Bernie’s been taking more flak than ever from progressive rebels lately, and understandably so — his recent cuddle party with the White Helmets, a known deep state war propaganda outlet with strong ties to Al Qaeda, was easily the most cringe-inducing thing that the Senator has done since endorsing neocon armageddon cultist Hillary Clinton.
People keep badgering me to make a big angry fuss about this, but it just doesn’t turn me on. I could tap out a series of perfunctory “oh yeah Bernie’s so horrible” essays so they’ll leave me alone like a dead-eyed housewife rolling over and watching TV while hubby does his business, but it’s really not sexy to me and I really wouldn’t be into it. That’s just not where I perceive the energy is building right now in the big picture of the greater anti-establishment movement. The energy is building in the media war, and in the shifting political battle lines which have opened the door to the possibility of a strong alliance between the anti-establishment right and the anti-establishment leftagainst the oligarchy. I still see countless people bemoaning the fractured state of the left as though there’s not a whole massive chunk of the political spectrum they’ve been ignoring who wants the deep state gone as much as we do, and you want me to waste my energy and creativity attacking Bernie Sanders for doing things that every single one of my readers already knows are shitty? Come on.
I think it comes back to this deeply misguided notion of “resistance” that has infected America’s political left, honestly. The internet is still shuddering in collective revulsion at Hillary’s “I’m a part of the resistance” comment from a few days back, and nobody’s been more grossed out about it than the anti-establishment left. Rather than rejecting the Washington think-tank manufactured Resistance™ slogan altogether and saying “Well you and your pussyhat-wearing goon squad are welcome to it, lady,” the lefties on my social media feeds have all been responding with articles, posts, tweets and memes to the effect of “Nuh-uh! You’re not part of the resistance! That’s our thing!” Which is understandable, but it can often go hand-in-hand with a mentality that we should really be trying to avoid.
Because think about what it means, really; think about what you’re doing by taking a verb which is reactive and oppositional in description, turning it into a noun so that it becomes a hard, solid thing (the resistance) and making a tribal identity out of that. What does that mean? What does a resistance do? It resists. Resists something or someone. If you ask the establishment liberals, it means resisting Trump. If you ask the woke progressives who’ve been infected with this linguistic mind virus, they’ll tell you it means resisting the oligarchy which owns both parties. But is that really where you want to take your stand? As a great big collective “no” to something? Where does that get you, exactly? How far does a “movement” that implicitly consists of nothing but obstruction and refusal actually move?
I have a pet theory that when David Brock and the other chief Democrat manipulators were kicking around ideas to coax people into rallying with them against Trump, someone at some point must have floated the word “revolution”. There is no way that word didn’t pop up at some point. That word would have been instantly shot down by the more adept propaganda manufacturers, though, because it would have planted a notion deep in the public’s mind that is intrinsically opposed to establishment interests. Revolution is a very different concept than resistance; planting the seed of revolution in the minds of the American people would risk the possibility of revolutionary thinking, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary paradigm shifts, an active push to replace what’s stuffy and old with something radically unprecedented.
Words matter. Words create. The propagandists know this, and we need to recognize this fact as well. The Resistance may as well call itself The Inertia. The Dead Weight. The Drag. Whenever you apply that word to yourself and imbue it with the power of belief — even if you’re not a part of the brainwashed fauxgressive corporate liberal conformity patrol — you’re casting a kind of word-spell on the posture you’ll be taking during this thing. By thinking of your movement as a resistance rather than a revolution, you’re taking your stand as someone who is tugging backward, tugging against, rather than building something new, something revolutionary.
So I totally get why it’s important to highlight the handful of agendas that Bernie has been aligning with as something pernicious, but I think the idea that we should be expending our creative energy pointing at him screaming “No! No! No!” in a war that requires a tremendous amount of creative energy is largely the product of this misguided notion of resistance. This is the same reason I don’t waste any energy on TYT or Democracy Now when they start exhibiting gravitational pull toward establishment narratives; if someone in the revolution falls by the wayside, I don’t stop moving forward to push against them, I just release the inertia and keep pushing forward.
This is an important life hack to learn, by the way, and I’ve managed to create a really amazing life for myself by espousing it. Rather than wasting energy pushing against areas of extreme inertia and fighting the things you don’t want, try just pouring your energy into the juicy, sexy directions that you do want instead. Instead of pouring your energy into NOs, pour it into YESes, into positive action. Try it. You’ll tap into something really magical.
Don’t tug against, push forward. Don’t defend, attack. Don’t pull back from the bad, advance toward the good. Don’t resist, revolutionize.
So yeah. I am at this time wholly disinterested in attacking Bernard Sanders. Right now he’s useful in the anti-establishment fight for economic justice and a tool of the establishment when it comes to foreign policy; one of those is sexy, the other is not, and my readers are smart enough to know the difference. If he ever moves into a position where he’s standing between me and what I’m pushing toward, then yeah, I’ll knock him out of the way just like I do the useless corporate elites. But then I’ll keep moving. Let’s keep blasting forward, please.
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