In the first post I think I said something about how there was so little reaction on this story, especially compared to the one about #FTV. Well, it has exploded, with a vengeance.
You can, for example, spend two hours (and I did) listening to a dedicated non-Trotskyite Marxist explain why JD is an ignorant asshole and a moneygrubbing fascist enabler:
Jimmy Dore’s Boogaloo Blunder: What Zero Theory Does to a MFer w/Discussion of Libertarian Populism
Or there’s Jimmy’s own attempt at self-inoculation against the viral storm of criticism raining down at the moment:
Fred Hampton/Black Panthers Joined White Bigots In Class Unity w/ Daryl Davis
That much will give you a clear view of the two poles of the argument.
I ran rather farther afield.
Here’s the hardcore non-leader of the hardcore Boogs, Mike Dunn, going on fucking InfoWars to vilify and malign his hapless googly-eyed host, Alex Jones:
Boi Mike Dunn on InfoWars: Lawful and Legal Protest Has Failed
There’s some rather disturbing shit in that one, mainly about how serious these guys are about their version of Revolution. One gets the impression that Dunn is really willing to die for his beliefs, along with a gut sense that he’ll find a way to make that death happen, and hope to be treated like a martyr and a further incitement.
Then we have the video evidence that two black guys from Texas, veterans no less, already pulled a Dore three months ago, and have been happy to openly platform their local Boog friend, who is of course quite white:
THE BOOGALOO BANNED (Ft. Kris Hunter)
CHASING ALEX JONES (ft. Kris Hunter)
I wonder about what the critics would have to say about their right to hang out with the enemy and decide that he, personally, is okay.
Two more for you, and I’d call these the must-see bits. First:
A Boogaloo Boy Investigation: Jimmy Dore Edition
Breaking tonight, Matt Binder does some actual journalistic digging, coming up with Magnus’ “real” name and … behaviors, some of which sit uneasily with the dopey and whimsical persona interviewed by Dore, and may or may not clash with the impassioned street-corner speaker we saw in the original protest-day speech. I don’t believe there’s a smoking gun here, so to speak, but there’s definitely enough to give a good-faith actor pause about his motivations, if not his honesty.
The best for last.
In yesterday’s post I used ‘Canadian’ almost pejoratively, implying that they’re all a bunch of fortunate-son sheltered sissies like David Doel.
Jimmy Dore, Boogaloo Boys, and Critiquing the Moral Purity of the Left
This guy calls himself The Canadian Commie. He only started posting two days ago, in this incarnation at least. But I liked his take best, next to my own of course.
He’s completely out of the closet as a Communist, rather than dressing his views up pretty as Marxism or Socialism. And from that far-flung perch, he’s actually able to punch right a little, at the kinds of people like the guy in the first link, who vented moral purity exactly for those two long hours.
His about page doesn’t list a usual name (so I’ll just call him CC), but it does say:
Our society has been captured by a parasitic death cult masquerading as a rational system. Capitalism can not be reformed or salvaged and must be replaced. Join me.
Well, yes. I’m down. I may still be fighting to find a label for myself I can live with, out beyond anarchy, but I know what I’m against anyway. What I’m against definitely includes capitalism, especially of the imperial american kind, and I think “parasitic death cult” is perfectly apt and descriptively true.
Back on point, CC says look: JD is Everyman, and that upsets the moral purists of the left.
His value and his appeal doesn’t flow from credentials in the movement or academia, much less any proper maoistic code of orthodoxy. He’s flawed and he’s average and maybe not even that smart, but he knows bullshit when he sees it, and he’s drowning in it, and that makes him into one pissed-off motherfucker.
All the other Everymen admire his rage, because he’s only saying what they feel too and don’t have any way to express.
CC also says: American Libertarianism, which is the philosophy at the core of what all hardcore and softcore Boogaloos believe, is a Genuinely Dangerous Ideology, and a potential gateway drug to actual fascism, precisely because libertarianism in the economic sense equals de-regulated capitalism, and even an atheist can see that deregulated capitalism is demonic as hell.
(I’m paraphrasing colorfully.)
Is a Boog like Magnus aware that his ideology equals deregulated capitalism? (I can answer that. No. He plays up his Green identity and his environmental activism, and those things are antipodal to corporations shitting all over the planet and eventually killing us all, as they probably will.)
Leftist Moral Purity, says CC, demands that the righteous can’t even interact with possessed persons like Boogs clearly are. They’ve been excommunicated, and to ‘platform’ them is to surrender to Evil.
If you believe that, says CC mildly, how weak are you? How fragile and insecure are your leftist beliefs?
Stop it.
When you do encounter the Damned, and you will, you must “approach them with Compassion, Empathy, and a Spirit of Forgiveness”.
(You mad godless Commie. That’s the most truly Christian thing I’ve heard in a long damn time.)_
You can think Jimmy a fool, and he might be one. But his desire to learn more about the possessed is a healthy impulse that makes his foolishness holy. Sanctifies it.
(The testament style language is all mine; a big part of what I do.)
The purists of the left instantly and instinctively react to stifle and silence both halves of the unholy conversation, and to insult and belittle both parties to it.
The Everymen won’t tolerate this holier-than-thou attitude.
This makes purity and umbrage into a losing strategy for the Leftists.
Fascists ideologies are so deeply entrenched in our society that most people can’t even see them. The idea that everyone can and must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is not communitarian, but fascist. Oprah’s gospel of prosperity, and its cousins among the the tent-preacher abundance theologians–fascism. The very trendy metaphors about Heroes and their Journeys–deeply rooted in a fascistic ubermensch ideolgy …
(Holy fuck, man.)
***
Holy fuck, man. That last one is going to take me long damn minute to process, but … I see what you’re about, and holy fuck.
I’ll cut it there, at 8:22 of 29:42, because I do want to finish this before midnight.
Go watch it all please.
***
Capitalism has violently failed you and me, and Magnus and Jimmy Dore, and everyone we know, and every day people all around us are dying of that failure. Once that was an abstraction. Now it’s real. Dead Americans, failed by their godly system, by the hundreds of thousands, just counting the Covid segment of the systemic failure. Dying Americans, living under every bridge in California, the heartland of neoliberal capitalist plenty.
We’re scared.
We’re afraid.
We don’t know what to do about it.
There is no solution.
All we have left is Compassion, Empathy, and a Spirit of Forgiveness.
I don’t care whether Dore or Doel is right; it doesn’t fucking matter.
So much mindspace taken up with rearranging the deck chairs on the moral high ground while the whole system sinks under us, drowning people we loved and always will love until we too succumb to the icy waters.
Meanwhile, evil exists and grows fat.
As I was writing this, CC put up another video.
YouTube Censors Me and Gives Me a Warning
Your corporate overlords don’t believe in compassion or empathy.
Go watch the video before your real enemy takes them all down.
Edit/Update:
The Canadian Communist’s name is Jon M. Sanderson. My admiration for him has continued to grow. Here’s another example of why.
Also, contrary to my previous assertion, he has videos going back a year on his channel–I was thrown a bit by the way his YT home page is set up, and in a hurry, as previously noted, because of the video on YT’s first step toward censoring him out of existence.
(Another) Interview with Magnus Panvidya
This interviewer this time is a ‘trump supporter’, but a non-crazy one who is primarily a fan of Yang and UBI, and who has also interviewed, and has high praise for, Krystal Ball. Magnus seems to genuinely be confused about why people would call libertarians ‘proto-fascists’. I’m not confused. I see that point, but I do continue to think that he personally is not the enemy we have to fear, like the real enemy would very much like us to.