I’ve actually run in local elections and won a few of them but I decided to quit when I found myself surrounded by either nazis or their liberal enablers. I don’t have the firepower or organization to protect myself or my family from those kinds of people sadly.
The choice is simple.
Biden wins and you can have genocide.
Trump wins and you can also have genocide.
Wow, this is incredibly inspiring. Please direct me to the polls right now!
edit: Also, the USA has never been a democracy. Project 2025, more like Project 1492, am I right?
also edit: if I were president, and the SCOTUS just declared that I am an emperor immune to all prosecution, I would simply imprison my political opponents (plus all landlords and business owners and police officers and soldiers, except those vouched for by workers), I would free everyone currently in prison, establish universal health care, education, and housing, forgive all debt, close all military bases, withdraw the US military from around the planet, return all indigenous land and sovereignty to indigenous people, expropriate all millionaires and billionaires and use their stolen money to pay the current value of forty acres and a mule plus interest to all descendants of slaves (and also pay reparations to every country harmed by the USA (so, every country outside the western bloc)), connect the country with a national bullet train network, dismantle all nuclear weapons, reintroduce covid precautions (deporting to europe anyone who even raises an eyebrow in response), nationalize all corporate and social media and use it to relentlessly bombard the populace with Marxist history and amerikkka bad communist propaganda 24/7, and, as my final act, pull down the American flag that’s on top of the White House and declare that the USA has been dissolved and no longer exists
This election will probably be similar to the last ones. IIRC, virtually the same number of people always vote for the Republican presidential candidate. It’s just the number of people voting for Democrats that fluctuates. My guess is that Biden will once again win the popular vote, but that he has a 50-50 chance of losing enough swing states to lose to Trump.
Anecdotally, almost no one is enthusiastic about either candidate. I live in a low-population (irrelevant) rural swing state, and I’ve seen a few Trump flags and stickers, and exactly one car with Biden stickers, and only one Biden yard sign. (I also spend several hours driving around every workday, FML, so I’ve had a decent look at a rural purple county, as well as a small city that is packed with young white libs and pride flags.) A few months ago I found myself taking a class with a bunch of chuds, and I was shocked at how they were just not that into Trump. Like, the older ones were going to vote for him—one said that he did “an awesome job” as president and that the president “should be a businessman”—but when he got indicted a few months ago (or whatever the fuck happened), they were concerned. “If only he would keep his mouth shut!” It’s similar IMO to Democrats being unenthusiastic about Biden yet still showing up to vote for him in droves. The younger dudes I was with were definitely reactionary but I can’t recall them expressing any support for Trump of any kind.
Biden got a lot of votes from young folks in the last election, but they/we mostly live in cities and blue states and therefore do not matter. I do think that foreign disasters matter and that “the economy” is only working for people who own a lot of stocks / houses, and that younger folks who express any enthusiasm for Biden risk losing friends. We still have over five months left until election day, and basically every day of Biden’s presidency (like Trump’s) has been a catastrophe, so we have to see. My theory is that the funniest realistic result is usually what happens in these elections, even if both Biden and Trump are genocidal fascists (redundant) and not funny to the millions who have died because of them. The funniest result would be…I don’t know. Trump winning? Trump losing? Both of them dying during a debate (godwilling)?
I struggled with this as a writer because I had, for decades, wanted to write a fantasy epic, yet after becoming a communist it became extremely obvious to me that nearly all, if not all fantasy and science fiction is reactionary. The genre itself is the problem, because it basically functions as a way for white guys to escape from real world problems (i.e., the world’s teeming masses are getting stronger and cannot be stopped).
Even relatively leftwing SFF (Star Trek, Star Wars) is so often unclear about where it stands, politically, that it appeals to reactionaries. One has to dig to realize that Luke is supposed to be with the Viet Cong; Star Trek is basically Horatio Hornblower in space, and spends maybe a total of five minutes (across hundreds of hours of TV and cinema) talking about about socialism (except for DS9). Just a few days ago I told a coworker who liked Episode One that it might be the most racist movie ever made; he had no idea about the Gungans being caricatures of Jamaicans, the Neimoidians being Japanese caricatures, and Watto being a caricature of basically every different race that lives around the Mediterranean, although to my coworker’s credit he didn’t argue with me when I told him. A small amount of less-famous SFF is a little clearer about where it stands; liberals like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, but fascists don’t (as far as I know).
I needed to figure out if there would be fantasy races in my trilogy, and I decided pretty quickly that there wouldn’t be. I would throw in some interesting monsters, but that would be it. As for fantasy powers, they would be like Crouching Tiger, but democratized. Anyone who wanted to could learn them, and to avoid the liberal obsession with individualism, they would be based largely on solidarity (with the bad guys using magic like vampires—in order to prey on people).
Fantasy races basically function (as the amazing Graeber quote ITT shows) as an excuse for people to be racist. Tolkien’s orcs are basically the Nazi vision of African oriental working class Judeo-Bolsheviks. The Eye of Sauron is Big Brother / the Panopticon / the superego. Rather than in a caricatured form of Europe, my fantasy trilogy would take place in a real historical place (11th century Byzantium) with real historical groups of people (Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Jews, Persians, Assyrians, Arabs, Laz, Georgians, Varangians, Normans, Venetians, and more!) fighting over land many of them have inhabited for centuries if not millennia. This would get sticky and complicated, but I would do my best to do justice to these different groups and keep them human (not idealized) but also entertaining. I wouldn’t clothe them in head crests like Star Trek does (much as I love Star Trek) so that I could turn them into easy caricatures and then make fun of them.
That project is finished, and I’m currently posting it chapter-by-chapter here. Eventually it’ll be released in paper / ebook form. I’ve been thinking a lot about releasing it on hexbear to see if anyone likes it (there is a chapter midway through the first book that involves throwing landlords out of their mansions, and two main characters are trans, so there’s a lot of hexbear bait, basically).
I’m currently writing a StarCraft fan-fiction, but with all the names and a number of concepts changed, and the racism that is inherent to SFF has come up once again, because StarCraft is fundamentally about three races with inherent strengths and weaknesses battling each other in the Korprulu Sector (the word means something like “bridge” in Turkish). If you look carefully at the OG StarCraft storyline, there is so much weird liberal fascist shit it is fucking unreal (the trope about the revolutionary leader betraying his own followers, the communist-like Zerg only being interested in slavery, genocide, and eugenics (the infested marine is literally a brainwashed suicide bomber), the Protoss basically fighting for landback on Aiur but never really having the strength to pull it off even though they’re supposed to be super advanced and powerful, every cinematic involving Terrans basically being about white dudes with southern accents getting brutally killed, and on and on and on…).
All of this ultimately comes down to a dialectical contradiction: everything is similar yet different at the same time.
leonard leo fuming rn