The Left and the Speed

of Signs
Were an empire now, and when we act, we create
our own reality. And while youre studying that
realityjudiciously, as you willwell act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and thats how things will sort out. Were
historys actors and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.Karl Rove

Last week, the wide world met Richard Spencer. The alt-right
icons introduction was sudden and percussive, courtesy of an
anonymous Antifas fist delivered straight to his jawbone. And
what a delicious, meaty punch it was! So satisfying in fact, that the
strike has been memed to infinity, the video looped in time to
seemingly every song under the sun. It is all the tastier considering
the memes status as the alt-rights ideological delivery system of
choice.
Boss

The only regret, perhaps, was that the knuckles werent a baseball
bat, crumbling concrete at the end of rebar, or a Toyata Rav4. It
seems churlish, however, not enjoy the fleeting catharsis when the
alt-rights ascendancy has been met with zero to little meaningful
resistance in the popular consciousness, the term meaningful
excluding finger-wagging op-eds, anodyne SNL skits, and cross-
armed Facebook statuses. Anyone with the most modest of left
sympathies has been dealt an unrelenting series of blows for
months (years, decades). But the fash-bash not only feels good,
it is good! Post election, fFascists, Nazis, and all around shitheads
have pranced about in post-election public, flaunting their
translucent skin and recessive genes as though the Muslim
menaces hour of reckoning drew nigh now that their Daddy is in
the White House. After the punch, Spencer commented he felt the
need for bodyguards when slithering about in public, betraying
justifiable fear for his well beingwellbeing. Nazis are more scared
than they were yesterday and this is a real victory that resonates at
a gut level.

And I do assume that the incident feels good for you. If you find
more pleasure in the deluge of think pieces asking if punching a
Nazi is acceptable, your sense of aesthetics is fucked beyond
repair. I consider myself a radical free speech advocate by leftist
standards, but Nazis Nazis get punched, end of story, and they
should be grateful they arent swallowing gallons of lead instead.

In loud voices, the Left have made clear they mostly share this
assessment, believing that resisting Nazis by violent means is a
moral good. The calls have grown so loud that the r/Altright
subcommunity on Reddit is preparing for retaliation, starting a
thread devoted to doxxing anyone caught advocating fash-bashing.
Surprisingly, liberals have been sympathetic to the Left here,
savoring the Spencer sucker punch (though there has been plenty
predictable and moronic elementary school chiding that all
violence is equally and identically wrong, be it against vulnerable
minorities or advocates of ethnic cleansing). The justification of
Spencers slugging consists one word: Nazi.. This seems right.

But the coins opposite side is less comfortable to contemplate:

what happens when the first communist or anarchist gets punched
for the world to see? Or worse? Fascisms fear (good) will spur
them to violence (bad) and their justification will be brief:
cCommie.. Will the justification find popular traction?
While socialism has experienced a massive rehabilitation
through Bernies campaign usage (a useful misnomer considering
it escaped the lips of a Keynesian reformer), the words anarchist
and communist remain regrettably tied to images of bombs,
looting, speech suppression, gulags, and Stalins totalitarian cult of
personality. Those conversant with Left politics know better than
to conflate all those images at once outside their historical
contexts, but liberals do not. There exists an education gap which
the Right will undoubtedly exploit to justify inflicting horrible
violence on the Left.

This cannot exist any longer. We need liberal bodies if there is any
hope of mounting meaningful resistance to Trump. We need their
solidarity when violence comes from below and attempted
liquidation comes from above. A Left in its current numbers is
positively fucked without a coalition force.

The problem currently is that most lLeftists loathe liberals. The

reasons are myriad, but there are two relevant animosities to the
discussion at hand.

The first is plainly ideological. If your goal is a dictatorship of the

proletariat, its hard finding common cause with a politics most
closely resembling a moralizing Sorkin drama, celebrating the
importance of rationality and compromise with whatever
motherfucker sits across the aisle. Third Way political rationality,
has not only failed, but actively produced our current Weimar
America. The Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity has never
looked so smug and impotent as it does in 2017. The rRight began
its war the moment Obama stepped into office while Democrats
blinked. Content with the proclaimed moral high ground, they
bemoaned the racism and sexism of the rRight in lieu of producing
useful political achievements. Obama has vacated the office with
the legacy of a stillborn healthcare plan and little else. And yet
there is still no shortage of his apostles, singing the praises of a
figure so transcendent that he has actually vacated human form
and taken on the ethereal form of the divine. Our societys
infantile appetite for nostalgia has accelerated to swallow up the
current moment too, it seems.

Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of future politics, the

hatred also has a Nietzschean flavor, in that the liberal class is
the reactive class. Liberals do not move, but are merely moved by
stronger political forces. Hillary Clinton is the nadir of this
pathetic politics. She was the technocrat par excellence. A lacuna
in a pantsuit. And she lost the most important election in half a
century. Clintons policy positions were hawkish Obama-Xeroxes
(yikes), and her core values were merely the negation of all of
Trumps. A bulwark against fascism and fascism-friendly politics is
no bulwark if it stands on no supports of its own. Trump set the
agenda in the debates, in the media, and now, of course, in the
Oval Office. Trump, with the aid of Goebbels-reincarnate Steve
Bannon, owns the means for producing official, U.S. Government
Signs. The alt-right is crushing the propaganda war, top to
bottom, yet we are still stuck reading vapid Lena Dunham think-
pieces and watching John Oliver mug for political dilettantes,
angry but powerless at what we have all witnessed.

Our anger at their reactivity is correct, but it also should be

directed inward. The Bernie campaign was as close as the Left has
had to a positive vision in like 50 fifty fucking years. And what was
it but a return to New Deal Keynesianism? A recycling of the past
is hardly a bold future. Dont misread me; supporting Bernie was
not wrong and it was a campaign I supported, but Bernie is radical
only in the eyes of the ignorant and the tepid.

So how can we find a vision to articulate and a means to that

vision that moves beyond the liberal media-cage and instead
moves their oafish bodies to our benefit?
Let us look to the current victors, the gruesome twosome of
Bannon/Trump for guidance, but lets do so by taking them up
with and through philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Marshall
McLuhan. Trumps nonstop gaslighting, self-contradiction,
doublespeak, and alternative facts have been discussed and
dissected to death, but few have seen how they connect to produce
power. This may prove useful to us. Ill point you to Ian Alan
Pauls exceedingly insightful, Deleuzian post titled 10 Preliminary
Theses on Trump. All are must-reads for grasping our current
moment, but Ill excerpt a few below (bold emphasis mine).
1. Trumps power is fundamentally virtual in form.
Propose this, suggest that, lie about yesterday, declare the
inevitability of that which is yet to come, retreat from one position
while advancing on two more, contradict oneself, tweet about the
greatest possible number of arbitrary things, attack, provoke, feign
movement, never apologize or restrain oneself, hint at gesture,
sound the dog whistle, appear still, expand interpretations,
proliferate noise, introduce turbulence, obscure predictability in
dense fogs of possibility. Trumps power arises not from any
individual act but from the multiplication of possible
acts.

Call him a bigot. Call him a fascist. Call him an unhinged child at
the controls of nuclear armageddonArmageddon. It makes no
difference. Trump and the alt-right are teflonTeflon to labels. They
embrace Nazism and then distance themselves from the label.
They are fascists one moment, defenders of free speech the next.
Their signs, like their memes, are provisional, nonessential, and
disposable. They are in short, active. They act, the liberals react.
The alt-right produces the fact, liberals moralizing is delivered
after the said fact. Liberals are on the run because they are, once
again, reactive.

If the alt-rights first route finds no purchase, they ditch and

produce new lines of speech. They are Nazis when it suits them,
they are rational when it fails. They are the enemies of PC gone
awry and they then install newer, more insidious forms of speech
control. Speaking out against them invariably elicits moral
denunciation, the only tool of the flaccid identity politic liberal.
The alt-right does not trade in morality, but rather post-ironic
mockery which self-replicates and proliferates. The Right moves
while liberals and the left bark, head cocked in bewildered rage.

Take Steve Bannons quote to the NY Times this past Thursday:

Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Spicer had lost credibility
with the news media, Mr. Bannon chortled. Are you kidding
me? he said. We think thats a badge of honor. Questioning his
integrityare you kidding me? The media has zero integrity,
zero intelligence, and no hard work.
Youre the opposition party, he said. Not the Democratic Party.
Youre the opposition party. The medias the opposition party.

The paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York
Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated, Mr.
Bannon said. They got it 100 percent wrong.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE THE MEDIUM IS THE

MASSAGE, PAY ATTENTION, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASS-
AGE

A cursory search will turn up liberal after liberal spitting fire at

these words, but they dont understand a goddamn thing
happening before them. I would be shocked if Bannon were not
familiar with Marshall McLuhan, but hes obviously well versed in
the lessons, if not the teacher. The words are invective, sure, but
he speaks through the NY Times, like a voodoo wasp infects
and controls a zombified caterpillar. The body is the NY Times,
but Bannon pulls the strings. Just as Trump has done since Day
One of his campaign. In this way, Bannon/Trump controls the
political spectacle, feeding the media what it needs in the form of
polemicized outrage, all the while letting the true message float
through unimpeded. The media is at once his official enemy and
the unofficial trumpeter of his/their war-machine. Trump can say
anything, at any time. He only need be shocking and it is now in
the popular consciousness, and entire fields of possibilities extend
forward from this point. This is infinitely more important than the
message itself. When he speaks, he sparks millions more to repeat
his words, if only in outrage. How many times have you,
personally, discussed grab them by the pussy? How often have
you tweeted about his #FuckingWall?

And liberals can do nothing but react with foaming, useless

mouths, those very mouths acting as the media for his messages. If
you participate in the clamorclamor, then he has already
reterritorialized your tongue.

Pauls Second Thesis:

2. Defending truths against Trump is to mistake the present
battlefield entirely.
Journalists and politicians alike are unable to meaningfully
respond to, resist, or rebuke Trump because they approach
him as something singular and consistent, whereas he
acts multiply and chaotically. They aim to pull down
something which already is, whereas Trump has already departed
from the here and now towards any number of things that could
possibly be instead. While everyone keeps busy defending fragile
shelters of truth, Trump has moved into his golden palace built on
a foundation of a glistening what if?

To understand Trump as a coherent whole with positions,,

beliefs, and values was the first mistake of a media trading in
yesteryears tongue. Trump is not static figure but a mobile,
decentered conduit for atavistic populism. Trumps inconsistency
is not a flaw, it is his central feature. Wherever the winds of fear
and hatred blow, his sails are positioned to ride them to
consolidated authority. He only denies his positional
inconsistencies now because he has not conditioned us yet to
accept the inconsistencies as normal and desirable. Extrapolate his
presidency in two years, and we will have always been at war with
Eurasia. And this will be true not under threat of governmental
force, but because it will be a common shared reality, in the
Rovian sense. They create realities, we live in them.

And this the passivity rearing its head once more. So how do we
stop desperately trying to return service after service and begin
dictating play for ourselves? Perhaps the Right has an answer.
They have historically stolen ideas and tactics from the Left
without a shred of shame. Spencers white identitarianism is the
not-so-funhouse mirror of modern idpol. Alt-right writer Mencius
Moldbugs influential theory of the Cathedral is a
modified Frankfurt School innovation. So let us take a page out of
the Rights playbook by taking a page out of the Rights playbook
(dizzy yet?):

Accelerate the signs.

Resist Trump. Do not normalize him. This is a barely a goal, and

it is certainly not a means. If there is a means, it is to seize our own
negativity, douse it in kerosene, and dance around the flames.
Stop standing against things, because your opponents will always
dictate the territory on which you stand. And stop
standing for things, for that matter. Standing is an immobile
activity. Begin running for, around, and amongst
things. Penetrate the rRight. Post comments amongst them. Call
them cucks and proceed to cuck them, doing so only with the
bare minimum of earnestness. Use their means to push them
around. Masquerade as a rRightist, speak in their tongue, but do
not meet them head on. Skew them a few degrees off course. Get
dirty. You do not derail the train by smashing it head on. Tilt the
rails slightly. Push their cars like a guerilla fighter, then retreat to
the bushes. Do not aim for a decapitation. Aim to be another in a
distributed assault of a thousand, weeping pinhole bleeds.

And here, we circle back to the problem of liberals. Just prior to

Spencers punch, he was in the process of distancing himself from
Neo-Nazis. Spencer understands the moves Ive described above
intimately. Neo-Nazis get punched. But do white identitarians?
This terrain had not been decided until this week. The good news
is that Spencer has been subsequently captured by the sign,
Nazi.. The media outran him and territorialized him as one. In a
rare instance, the media was faster than the alt-right. They own
the narrative on Spencer, at the moment.

At this moment as well, the media and its fawning liberals have
not yet captured communists/anarchists. In fact, the
aforementioned Bernie campaign has given us a head start.
Socialism far outranks fascism in positive associations in the
popular lexicon. But its high time the Left sheds its marriage to
static signs. The sickle and hammer. The Red and Black. Use them
as long as they are useful. Deny them and shed them when they
are not. Put up banners with your comrades and downplay them in
the presence of libs. You cannot win solely on your chosen terms
when you must play with heterogenous political bodies.

We cannot and should not attempt to justify ourselves to liberals

from singular, immobile positions. We must blaze lines of flight
ahead of them. We must capture the initiative by creating our own
realities. Perhaps we should do this in tiny steps and lengthy
bounds simultaneously. Present them five Left narratives and sell
the illusion you have captured the full gamut of options that can be
thought. Neoliberals have had tremenoustremendous success with
this strategy, selling the delirium of the cereal aisle as human
liberation.
You do not radicalize a liberal all at once. Much like the strategy
described above to defeat reactionaries, we should do similarly
with liberals. Appeal to their sense of righteousness, democracy
and free speech. Make them take one step an inch to the left.
Speak like radicals to each other, then speak like liberals to
liberals. Multiply the lines and in time the lines will converge. DO
NOT BE STATIC.

Be at once the one courageous Antifas knuckles and another

identity-less wolf amongst the roaming collective body. The sucker
punch was effective not because it gave Spencer a black eye, but
because we all saw that black eye. A line opened where Nazi-
punching is now possible. We saw it remixed, looped to infinity,
and memed back on itself. Everyone knows it now. Be like Trump
in how you create doors in the bodies of your opposition.
Territorialize enemy spaces. Dialectics are for your dead, stupid
grandfather. There is no antithesis to be formed, or at least none
worth participating in. The Alt-Right as decentered machine has
outwitted us. Its time we decenter our own machine, and let us
stop at nothing to fuel that machine. This is a race against time,
speed, and signs and theyre about to lap us. Best get moving.