What We Are Doing is Not Working
I started getting into politics in 2001. I was 15. It was a combination of listening to a lot of punk rock music of the era, and then pairing that with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to my inexperienced teenage brain, it was validation that, "Those bands are actually right. Our president is a warmonger."
I don't disagree with that assessment today. But in retrospect, I admit that the way I got into politics was loaded with a certain bias. And moreover, it was unique to a time period where the common liberal perspective was a more rational perspective. But things change with time a lot more than you expect them to.
That isn't to say that I've flipped to the right but I've certainly flipped.
In college I read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, which is a story set during the Spanish Civil War. Prior to that I was very inclined towards libertarian socialism and other types of anarchist thinkers which are critical of hierarchy, capital, church, and state. But after reading that book and mixed with my life experiences as a young adult, I started to see anarchism for what it is: a pipedream for people who prefer fantasy over reality. In practice, it would be rule by the mob with a short lifespan leading up to being crushed and overpowered by a virulent and organized military force.
Something I would say commonly back then was, "Anarchists are great at identifying real problems but horrible at good solutions." For years after that I leaned more into social democracy and less into radical leftism. But it was all theoretical. I was only familiar with real left extremists from these stories and from other parts of the world or in what felt like the distant past. I had never interacted with any in real life and if I did, they were intellectual sort of thinkers -- not radicalized peons thrown to the wolves and ready to die for some imaginary revolution concocted to power grab. That didn't exist in my world.
The American left during this time period -- and the western left in general -- were very reasonable. So of course going through college I voted for Obama. I voted for Bernie Sanders. I voted for Hillary with disappointment that she was our candidate.
The first Trump presidency is when I began to change again, not in the sense that I flipped from my political position, but I realized my "activism" and "campaigning" on the Internet might be doing harm.
In those years I was still a prolific Facebook user. I'm not sure when the Cambridge Analytica thing came out but the realization that my outrage might have been intentionally prompted by what people eventually would blame on Russian state actors didn't sit well with me and I started to be quiet on the Internet about politics.
I say it like this epiphany came to me immediately but it was after years of Internet outrage about the president and being as big of a thorn as I could possibly be to people that supported him because I thought that was justified in fighting back and winning people over to the cause against him. Meanwhile people from high school and college were dividing up by which type of political posts they enjoy. I thought at the time, "Good riddance." But it eventually climaxed into feeling like I was a pawn in someone's game and fundamentally that what we were doing was not working.
When Biden won I had already become well disciplined in keeping my political opinions off social media even though I still felt strongly about them daily. I didn't celebrate publicly when he won but was quietly relieved and thought we would just go back to how the country was before. He wasn't a great candidate but he was fine. There would be room for better candidates in the future I thought.
During the Biden and covid years, I started to relax from thinking about politics as much. It was exhausting to do and I thought it was a good time to take a break from it. At first it was nice to just enjoy how popular liberal views were in the country again and especially in mainstream online spaces. But many leftists decided to make it difficult to enjoy: again, not something I put together until later, probably because I was more worried about my mother's health during covid than about politics.
That is jumping ahead though.
In 2017 or so I reconnected with an old friend from high school (one who I originally got into punk rock with) who was getting into cybersecurity after retiring from the military. We had always had a respect as teens for open source culture back when we were just forum brats and he told me that some people he had met were associated with DEFCON and there was an exclusive Mastodon instance that I could be invited to. By this time the frustration with social media was getting moving and I was ready to jump on to that.
It's not that the individual people who were involved in this community were bad people. However it was a window into a world that I would fairly call an echo chamber. As long as such a place wasn't the only window into the world I had, it seemed like the problems associated with it would be manageable and the perceived benefits outweighed. But the reality was to be involved, you're surrounded by people who are actively building a bubble around themselves; they're creating a new way to talk that you have to emulate or someone is going to call you out, accuse you of using "harmful language" that triggers someone, and you're going to have to submit and prove that you're one of them or the mob is going to throw you out.
Some of the things that could be considered harmful included: talking about food, pictures of faces that have eye contact, any graphic media that doesn't include a description of what's in the image for the visually impaired. They regularly joked about the community being a cult but over time I began to realize it had striking similarities with a cult. If those people involved read this post, they would shun me exactly like my 93 year old mother's aunt when she found out I don't believe in her religion.
In a normal context you could easily say, "These people are kind of crazy, I'm outta here." But this was where I was reconnecting with my old high school friend who lived across the world. I did not want to leave and just wrote it off as, "These people mean well, they're just eccentric misfits and not everyone here has the best social skills. I can't judge them too hard for that since I fit the profile in my own ways."
That profile of being socially different -- often crass -- and not understanding all the rules of modern leftists paired with being straight, white, male, and cisgender made me... It felt like at times my presence was only tolerated because it was nice to have a pet dog who rolls over on command. I guess they were always suspicious of me because I had trained myself to stop using social media as a political dumping ground so to everyone who didn't know me I was just a techbro from Texas who might need another round of purity testing to make sure I belong.
Keep in mind, these were not thoughts I had at the time. It was more like, "I'm sorry, of course you're right. I didn't mean it that way. I've always believed..."
In general, seeing the open source world turn into a place where people I've respected over the years for their work on big projects like the Python programming language get pushed out of the community because they don't exude the new ideology with every step they take was immediately upsetting to me. I've seen people get banned just for asking, "Is it fair that we're banning this person?" When the decisions are made by people who are thinking about their social status more than any positive impact on the world for other people it does not sit right with me. If they do care about the impact on the world, it's only the feeling they go to bed with at night believing they are doing the right thing and not what the consequences of their collective action really is.
Another key event that influenced me was the release of the Harry Potter video game. For the record, I've never cared about Harry Potter. I read the books many years ago just because I was curious and would often read anything. But I largely didn't understand the phenomenon it was with kids my age. I had no interest in the game. But around the time it was released, I was involved in a gaming community where everyone collectively followed and talked about all the gaming news.
The main demographic of the community was Asian Americans and their real life friends plus random Internet people who played the same games. Most of this group is the type of neoliberal who does the stock market and is fairly into finances and probably leans left mainly because they can't identify with Trump not because they're sympathetic to economic leftism. However many leftists were present in the space despite most people having at least one foot in the real world.
When the Harry Potter game released, there was a massive push of vocal people that wanted to shut down anyone from talking about Harry Potter. Some people tried to do the, "Yeah, I don't really agree with the author but I still would like to play the game," but most of them quickly retreated into not talking about this of their own volition to avoid the hostility that was being aimed at people who wouldn't publicly denounce the game and the franchise enough.
As a member of the group for years, we all knew each other, so it wasn't random people with suspicious amounts of transphobia. We should have all known that no one in the community was wanting to talk about the game in support of the type of bad faith positions they were being accused of. But the mob was wild during this time; anyone in a gaming community that leaned left during this time probably has their own stories about it. There was blood lust. The admin of the community locked the entire space for 3 days saying, "I don't have time to beg you to not go for each others' throats, so until you can treat each other with respect, I'm closing this place." When we came back online, there was a rule that no one is allowed to talk about Harry Potter. For the people who did this, it was a victory. This happened all over the Internet.
It's a lot like the Spanish Civil War from the story I read in college where anarchists and fighters for the cause drunkenly celebrate their victories, point their fingers and behead whoever they want to be their oppressor in the heat of the moment. But marching on them is a growing force of real, actual fascists who wipe the ground with their blood and move onwards.
I wonder are those people still celebrating victories now? Do they still sleep in their bed at night imagining what a good person they are? Do they feel any responsibility for what they've done?
When Donald Trump won the second time I was furious not at right wing grifters but at radical leftists. I watched the videos of the right laughing at liberals overreact and I thought, they deserve this. I saw the vibe shift and I wasn't sad about it. I didn't vote for it and I wouldn't have asked for it but after it happened I realized there was no recovering from the plague of radical leftism without it. The people in the center right are more my allies in this time period than the far left are. We can't get back to working towards a better world -- and having healthy disagreements with the center right -- until we're not weighed down by the destabilizing force of radicals dialing everything up to the max. It pushes other groups to dial things up to the max right back and this is where we are.
Just because people say they fight for causes you believe in doesn't mean they have any good effect for those causes. Since George Floyd was killed, we never were able to get back to the immense progress we made towards minimizing racism during sane, stable liberal years. Instead most modern leftists have become racial accelerationists and don't even know it. They never stop talking about "white people this, straight male incels that."
People who start off being on your side run out of empathy when there is no one who has any respect for the years they've put into liberal causes ... because of immutable characteristics they can't change and history that happened before they were born. At one time, I was willing to consider that, yeah okay, people in my identity group have had the advantage for years, maybe it is time to celebrate other people and make an effort to include them. But ever since that started I was only sitting by and not only watching people begin to exclude me but watching them tear up all the progress made towards minimizing racism and sexism that has been made for decades.
I am not tolerating it anymore. Just like when I made the change to stop bombarding social media with my fiery 200 character political takes, I have now made the change that I will not prove myself to any radical leftists anymore. You're the ones who will have to prove yourselves to me because I'm tired of letting people lead the cause who can't win. And I won't be there with you if you're going to continue to smash the board. I will side with the center right for as long as it takes to stamp you out. And I think we both know... it will not take long.
To all sane liberals, the sooner we get rid of these locusts on the far left the sooner we can get back to winning victories, seeing a decline in the far right, and making slow, long-lasting progress again.