost everyone is a secondary, tertiary, death. Or ten or twenty causes removed, but the ultimate cause was these 5,000-10,000 people making decisions where they knew the outcome, and making them anyway. First, because everyone else allowed them to. (Allowed their companies to operate like this. Refused to find their homes and burn them down.) And second, because they chose to knowing the consequences. You might call them sociopaths. I might call them an inevitable product of our society, that doesn’t shun a complete lack of care for others; doesn’t shun a complete focus on oneself at the expense of anyone whose life might be a cost of business. We need a society where this *is* shunned. Ostracised. Diagnosed as an illness, potentially. Certainly redirected, early in life. Ayn Rand needs to be held up, universally in art and education, as one of the most ill-formed thinkers of recorded history.
• When the “oligarchy study” came out it was big news to us policy nerds. The idea that a lot that has passed through Congress or been implemented by any president is wildly unpopular, and a lot of stuff that’s wildly popular has refused to be taken up. It’s gotten some more press lately with the (disingenuous) Democrats’ framing of “oligarchy” in 2025. (As if they aren’t also verifiable tools of it.) But what were the most unpopular decisions passed or decreed in the last 10-15 years? Who pushed for them? And what are their addresses?
• Lots of people think “antifascists” are the ones who will use violence. It’s clear that to stop a violent fascist movement, violence of some kind must be used. (See: “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed”) But that can get creative before it gets very bloody. One pound of sugar taints one ton of concrete. One cup of sugar destroys some of the largest engines. Some of the employees of the most heinous manufacturers of bombs and bombers would be happy to let slip a detail crucial for where the clean room is. Maybe this is what happened when those young people cut a hole in the roof of a jet manufacturer and just happened to foul up its clean room, preventing manufacturing of jets used to bomb Gaza for “at least six months,” according to some sources. We have previously advocated for shunning cops and ICE officers. But in a way, they’re already in their own little social worlds, so that might not matter much. So we have to find other ways to show them what they’re doing isn’t just not right; isn’t just inhumane; but is actually kind of dumb and built on a house of propaganda cards. (It’s okay, we’re all susceptible to propaganda.) This could start a series on so-called “direct action,” which features acts of direct action around the world and what it accomplished. In the UK, “Shut The System” cut power and internet to the major funders and insurers of fossil fuel and weapons manufacturers one day in August 2025. Memes: “how to defeat fascism with the power of love (actually not, actually “incredible violence”); and “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” Assata: “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of of the people who were oppressing them.” “Violence is not the answer. The answer is *opens history book* Uh oh *frantically starts flipping through pages* uh oh. Oh no. No no no. Uh oh”
• Short piece: be careful who you ascribe actions to. Are “we” failing the planet? Are “we” the reason blue whales have stopped singing because they are starving? No. People running roughly 100 companies are, and their shareholders, who by and large (perhaps 80%) are the capital class, not your parents’ pension funds (perhaps 10%). Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people have chosen that the whales would starve. And they DGAF, as the kids say. So be careful when you see that “we” have chosen the way of life that results in whales starving. You and I and everyone we know did not. They did. Let’s start talking about them. And how to make them stop. Don’t abide by people claiming you are a part of this.
• So many times when I was briefly an elected official, I was told that what Trump is doing is fascism, uniquely Trump, because he would break the rules. I would say, no no, we must break the rules in service of justice, and people didn’t understand; didn’t believe me. They would just say that this is what makes you like Trump: “move fast and break stuff” inside government. Therefore in their minds the way to resist Trump—in their minds the way to stop fascism—is to just 1. Follow the rules themselves, and 2. insist that Trump follows the rules. This ignores several realities: first, that Biden, Obama, Clinton remade “the rules” in the image of fascism (albeit a sneaky fascism, polite to the ruling class and upper working class whites); so rules didn’t actually matter to them like you think they did. Next, Trump doesn’t care about your insistence. None of the ruling class does. In other words: if you follow the rules in telling them to follow the rules, they will continue to steamroll you. Essentually everyone in the ruling class is a sociopath. The only things they pay attention to—and thus the only things that change their behavior—are credible threats to their power and actual forced reductions in their power. Often the latter is the result of physical/material resistance. And of course, there are all kinds of rules preventing you from doing that. So the only way to accomplish anything that actually changes their behavior is to break the rules. And when we get to the point we’re at now, where we don’t know whether we’ll have another election, the “credible threats to their power” cannot even be accomplished by demonstrating electoral resistance. So breaking rules becomes not “you’re becoming fascist” but actually the only way to meaningfully oppose fascists.
• You may have noticed that our audience is not the punks (term of endearment) who seek to throw Molotovs each weekend. But we have solidarity with them. Traditional antifascists have realized that “the revolution” could foment from nothing to success in just a month or three, and we must realize physical realities: our bodies take a few months to change. So it behooves us to be strong. To know how to punch. So! Here is a series on strength training and combat arts for those for whom this is new to you.
• The Atlantic had an article “The technology that actually runs our world” about algorithms making decisions. (I’d best read it, with one critical eye, ‘cause their politics often suck.) Well, if you’re a fascist (whether you know it or not), you’re gonna make algorithms that carry out that ideology. What do we do?
• If you’ve ever seen the TV series “The Americans,” and you understood how accurate it is, you’ll realize how unethical the profession of espionage is. When you’re doing it with every trick in the book—when it actually becomes *espionage*. But the thing is, espionage makes you (if you’re a nation-state) more powerful. So if we’re building a revolution, do we swear it off because the practice is unethical? (The argument being, we shouldn’t do this unethical thing as we seek to replace an unethical regime, because otherwise, how are we any different from them?) …or should we embrace it for justice, Andor-style, because otherwise we have no chance to replace an unjust regime. A conversation with John Kiriakou, perhaps the writer of Andor, a Marxist scholar of ethics, someone who was in the Black Panthers, among others.
• A deep dive on the Black Panthers. With folks who were in it and with historians and authors who have studied it closely
• Review of Camus’s The Plague. In a society which is collapsing, the only way to be healthy is to try to do something about it. Perhaps also Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and other excellent Antifascist works.
• “Where to Invade Next” style pieces on how fascism is NOT done elsewhere. How could things work? When you’re in the fishbowl it’s hard to see the water.
• The fascism of the Supreme Court, one of our most fascist institutions. @mdbell79 reminded us “You can regulate a pregnant body but not a coal plant. You can control the free speech of a teacher but not the money-as-speech of a corporation. You can coerce a child to pray in school but you can’t keep guns out of their classroom.”
• Maybe we should start a movement for phones that you can remove the battery from and thereby disable the surveillance features. Allegedly they killed the BlackBerry for this.
• Boycott Divest Sanction. “Voting with your money” has been the milquetoast way to revolution, and at times even pushed by neoliberals, but it should be one weapon in the tool belt of the antifascist. The key is good knowledge about what companies do what. Good sources of information. Ideally a “clearinghouse” where one can look up X or Y company.
• Everyone seems to say “mainstream media sucks but where do you hear of good media?” What other media to follow? Absolutely Working Class History. Maybe this is a recurring column, pinging up other good media, because of the need. Seymour Hersh’s substack. (Unreal that he’s still writing.) Ken Klippenstein. Drop Site News. Who else has won the Izzy of late?
• Heck, we should just have a republishing agreement with Working Class History where in every issue, we republish something of theirs.
• Maybe more importantly, how to read a news report critically. How to assess whether it’s sourced well and has a perspective that can result in honest information about the world with the proper context. (A big part is whether the questions are good ones, and whether the perspective that generated the questions is one that’s carrying water for imperialism.)
• Meshtastic. (Look it up!) Is this the way forward to jettison our corporate/government overlords of our technological realm? What decentralized infrastructure is, why it’s needed, and how to make it work for you and yours
• Three ways to repurpose the open source Signal protocol THIS MONTH to take down three fascist institutions with their boots on our necks:
  • 1. Health insurers: An opt-in service with which you share your insurance online portal login info, and it uses the Signal protocol for transfer (and rigorous third party internal audits) to securely upload, every few minutes, data about what the insurer is covering versus rejecting. Then this data is anonymized and reported publicly, with good methods of comparison between companies. First it might inspire better competition, then it might solidify resolve to demand universal no-insurance care like almost every other rich nation has.
  • 2. Existing political parties. We have all kinds of data to support that almost everyone wants another better choice than the two major parties; half of registered voters still vote for these parties; and the overwhelming reason they vote for these parties is because they think a third party can’t get a foothold and a vote for one would be a “wasted vote.” When again, nearly everyone would rather vote for someone other than D’s or R’s if they thought that candidate/party had a chance for winning. This situation *screams* for a widely publicized effort to give folks a way to log their commitment to vote third party IF a winning portion of voters (for now, defined as winning the electoral college, so the system would track this) make the commitment. (Signal is only marginally needed for its anonymity.) You wouldn’t be committed to vote third party unless it was clear there were enough commitments for a third party to win the election. Say, 55% of voters needed in each state in which we’re calling it a win, for a good margin. Once the commitments have won enough states to win the electoral college, then it’s widely publicized that the commitments have in theory won the election, so it’s now fully safe to vote third party. The one thing that needs done before this happens is to ensure that third parties agree to not accept anonymous donations (so no SuperPACs, etc); and limit total donations across the election to something like $500. So it becomes an election that everyone funds, and the super rich don’t fund more than anyone else.
  • 3. IceBlock – uses encryption (though maybe not Signal) – should we interview the creator? Have existing interviews asked the right questions?