What is wrong with you people?

Congratulations on owning the libs. Was it worth it?

Right, I’ve got something to say. It isn’t nice, and I’m not even sure it’s fair, but I’m watching the same news as you and I’m not in the mood to dance around anyone’s ego at this time.It seems to me that we are facing a moral test, and so far the failure rate is alarming.

Have you ever seen someone bomb a test so badly it’s almost heroic? I once knew a kid who got so high before his spoken French exam that he did the whole thing in English with a rrridiculous accent. A more extravagant flunk I have never seen-until today. Today’s test is a lot easier than high school French.

There’s just one question:

You wake up one morning to find a nakedly authoritarian regime running the world’s most powerful country on earth. Culture is becoming violent and vengeful. Crackdowns on immigrants, women and sexual minorities have already begun. You’ve always thought of yourself as a decent, tolerant sort. Do you:

1. Give up. Keep your head down, self-censor and obey in advance.

2. Refuse to normalize this shit. Summon the courage to stick to your principles.

3. Look on the bright side - at least you got to own the libs!

I feel like this one ought to be easy. So I’m genuinely shocked to see so many of self-appointed guardians of the enlightenment flame, however cautiously…. celebrating? Since November, when it became clear that Cheeto Mussolini was coming back for seconds, my feeds have been flooded with recent ex-liberals rehashing the same takes they’ve stammered for years - over and over, as if they’re desperate to believe that they made the right call here, that they’re still in the world where the most significant threat to civil society is cancel culture. As if it still made any sense to roleplay a public sphere where the greatest danger to democracy is woke kids being dicks on the internet.

What’s more, it turns out that woke kids with their pronouns and their protests are apparently to blame for provoking this hard-right takeover in the first place. That seems very convenient for the hard right and their apologists, in the same way that when a woman wearing a short skirt is held responsible for provoking sexual violence, it tends to work out well well for rapists. Look what we made them do.

Yascha Mounk was among the many gloaters apparently excited to see Team Social Justice take damage that is “to a significant degree self-inflicted.

‘A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world…has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.”

This is an accurate pen portrait of the American hard right. But Mounk is not describing the hard right. He is describing everyone to the left of himself, with the special venom that most reactionary or ‘gray’ liberals still reserve for whatever it is that the young and zealous are doing today that makes them feel stupid, uncool or, worse, guilty. I say ‘most’ because there are significant exceptions. Scott Alexander, in his excellent endorsement of Kamala Harris, tried to persuade his many readers that while, even for him, the 2024 election sometimes felt like a personal psychodrama between himself and the straw social justice warrior in his head:

“Our first priority is to punish the bright-line violation, lest civilization collapse…I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”

A chilling number of influential thinkers - many of them to the left of Alexander - who have yet to demonstrate a shred of the same foresight and integrity.

Part of the problem is that the language of the new right feels uncomfortably familiar. That’s no coincidence - that substantial chunks of the Trumpist and European neo-nationalist propaganda catalogue are straight-up plagiarised from the axioms of angry ex-liberals. The obsession with keeping trans people out of women’s sports, the panic about policing school bathrooms, and the outrage at the mere existence of non-binary people - it’s all hijacked from the so-called ‘Gender Critical’ movement that has been one of Britain’s biggest recent cultural exports since, well, Harry Potter. The fixation on ‘cancel culture’, the recasting of social justice activists as the ‘intolerant left’ who are determined to destroy free speech , the demonisation of ‘woke ideology’ - all of this was road-tested by mainstream reactionaries before the far right decided to ride it to victory.

Obviously, it’s got to be uncomfortable watching the far right make enormous gains using the same arguments you’ve been making for years. I can only imagine how mortifying it must be to hear the words you’ve spoken twisted by demagogues to make a grave for democracy. It would be crass to point out that some of us really have been sounding the alarm about this for a long time, so I’m not going to - firstly because we don’t have time, and secondly because, as mentioned, a fascist takeover is not the time to act like a smug, gloating prat.

The other major flavour of cope this week is the sudden, cloying call for unity. This week, just as the entire world was asking itself if they just saw the world’s richest man usher in the hard right president he bought with a goddamn Nazi salute, the exact institutions that are supposed to be against this sort of thing started spaffing out this sort of oily nonsense:

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this is a bad time to turn to terrified members of marginalized communities who are having their human rights flayed in realtime by a cabal of unhinged disaster nationalists and give them a lecture about peace, love and understanding. Please. To insist on community healing at a time like this is to summon the sort of rapid, panicked repair that leaves a culture scarred and twisted. Besides - why is it always our side that has to build the bridges? Will the far right be joining us? Perhaps the tiki-toytown stormtroopers who marched through Charlottesville chanting Jews will not replace us or the mewling murdertwinks hounding women with your body, my choice forever would like to reach out the hand of friendship to people like you and me? Or perhaps not. For months now, my mentions have been a particular binfire of transphobia and promises that I’m about to get what’s coming to me. We can talk about healing when anyone to the right of Oprah shows the slightest sign inclination to participate. We can have the conversation about healing when the far right stops stabbing.

Meanwhile, if you’ve already decided that what you actually want is a quiet life unburdened by self-scrutiny, have the decency not to sing a song of tolerance while you’re doing the wimp-out shuffle. Besides, you can’t placate people who’ve spent eight years huffing the chemtrails of weaponized resentment by giving them what they say they want. That’s not what they want. That’s no fun. The major promise of disaster nationalism and necropatriarchy is precisely the pleasure of hating. They want to win. They want the rest of us to lose. They want to see it hurting. And quite a lot of people who should know better are joining in the sadistic victory binge. Let’s check back in six months, shall we? See if it was worth it.

I understand the instinct to crawl into a blanket fort of convenient fictions. But it’s been less than a week, and team Trump is already pumping out a firehose of far-right shock-and-awe edicts designed to set the tone for years to come. When the priest who spoke at the inauguration and begged Trump’s freshly-fledged, deranged aviary of hawks, vultures and wingnuts to show ‘mercy’ to minorities, An actual Republican senator responded by telling the world that the - I cannot this stress this enough- priest should be in ‘the first wave of deportations’.

What is it going to take? At this rate, Skeletor could be cackling over the nuclear codes with his best pal Lex Luthor and we’d be instantly blasted with podcasts about how the armies of darkness have legitimate concerns. Gargamel could be throwing rallies on the mall and some beflanneled bloviator on Substack would point out that, well, papa Smurf ran an uninspiring campaign.

But admitting the plain fact that the far right are now in charge, that they are already a far bigger danger than you anticipated - well, that would feel like weakness. It would mean spitting up a bit of that redpill and admitting that you could stand to maybe adjust your priorities. That yes, we can all agree that even though social justice warriors and left-wing gender weirdoes can be super annoying - I’m both, and I’ll cop to it - you might, maybe, have been a little bit intolerant yourself.

Instead, I’m watching a phalanx of ex-liberals morphing into ideological preppers. They are building bunkers full of heat-sealed heuristics. Stocking them with shelf-stable fallacies. Old certainties and major cities may be on literal fire, but you can last a good few years with your head in the ground swallowing down dried rations of women have gone too far with a side helping of you can’t even say woman these days washed down with a tall glass of what if the left were the real fascists all along.

And that is rank, repulsive cowardice.

And I’m qualified to say so because I have been there. I know what it’s like to be monstered by the left. I know what it’s like to be afraid that you’ll make one mistake and pay for it forever. I know just how priggish and sadistic members of some activist groups get when they get a little bit of power and haven’t unpacked their own trauma. I’ve been cancelled multiple times, over many years. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t fair, and all the rape and death threats from the far right didn’t hurt half as much as a single day being the whipping boy for my own team. Especially when you’re also getting it from ex-liberals and apparent progressives. It’s one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. I get it.

What I don’t get is why I’m expected to change my politics based on who, at any given moment, is flattering my ego. Granted, I’ve enjoyed the dubious privilege of having had almost everyone yelling at me at some point in fifteen years of public punditry. But I just can’t grok how it’s logical or ethically sustainable to, for example, to respond to accusations of transphobia by becoming a full time transphobe. I hate it when strangers accuse me of bigotry on the internet, especially when I actually made an embarrassing mistake and am trying so hard, you guys - but I also understand that being on the receiving end of bigotry is objectively worse. That in the grown-up world, the one where we take basic responsibility for how we treat others, being called out for racist behavior is not an equivalent social harm to systemic racism. That in the grown-up world, good is not a thing you are. It’s a thing you do.

Which is, again, why I’m comfortable asking anyone still telling themselves that their enemy is ‘cancel culture’ what the hell is wrong with them. Matt Taibbi was a legend when I started out in journalism. I watched him speak at Occupy. I lapped up his delicious takedowns of the world’s biggest investment bank as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ And now, when the biggest fanged sucker of them all is rending the ventricles of US democracy, what has he got to say? ‘Ding dong, the cult is dead.’

Owning the libs is not a sustainable political program. I am sure it’s satisfying on some level to watch the biggest bullies in the playground going hogwild hurting your chosen enemies, without having to bother with sophistry or the scruples of conscience. I am not going to have a debate today on whatever technicalities allow let sleep at night, when we have all seen certain parties do nothing but attack trans people since that one time someone asked for their pronouns in class. I’m done engaging with those stupid excuses. None of us is the protagonist of life, and nobody is born with perfect politics. If you don’t want to be called a bigot, don’t act like one. Simple as that. And maybe you’ll still make a mistake and get unfairly yelled at even though you’re trying super hard to do the right thing. It happens. It’s happened to me. But there are ways to defend your self-worth that don’t involve abandoning your principles.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I lack the requisite spite glands. All I know is that I find petty revenge boring, and I’ve made enough damfool errors since I started blogging at the age of 21 to know that it really, actually, isn’t very hard to put on your big boy pants and admit when you’ve fucked up. Right now we’re all facing a moral test - but you get to retake it as many times as you like. You can start standing up for for the basic principles of tolerance, fairness, human rights and the rule of law at literally any point. That’s always going to be brave.

I know that the Metoo movement is still so much scarier for a certain sort of man than the sound of approaching jackboots. But, chaps - and this is the first time I’ve said this and actually meant it- fuck your feelings. The fascists are here. They have showed us exactly who they are. Now everyone else gets to decide who they want to be.