The Revolution Will Be Monetized

How Hollywood manufactured the modern far-left.

The far-left is essentially a collective of affinity groups operating in parallel. John Brown gun clubs, antifa collectives, Redneck Revolt, and queer Marxist militant groups all share significant overlap with the DSA, the 50501 movement, trade unions, and student activist groups. Anyone who considers themself an anti-capitalist revolutionary is a part of this overarching movement towards the overthrow of the government.

Just because they’re autonomous doesn’t mean they’re “just an idea.” They actively recruit from other affinity groups, use them to vet people, and send members to serve as a sort of liaison for coordination. An antifa collective might recruit someone from a student activist group they’ve worked with in the past, using their prior activism as a resume.

Once they’ve been vetted, they’ll be given very low-level tasks like putting up fliers or participating in a counter-protest. This is how they prove their loyalty. If they throw rocks at the cops and show the appropriate amount of vitriol for “fascists,” maybe they’re trusted enough to be invited to a private Discord server. Then they’ll be directed to a bunch of PDFs on tactics, recommended book lists, etc. They most certainly keep track of who’s who, so don’t let the fact that they don’t have a sign-up form or membership dues be used to gaslight you into believing there’s no amount of organization or hierarchy.

Every collective has an inner circle that does most of the decision-making and is prone to all of the politics and petty grudges that go along with having layered group chats based on a hierarchy they pretend doesn’t exist. They live in a state of constant paranoia, so there’s always some internal drama going on because they’ve convinced themselves so-and-so is a fed or an infiltrator. The Signal group chats where a lot of the planning is done are filled with imagined conspiracies and in-fighting.

Years ago, they’d meet up at bookstores, co-ops, and other venues owned by people who were friendly to the cause. Now they’re mainly online with very limited meetups outside of rallies and counter-protests. It’s almost like an angry book club. People show off their intellect by quoting from “Rules for Radicals” before going into a rant about how much they want to kill cops, White men, rightwing podcasters, and government officials. There’s a scheduled two-minutes hate that happens every fifteen minutes as the echo chamber distills the homicidal fantasies of every malcontent into concentrated rage.

The problem with building a movement out of radicals is that you have to constantly up the ante to keep them from getting bored and losing interest, or labelling you controlled opposition. It’s the most volatile form of audience capture. The only way to maintain momentum is to always be escalating. More vandalism, more violence, more doxxing and SWATing. Hasan and Destiny are finding this out the hard way, as their audiences push them into being increasingly radical, which just digs the hole they’ve found themselves in deeper and deeper.

All of this to keep the needle moving towards their only real goal: seizing power.

Aside from consolidating and accumulating political power, these groups are dedicated to dismantling the society they’ve declared war on. By pushing for bail reform, the defunding of police, and the appointment of leftist DAs and judges, they’re making the justice system even less effective than it already was. That way they can delegitimize the very thing they’ve been actively rendering ineffective.

The goal isn’t to replace the current law enforcement and justice models with something better, it’s what they call “radical decarceration.” The abolition of jails and prisons altogether. No more cops, no more detentions. Just millions of murderers and rapists continuing to murder and rape all of the people the anti-capitalists hate. They know this isn’t likely to happen under the current system of government, this is the carrot they dangle in front of their supporters to incite them to initiate a revolution.

If you’re appealing to the economic resentment and bitterness of criminals, promising them revenge on the people who held them accountable for breaking the law is a great way to mobilize them for your cause.

At the same time, every policy they support from the democrat politicians they see as useful idiots serves to hurt the economy and thus serves the purpose of accelerating the collapse. They will use the effects of the policies they advocate for as proof that capitalism doesn’t work, while trying to make it stop working entirely. Then they can tell you that you were a fool for ever believing in capitalism, so you should try their brand-new, never-before-tested brand of anarcho-socialism.

Since 2008, it’s gotten harder and harder for young people to buy a house, get a job they can actually afford to raise a family on, or have any hopes of retirement. They’ve inherited a blighted field. Which makes it really easy for fringe elements to cater to the disillusionment and bitterness of a population of young people who feel like they have no future to look forward to.

Every revolution is fueled by discontent among the working class, and the modern political movements are no more than the dying vestiges of the political movements of the 20th Century. We are stuck in an ideological time capsule, unable to move on past the paradigms of the previous era, while continually enduring their consequences.

But to understand where all of this came from, we’re going to have to go back a few more years. Not by much, just enough for the release of a movie you probably haven’t thought of in decades.

V for Vendetta really one-shotted half of my generation. It spawned Anonymous, Occupy, and Antifa (the modern version has very little in common with the Antifaschistische Aktion of the 1930s, outside of tactics and bioleninism).

And those Guy Fawkes masks? Every single one you buy is making Warner Bros wealthier. Yeah, they licensed the rights to the masks. The Revolution will be monetized and HR-approved.

The film was released in 2005, at the height of the war in Iraq. A few years later, the 2008 housing market collapse would lead to a recession. This is when Anonymous popped up on the radar, protesting the Cult of Scientology while wearing V’s mask and making it the symbol of their rebellion.

They branched out into DDoSing corporations and governments, which led to alliances with Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. They unintentionally assisted the CIA’s efforts to destabilize Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia during this time in the name of freedom.

They were caught between a rock and a hard place. Either resist censorship by helping destabilize regimes on behalf of the CIA and Mossad, or side with dictators to maintain their alliance with radical Islamist movements. The collective fragmented in response.

Then in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street emerged. Mainly a bunch of rich White liberal kids sitting around holding signs, smoking weed, and being mildly annoying to their corporate overlords. It quickly lost momentum, but in the chaos of its slow death spiral, Anonymous saw an opportunity. They were already affinity groups, so it wasn’t hard to turn coordination into subversion.

The “top hats” at Anonymous offered to help the Occupy movement go more kinetic. This led to the black bloc tactics of smashing ATMs, looting shops, vandalizing banks, etc. These guys would become Antifa as increasingly militant far-left methods were being adopted by their leaders and the Feds who infiltrated them for sabotage and entrapment.

Right as the Occupy movement fizzled out, you had GWOT bros coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, processing their grief and rage by playing games like Call of Duty. Military life and combat deployments meant the N-word quickly became the “gamer word” in CoD lobbies.

The angst of millions of left-leaning anarchists who had made cosplaying as V the foundation of their personality finally had a new fight. Gamer Gate. You can trace all of this stuff back to a bunch of millennial kids with no mythology watching a movie about a rebel fighting a fascist regime in the UK.

Brits have been celebrating Guy Fawkes Night for generations. So the film was just a fun retelling of an old tale for them. But Americans, who had become increasingly secular, didn’t have any rituals or myths. This was their Ur. A comic book hero who fought for the weak, the oppressed…the outcasts. And his nemesis was a far-right White guy with conservative values.

Sound familiar?

These kids brainwashed themselves into LARPing as a lifestyle based on a corporate-approved fiction designed to make a bunch of capitalists in Hollywood rich by playing on the insecurities of teenagers. Top shelf propaganda, really.

Those of us who weren’t trying to revive punk music and spraypaint anarchist symbols everywhere had our own propaganda, of course. Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, 300. Man, we lapped that shit up back when we thought we were liberating Iraq and Afghanistan.

So much of the politics and culture you see today was shaped by the effects of propaganda on impressionable young minds 20 years ago. Hopefully, we’re all starting to grow out of it, but I have my doubts.