You don’t have “common sense” if you’re a transphobe. What you have is a gullible mind. The modern wave of transphobia was orchestrated by Epstein to take the heat off the bougeroisie for their crimes against children. You are literally playing right into the hand of the pedophile class if you buy into it. You’re a useful idiot to these monsters. It’s right there in the Epstein emails. Your being played for a fool by monsters.
Trans people have existed for all of documented history; all the way back to the clay tablets in ancient Sumer. Trans history is older than the Bible (which has nothing to say on trans people.) Many trans adults today report having known they were trans as young as 5 or 6 years old, long before they had access to the internet or anyone to influence them. Many even had conservative parents who would actively discourage them from discovering their true selves. All available evidence shows that trans people are born that way. All the internet has done has made it easier for people suffering from gender dysphoria (a painful neurological condition that results from a brain gender mismatch with that of one’s body) to understand what they are experiencing and seek help from a medical professional to undergo transition. Transition is the only treatment that has ever proven effective at treating gender dysphoria. Yes, everything you’re thinking of has been tried and utterly failed. Left untreated, gender dysphoria is often a fatal condition. So what do you expect someone born that way to do if you don’t give them access to the life saving medical treatment they need to survive?
Your life doesn’t suck because trans people exist. Your life sucks because that same Epstein class, the bougeroisie, are exploiting your labor and controlling the government through lobbying, manipulation, and other forms of bribery to crush the working class. They are your enemy, not the innocent trans woman who just wants to live her life in peace and not be harassed and she’s just trying to go to the bathroom like a normal person. I guarantee you have more in common with your local trans people than any of the billionaire pedophiles that tricked you into hating your fellow working class comrades.
True common sense would see you fighting against capitalism which is the actual cause of your problems. True common sense would be to reject the lies of the Epstein class that are designed to divide the working class against itself. The culture war is a distraction from the class war. Like it or not, you are a victim of the class war and these lies are just one more way that they get you. Don’t fall for the bullshit. Stop being so gullible. Fight capitalism, the true cause of your problems, not your fellow working class people just trying to survive.
AnCaps Don’t Actually Understand Capitalism
The fundamental thing that AnCaps don’t seem to understand is that the government is doing the bidding of the bougeroisie. What little rights they think they have under capitalism are just concessions the bougeroisie gives them to keep them complacent and docile to being exploited, and give it all a veneer of legitimacy. If there wasn’t any government to buffer us from the raw exploitation of the bougeroisie, we’d be in a hyper-feudalist slave state entirely controlled by the owning class at every level. You know, exactly what they mistakenly believe communism is. (When it’s actually the most democratic system possible and the only one capable of actually giving real meaningful rights to the workers that aren’t just concessions, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.)
The whole concept of volunteerism sounds great on paper but it goes out the window in 0.5 of a femtosecond the moment anyone starts growing in wealth and power like all market competition inevitably leads to. Once there’s a power imbalance, there’s no longer voluntary actions. “Work for me or starve” isn’t a voluntary transaction, it’s coercion. You can pretend you could protect yourself from that with guns but you fail to realize that without a government buffer, the bougeroisie just own the weapons of war directly and can use them however they see fit. You’ll be bringing a gun to a drone fight.
What they also seem to fail to understand is that without a government, you can’t have a stable currency. You might say you’ll use crypto but it only takes one look at the volatility of any cryptocurrency to realize that will never work as a day to day currency. (Not to mention all the other problems with crypto such as energy cost.) You might say you’ll use gold, but gold is a resource needed for industrial applications. It isn’t a neutral resource. Not to mention, you’re just setting up the owner of the gold mine (or whoever takes over Fort Nox) to own everything.
No matter how you cut the cake, anarcho-capitalism doesn’t work even on paper. For how much these people pretend that communism only works on paper, they can’t even come up with a theory that gets that far.
And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fancy living in Rapture.
Epstein was Always Inevitable Under Capitalism
The Epstein class, apart from wanting you to forget their haneous crimes, also wants you not to question the system that not only made it possible, but inevitable; and that’s just what you should not do.
Capitalism by its very nature creates massive wealth inequality. That’s how it works. When you have private ownership of the means of production, those owners will inevitably become gluttonously wealthy off of the poverty of everyone else. Exploitation creates inequality, because that’s what it is.
Capitalism cannot be reformed. Setting aside for a moment that all concessions the working class wins will inevitably be rolled back by the owning class sooner or later, when you have competition, you have winners and losers. Eventually those winners become monopolies that concentrate all the wealth and power into the hands of a tiny minority. When that happens, you’ve effectively created market feudalism, if not full on fascism. The kind of wealth and power inequality capitalism creates, damages the brains of the owning class, burning out the center of the brain that makes you human and capable of rational thought; the center responsible for empathy. Without that center functioning is no surprise they engage in monstrous behavior. The examples are numerous if you do even a little bit of research. For the sake of your sanity I’m not going to list it here.
If we ever want a society free of the Epsteins of the world, we need to be absolutely certain our societal system does not allow wealth or power to become so concentrated. We need a system that is permanently decentralized and federated and where individuals, especially minorities and the vulnerable, can have their needs met concerns heard and addressed in a timely manner, and their rights respected. We need a system where nobody is in a position to disregard ethics without consequences. We need a system where the kind of structural failures that Epstein and his buddies took advantage of are simply impossible. That’s not something capitalism is capable of. So for the sake of humanity, we must leave it behind.
Transphobia is Literally Nazi Propaganda
Before they went after any ethnic group, the Nazis went after trans people. The primary target of their famous book burning were trans healthcare books. They destroyed trans healthcare centers. Trans people were among the first victims of the Holocaust.
The modern anti-trans hate speech which is being spread by fascist hate groups, is this dark chapter in history repeating itself. This is happening again partially because the Western imperialists intentionally left it out of the history books, and partially because trans people are among the most marginalized communities under capitalism; they’re an easy target for fascists when they need to invent an enemy to justify seizing power.
If you find yourself agreeing with the Nazis on what sort of people you should hate, it’s a sign you need to rethink every thought, assumption and belief you’ve ever had your entire life. Try again and this time be better. Lacking a functional moral compass isn’t something you should be proud of.
Why Fascism Has Come to America
The I.C.E. gestapo are a product of capitalism. If you hate what I.C.E. is doing, you have to also recognize its root cause in capitalism or you’re focusing on the symptom but ignoring the disease. Correctly identifying the root cause of the a disease is absolutely necessary before the disease can be treated.
“Capitalism as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.”–Albert Einstein
Capitalism is a plague on society. Like a cancerous growth, it is compelled to continually expand despite the harm this causes on its host. Thanks to the contradictions inherent in capitalism, inflation is inevitable. (Unlike under communism where it’s generally non-existent.) Thanks to inflation, a business under capitalism must have continuous growth in order to survive. However, we do not live on an infinite planet, and unequal exchange is only sustainable for a finite period of time. Eventually there’s nowhere else to expand and the entire system begins to collapse.
It’s because of this inevitable failure inherent in capitalism that we are where we are. Prices continue to rise while wages have been stagnant for decades. Eventually the working class will have no choice but to revolt or perish.
The capitalist class knows this, but rather than give up one rotten cent of their wealth and power, the bourgeoisie will turn to fascism, just as they have in the past. Wealth and power changes a person and makes them physically incapable of seeing reason.
The Epstein case is a symptom of the corruption that’s inherent in capitalism. When you have so much wealth that you’re no longer living a normal human life it changes your brain in such a way that you lose touch with humanity, in effect you stop being human altogether in any meaningful sense. It’s been documented by scientists.
Unfortunately, not only is fascism evil in terms of the toll in human life, but it is also entirely incapable of resolving the contradictions inherent in capitalism so it too is doomed to fail, but not without an extremely high toll in human lives. It blames the failures of capitalism on scapegoat minorities, the more marginalized the better. It seeks to divide the working class against itself by distracting the working class from the class war with culture wars and invents an enemy to justify grabbing all that power. “Look over there,” the fascist says while he robs you blind and takes away your freedom.
Fascism has never been overthrown by nonviolent means. Despite Western propaganda minimizing the contributions of the USSR and overblowing that of the Western imperialists, the primary driving force behind the defeat of Fascism the last time around were the communists.
It’s worse than just taking more credit then due though, because the USA actively imported, sheltered, and integrated literal Nazis into government positions in Operation Paperclip. As you can imagine, switching flags does not magically make a person grow a moral compass, adopt better values, nor absolve them of crimes, so they brought those ideals with them.
However, fascist ideals didn’t start in America with Operation Paperclip. In fact, the Nazis studied America’s evil Jim Crow laws for ideas on how to put their racist ideology into practice. Ironically, even the Nazis found some of the policies around in America too barbaric even for them. So fascism isn’t new to America, it’s always been here waiting just under the surface. (And for many minorities, always was.)
So what’s next? What can you do? Luckily, you don’t have to guess, there’s already a guidebook. Put in simplest terms, educate, organize, resist, in that order.
Like it or not, the only force capable of permanently putting Fascism in the ground is communism, as it is uniquely equipped to address the contradictions which leads to its rise. Despite the propaganda, when studied scientifically it was proven to be more capable of providing for the general welfare than any other economic system. There’s a reason the Soviet economy was expected to overtake that of the US. That’s why Regan ordered the CIA to sabotage it. Capitalism couldn’t compete, so it cheated.
Only a planned economy owned by the working class is capable of keeping the corrupting market forces at bay. When you have markets, you have competition. When you have competition, you have winners and losers. This means that consolidation of wealth and the power that comes with it is always going to be inevitable when the profit motive survives.
However, the bourgeoisie are never idle. Billionaires spend millions on anti-communist propaganda annually and works tirelessly to keep the working class divided. The McCarthyist era especially did a lot of damage to the psyche on the working class in America. This is going to be an uphill battle but it is absolutely necessary.
Therefore, education comes first. If the people don’t understand what’s happening and why, they are doomed to reactionary behavior. Raising class consciousness, studying the science of dialectical materialism as well as history, and uniting the working class ideologically is a must before any other action can take place.
Organizing comes next, and the majority of this is going to come in the form of alternative structures of power and resources. A resistance that has no leadership or supplies cannot succeed. For a resistance to succeed it needs the backbone to support it and that comes in the form of a strong network providing the material conditions for success.
When I talk about organizing, I’m not saying to immediately start forming a militia. You need to start organizing by structures of support outside the control of the bourgeoisie. Nothing else can move forward without the material conditions that makes it possible.
I highly suggest you get a copy of Trotsky’s book Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It. Read it and pass it along. If we get the working class educated and organized, we stand an actual chance. If not, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better and as history shows us, a lot of people won’t survive. Without communism, we’re all eventually doomed to own nothing and depression.
“Not a wheel turns, not a phone rings, not a light bulb shines without the kind permission of the working class! Once this enormous power is mobilised, no force on earth can stop it.” –Karl Marx
“He’s not a TRUE Christian”
Here’s the problem with that often cited logical fallacy of “but he’s not a TRUE Christian”.
The expression is not “a few bad apples are really annoying” or “one bad apple makes the others look bad.” It’s “one bad apple SPOILS the bunch.” That’s why farmers get rid of bad apples. They don’t defend bad apples. They don’t give bad apples excuses. They don’t let bad apples represent their farm. They certainly wouldn’t select for them or justify their decay. They throw them out to protect the good ones. They turn them into compost. They make sure that the rot and disease they carry doesn’t come near the good ones and potentially contaminate them.
If these religions want our respect, they need to earn it by showing us they actually care about morality. No more of this shallow moral posturing while gaslighting us about what we see happen with our own eyes. Until they do, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume the whole barrel is spoiled, and the farmer doesn’t care.
If someone is transphobic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, or espouses any other such barbaric anti-human ideologies, if someone engages in criminal behavior like pedophilia, shows support for exploitation, or preaches fascist rhetoric, you exile them. You make it absolutely clear to them and everyone else that they are unwelcome. You make it unmistakable that they are not part of the group in any way. You go out of your way to make them unable to carry your flag or pretend to be part of your in-group at all. A failure to do this makes you an accomplice. If they really were “not a true Christian”, there would never be any reason to have to jump to justifying it with a logical fallacy in the first place. If they really weren’t, you would have already gone so out of your way to make that clear that there would never have been any doubt in the first place. You would have taken care of it long before any outsider ever heard of it. Your silence tells us the truth of what’s really in your heart. Why do you only care when someone on the outside has to get involved and criticize you over it?
There’s an old Christian hymn that goes “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Well, if that’s the measure, then there’s not a single “true Christian” alive today because the people who carry that flag most prominently do not exhibit love, and the rest seem content to let those bad apples spoil the rest. The whole barrel is spoiled, and the farmer doesn’t care.
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
― Naomi Shulman
Note: The phrasing of this was based on a meme I found about police violence, but it applies equally to any in group that defends or excuses their toxic members instead of ousts them with extreme prejudice.
Supporting ICE is Treason, Actually
It doesn’t matter what illegal BS they passed or who signed it. It doesn’t matter who ordered it or why. It doesn’t matter if they are even actually citizens it not. The Constitution takes precedence and it’s very clear. Nobody, not even the president, can override it.
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” –due process clause
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” –Forth Amendment
Note it says “person”/“people” and not “citizen(s)”. It applies to everyone regardless of what arbitrary paperwork they do/don’t have.
Ice is violating the highest law in the land which makes them criminals. Without due process, what they are doing is just a crime. Since many of the people they’ve abducted have proven to be citizens, and they’re carrying out a military-esque invasion of communities, that makes them legally treasonous to the country. Therefore aiding them in any way makes you an accomplice to treason.
Debunking Common Capitalist Apologetics
“Communism is when no food.”
This is an incredibly stupid meme. Honestly probably the worst.
It’s based on a few cherry picked extremely exaggerated accidental famines that happened while brand new communist countries were still recovering from war and being subjected to extreme sanctions. There’s often accusations that these famines were engineered on purpose but no actual substantial evidence has ever been provided that this was the case. All citations of such, if you actually bother to follow them, end up ending with capitalist propaganda outlets, never any actual substantial proof. When someone did decide to dig into the actual data for one of them, it turns out he found substantial evidence proving the exact opposite was the case. (ISBN 978-0578445533) Were mistakes made? Sure. They were figuring it out as they went along. However pretending that was somehow an intrinsic component of communism or that it was in any way intentional is at best extremely dishonest.
Worse, the meme completely ignores that when actually studied scientifically based on the actual data, socialism was proven to provide for the people better than capitalism. (https://doi.org/10.2307/3342145)
Worse still, it pretends capitalism isn’t guilty of starving people. The US lets 13,690 of it’s own people starve to death per year despite sending five million tons of food straight to the landfill. That’s the very definition of artificial scarcity. Further, not only do famines happen under capitalism, but capitalism has actually demonstrably engineered famines on purpose (this time with plenty of evidence). The British Empire engineered no less than 11 famines in India alone between 1770-1943 and right now, NATO is actively engineering a famine in Gaza. (Along with a full on genocide.)
“The rich create jobs.”
WRONG! Market demand creates jobs. The capitalist class just leeches off from the labor that does the work to fulfill that need and pockets the surplus value instead of letting the people who actually did the fucking work reap the benefits of their labor. If there is a need to fill there is already a job. It doesn’t matter how the economy is organized or who benefits from the surplus value of that labor. The job already exists because there is a need to fill.
“Poverty is the default state.”
WRONG! This hasn’t been true since the industrial revolution. (Likely longer.) Thanks to industrial output, we now produce more goods and services than the population can actually use. This is called “surplus value” and it’s one of the core contradictions of capitalism. It’s one of the many reasons why an unplanned economy is inherently bad and one of the primary driving forces behind inflation and artificial scarcity. In an industrialized nation, poverty is a policy choice. They could provide and distribute enough goods and services for everyone, they just choose not to. To the capitalist, if you can’t be exploited for your labor, your life has no value, which is why capitalism is inherently immoral. Arbitrarily deciding the value of some human lives is greater than others is how genocides happen.
Intellectual Property Is Violence Actually
The concept of intellectual property as defined by capitalism is the strangest mind virus that seems to have infected pretty much everyone and has had the most damaging effect on culture. Why have most people just rolled over and accepted it as normal? Being made a petty tyrant over an idea by default backed by a threat of violence from the state just because you were the one who remixed them is actually pretty fucked up actually. It’s just one more way that bougeroise society takes for capital what rightfully belongs to the entire collective.
“Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?” –Brennan Mulligan
The concept that ideas themselves can even be owned, bought, and sold is so capitalist violence coded. But if you dare challenge that idea, the knee-jerk response is always “don’t steal from artists” or whatever as if not being instantly declared a dictator just because you did a little art that’s just enough of a remix that it fits the legal definition of “original” is somehow theft. It’s only seen that way because we force artists to be essentially creative factory workers in the capitalist system, forcing them to have to market and sell their creations like they’re just a pair of sneakers at Walmart. That’s actually pretty abusive honestly. We ought to just structure society in such a way that they’re just supported by default without having to prostitute their creations, and then the need to be made a dictator over ideas won’t be necessary. It’s incredibly ironic that it’s become so prevalent even among scientists considering it’s definitively unscientific. It’s now possible in academia to plagiarize yourself. That’s a concept so patiently absurd that it really shows just how ridiculous the entire thing is and anyone who acts like it is normal, sane, or makes any kind of sense deserves to be mocked and possibly committed. I mean who’s even the victim here? They say “Self-plagiarism misleads your readers by presenting previous work as completely new and original.” but there’s no such thing as new and original. That’s not how reality works and you’re delusional if you think it is.
Checkout the documentary series “Everything is a Remix” for a great breakdown of what I’m taking about complete with examples, but in short the human brain is physically incapable of purely original thought. Literally all it ever does is remix things it encounters. The entire idea of an “original work” is based on the superstitious concept of divine inspiration, something that isn’t backed up by reality. Just because you personally can’t identify all the elements that were remixed to make a thing, doesn’t mean they came from nowhere. That’s a logical fallacy called “argument from personal incredulity.” True novelty does not exist in nature. Life itself is entirely built on copying. The DNA of the parents gets copied and remixed to make something new out of something old. There’s nothing new under the sun because truly new isn’t physically possible. To pretend that it is is delusional.
In a collectivist society where the means of production are collectively owned (a mode of production that has been scientifically proven to be superior) the intellectual production must so too be collectively owned even if that production must by its very nature be a product of an individual. We must stop using the violence of the state to enforce dictatorship over ideas. It was always wrong, but they used the plight of the way artists are exploited by capitalism to trick you into thinking it was normal. The opposite used to be normal for most of human history. It was called the folk tradition. It’s how cultures, religions, and society organization itself formed. Pretending that it’s somehow bad is intellectually dishonest and one of the core contradictions of capitalism.
People are fighting back on a small scale. The growing copyleft movement is pushing back against the violent narrative of the capitalists. Things like creative commons and FOSS software licenses like the GPL are ways that people push back against the violence. But so long as we live under the violent domination of capitalism, those methods will unfortunately always be a way to opt out rather than having to opt in to choosing violence just because you created something. It is worth noting though that the entire backbone of the Internet was built on collectivist labor utilizing copyleft licensing. Pretty much every major website and service runs its server infrastructure on Linux; a copyleft operating system. They do so because it’s better. No matter what they might try to tell you, collectivist labor makes better products.
The next time someone tries to tell you that when the proletariat copies from the stuff the capitalist class have metaphorically written their names on with a sharpie is somehow bad, remind them that they wouldn’t even be alive today if their DNA wasn’t pirated and remixed from that of their ancestors.
Appendix: Have you ever heard the accusation “white Americans have no culture”? This is the reason at its heart; culture is a form of collective remixing. A variation on a theme that a group of people develop over time due to their physical proximity. However when you build metaphorical fences around everything and say “this is mine, you have have it” backed by a promise of state violence, it’s pretty hard for such a thing to actually develop naturally.
Collectivist Labor is Demonstrably Better
As a software developer, I’ve long known the power of collectivism. Free and Open Source Software that’s community developed by non-profit organizations forms the backbone of the internet. Pretty much every major corporation runs their backbone on it because it’s demonstrably better. With rare exception, pretty much every major website runs on servers that run Linux, an operating system developed primarily by volunteers working on it because they want to, not because there’s any profit to be made. The idea that we need the profit motive to be innovative or productive has always been a lie and the proof is sitting in front of all of us every single time we go online. Companies are all too happy to exploit the fruits of collective labor, but rarely turn around and offer the same back. Microsoft will run Azure on a backbone of Linux all day long but they will never open source Windows even though free and open source development would rapidly improve Windows, because it isn’t about making the best product, it’s all about control. It’s market fascism. Windows isn’t the dominant operating system on computers because it’s better, it’s because they spend billions of dollars making sure it comes pre-loaded on every computer you can buy so you don’t have any choice. They have a history of choking their competition out of the market too. Just look at what they did to Novell. They were hit with an anti-trust lawsuit over it and lost, but the punishment was basically a slap on the wrist. Also Apple isn’t real competition. They bailed out Apple years ago under the agreement that they wouldn’t actually compete, and they’d let you install Windows on your Mac. That’s why every Mac comes pre-loaded with BootCamp, which lets you install Windows but they’ve made it increasingly hard to install Linux.
Apple is the DNC of the software industry. It’s controlled opposition to give you the illusion of choice while refusing to actually compete with Microsoft directly. The proof is sitting there in every install of MacOS from the first boot. BootCamp comes pre-loaded to let you install Windows, but it doesn’t let you install Linux, and they’ve made it increasingly harder to sneak around and install it anyway, while they actively go out of their way to keep people from using MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which is artificially inflated in price over the competition. The illusion of choice is sold to you at a premium so only the affluent can get access to it.
If you think that Linux is behind Windows just because of market share, how do you explain Android? Companies rushed to support a Linux-based brand new platform with literally no market share when it came from a giant corporation with a history of questionable policies. It isn’t about market share, it’s about prejudice. Linux is the greatest proof in the pudding example that grassroots community organized labor is greater than corporate labor. They’ll run Linux all day long on servers that the public doesn’t get to see directly, because it’s demonstrably better than the corporate made closed-source choices, but they generally won’t run it on production machines in the office that the average worker or customer gets to see, even when it would actually save them massive amounts of money in licensing fees and maintenance overhead, because they don’t want employees to start getting ideas.