Photo mashup by Salon
The discourse psyop that I’m describing isn’t just about managing the narrative. It’s about ensuring that as capitalism in this country declines, it will be able to take on a form that lets it sustain itself. In the United States, what we’ve traditionally called fascism—where monopoly finance capital wages warfare to preserve itself—needs to take the form of two different synthetic ideological camps, not one. Our society is too divided for just one kind of fascist doctrine to be effective, so the optimal strategy is what we’re seeing now: the manufacturing of two color revolutions, one “trad” and the other one liberal or radical liberal. The latter group reinforces the former group, cultivating “Antifa” counter-gangs that act as intimidation squads on behalf of the Democratic Party. Its efforts to escalate cancel culture towards targeted stalking, and its hypocritically selective definitions of what constitutes a “fascist,” work to drive more people into the right.
At the moment, we’re seeing an effort to make American fascism’s traditional cultural symbols and ideas into the dominant parts of the fascist project. The Republican Party’s Project 2025 aims to define being publicly transgender as promoting pornography, increase “abortion surveillance,” and consolidate legal authority within the executive branch so that these and other Christian nationalist policies can be implemented without any challenge. It’s important that we respond to this properly, though, and not be frightened into aiding the liberals. The liberals want socialists to either vote blue, or pursue a broader program of liberal tailism, where we only try to reach liberals while blanketly vilifying the “deplorables” outside the left-liberal camp.
We must refuse to help the liberals because the problem with them goes far beyond their being “lame” or a poor opposition to the right, as the weakest left-wing critiques of liberals say. The problem with liberals is that they’re advancing another type of fascism, one which has the primary backing of finance capital. This is because their brand of fascism is the one that’s most culturally palatable. Caitlin Johnstone warned about this type of fascism in 2017, when the Democratic Party had established a narrative about it being the “resistance” which anti-fascists must unify with:
Christianity and flag-waving patriotism still hold value in red states, but they’ve become largely invisible to the major culture factories of New York and Los Angeles, and thus to the dominant culture of the greater United States. If fascism came to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross today, it wouldn’t have enough broad public support to implement its agendas, because crosses and flags don’t hold that much sway over America’s dominant value system. In order to rope in those who don’t value the old cultural value symbols, something more is needed. So when fascism came to America, it came wrapped in a rainbow flag, and wearing a pussyhat…[liberals] collaborate with the deep state’s world-threatening scheme to take down Russia, because the idea of Russia has been successfully married to the idea of Trump. One of the ways that they have done this is to demand a drastic increase in online censorship to protect them from Russian propaganda and fake news, and a drastic increase in online censorship is exactly what they are receiving. Trump fear was used to manipulate rank-and-file Democrats into asking for this fascism, while cheering for the US intelligence community to keep fighting America’s enemies.
By tailing the liberals, this is what “Antifa” is assisting in: an effort to destabilize the globe with proxy wars, inhumane sanctions, drone warfare, and terrorist attacks like the one Washington just subjected Russia to. This goes along with a campaign to destabilize the United States as well, because U.S. imperialism’s wars increasingly bring economic chaos and blowback violence to the American people. The liberal tailists argue that we must enter into a united front with liberals against fascism, yet it’s these supposed anti-fascist allies that are doing the most to advance fascism’s goal: wage war on behalf of the monopolists.
This reality about the nature and role of liberals isn’t the only reason why we must reject an “anti-fascist alliance” with them. Because during the last year, the “trad” forces that Project 2025 represents have come to have a new role. This is the role of carrying out a controlled anti-woke backlash, managed by the same deep state forces these rightists claim to oppose. Therefore, to react to Project 2025 by allying with liberals is to fall for an intelligence manipulation tactic, one where the intel centers are using the far right as a tool to sway leftists.
When Project 2025 was revealed last fall, I was hesitant to say it was a project by the deep state to drive leftists towards liberal collaboration. And I still believe it was originally something independent from the deep state, because its source org the Heritage Foundation isn’t funded by State Department-tied NGOs. (Its funders are mainly the right-wing elements of capital that aren’t necessarily invested in liberal geo-strategic goals.) Since then, however, a shift has occurred: the escalation of the Gaza genocide has made wokeness less useful of a discourse tool, since wokeness isn’t compatible with the genocide’s clash-of-civilizations rationale. The psyop agents are now promoting faux-dissident right-wing figures, like Elon Musk and Javier Milei, that reinforce Zionist narratives while portraying themselves as anti-establishment. And Project 2025, along with its candidate Donald Trump, have by extension become connected to this psyop.
Trump isn’t in the same category as the “dissident” rightists who’ve been getting promoted by the intelligence centers, as the intelligence-tied media is now avoiding coverage of his campaign. He and the far-right Christian operatives who are driving his agenda have a particular kind of use within the anti-woke psyop, though. For one example, this usefulness of Project 2025 is apparent in how certain leftists are reacting to it: by concluding that they have no choice but to vote blue, since the threat from the right is now more extreme than ever. The Democratic Party sees Project 2025 as something it can take advantage of; Biden recently linked to the Project’s text to try to scare the left into voting for him. Heritage responded by taking the text off of their site, now seeing how unpopular the Project’s ideas are.
If Trump wins, the liberal establishment is going to mobilize its counter-gangs, and these gangs will try to get developing radicals to join them by invoking Project 2025. Is it possible that the first day of Trump’s presidency will indeed consist of unprecedented strong-arm efforts by the executive branch? It is, as the U.S. has regularly been seeing such White House power grabs since the War on Terror especially. The Democrats and their radical liberal allies will assert this means we need to forsake resistance to the deep state and the new cold war, since supposedly these things will be irrelevant amid what Trump is doing. The context they’ll be leaving out is that the geo-strategic intelligence and foreign policy actors who make up the deep state will still be the ones predominantly driving our ruling institutions.
We know a second Trump term won’t truly make the deep state lose its power because for all his anti-establishment posturing, Trump remains a Zionist. He’s also now fully pivoted towards a pro-Ukraine stance, after having initially used some hollow antiwar rhetoric on the Ukraine conflict. This shows he’ll repeat his first term’s provocations against Russia. The only threat Trump poses to the deep state is in how he’s a bad figurehead for liberalism’s fascist agenda, as he puts forth the outdated Christian nationalist program. The lie the trad side tells is that defeating the deep state means getting wokeness out of government. This idea is absurd; wokeness didn’t become the country’s dominant cultural force until the 2010s, and the deep state was able to operate during the decades prior to then.
The whole reason why the deep state exists is so that it can enforce the system of imperialism. No one is actually willing to combat the deep state unless they’re an anti-imperialist, which Trump and his Heritage backers absolutely aren’t. For the element of conservative-leaning people who’ve been convinced by the radlibs to join the “trad” tendency, or who could be brought to that point in the future, there is an alternative to Trumpism’s fundamentally liberal brand. There’s the element of the U.S. communist movement that’s authentically communist, because it cares to differentiate itself from the liberalism-tied “leftist” brand. Not every illiberal individual is willing to join this camp within the class struggle, but if we put in the work to build it, enough of them will.
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