JAMES BIRMINGHAM JOINS SIMON AND JON FOR A TRANSATLANTIC SHOW TO KICK OFF 2026 ~ US bellicosity in Venezuela and Greenland has shocked the world with what has been a naked display of gangster tactics in the first instance, and a seeming disdain for Nato in the second – and just today it has announced withdrawal from 66 international organisations. The shooting in Minneapolis of Renee Good meanwhile has been kicking off protests nationwide. Back in Blighty, the Filton Palestine solidarity hunger strike has seen one of the hunger strikers, Teuta Hoxha, forced to stop amid fears she has suffered irreversible damage to her body, while Kamran Ahmed was admitted to hospital for the sixth time yesterday and his immediate family notified. The hunger strikers are between 50 and 70 days in, which is the same range that killed Bobby Sands. In London, a recent FT story has gone into a bit of detail over a proposed data centre at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. And last but not least, Freedom has published an exclusive interview with Iranian group the Anarchist Front about the uprising which is taking place there  The post Anarchist News Review: The US gets aggressive while the UK sits around appeared first on Freedom News.

THE TRUMP REGIME’S SHOWY BID FOR VENEZUELAN OIL IS NOT SIMPLY REHASHING THE MONROE DOCTRINE—IT IS AN OPENLY FASCIST ASSERTION OF FLAGRANT POWER ~ Daniel Adediran ~ Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as the country’s new leader, sounding a conciliatory tone towards the United States after it abducted her predecessor Nicolas Maduro and his wife under “Narco-terrorism” and weapons charges. US President Donald Trump has publicly said that the operation was intended to increase access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, stating that his regime will “run” the country. This new phase of American global power games is not simply a warmed-up corpse of the Monroe Doctrine which rejected European involvement in Latin America and designated it as the United States’ backyard. Trump’s monstrous realpolitik of open disregard for the law is blatantly a fascist geopolitical doctrine, fully complementing the authoritarian creep at home. The US has been using violence to promote its interests as a ‘continental superpower’ for much of its history, whether it’s Panama, Chile, the Bay of Pigs, Haiti, or extra-judicial killings all over the Caribbean going back to the 19th Century. As was made plain in a statement by the Latin American Anarchist Coordination (CALA) and its sister organisations, even its meddling recently in Argentina’s sovereign affairs is part of this pattern. Neither is it surprising that the USA’s media class was in lock-step with the administration, seeing tried and true headlines and catchphrases from the last 30 years come back into vogue in political punditry. What is different today is that only the flimsiest vestiges, if any, of international or even domestic legality are being provided for the invasion. Trump’s cynical use of the language of the “War on Drugs” and “The War on Terror” was bound to ring hollow, after the failure of both adventures by the ‘World’s Policeman’. Only those entirely hypnotised by the powerful will cling on to such rhetoric after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this flimsiness of legitimating rhetoric is actually what it’s all about: to a fascist regime, none of it matters any more. Trump is making a point of sidestepping even his own official legal parameters to uphold a twisted vision of flagrant, unlimited US power. This is an openly fascist policy—the brazen use of violence to further national interests, linked to a drummed-up external threat to unify the in-group and boost the regime’s woeful unpopularity at home. Nor is this the first time that America invasions to instigate regime change has been met with crickets by other Western states. The weak-willed calls from European nations to respect and uphold international law are thus predictable; they never recognised Maduro’s administration, and thus practically approve of the US operation. What remains astonishing is Prime Minister Keir Starmer ability to outdo even the most milquetoast responses of conservatives like Germany’s chancellor Merz or EU Commissioner von der Leyen—as he refused to even acknowledge that international law has been violated. As anarchists, we know that the rule of law—whether on the international or domestic level—is a complete farce meant to protect the powerful and their cronies. If anything, the genocide in Gaza has put its laughable hypocrisy on full display. With Israel facing hardly any official consequences for its murderous actions, the ground has been prepared for the American abduction of Maduro to appear ‘surgical’ in comparison.  The attacks on Caracas and the abduction of Maduro will do nothing to bring freedom to the Venezuelan people. But nor will they crush the people’s own resolve to achieve it. Venezuelans are more resilient now than they were in 2014, despite the switch of those in power from the wallet to the gun. Outstanding grassroots initiatives like CECOSESOLA have withstood over four decades of shocks, from government crackdowns and environmental strain to crippling economic sanctions, hyperinflation, countrywide mass exodus and food shortages. It has inspired literally thousands of other co-operative projects in Venezuela, which even with the blockade have been meeting the needs of over 100,000 families in seven different Venezuelan states. Whatever happens to the regime and its oil, horizontal self-organisation in the country will continue to be the people’s only hope for liberation. It will never roll over for a fascist. The post Surgical coup in the fascist backyard appeared first on Freedom News.

FROM RACIST ELECTORAL ENGINEERING TO HOLLOWING OUT PUBLIC HEALTH, TRUMP’S SECOND TERM IS CONSOLIDATING AUTHORITARIAN POWER ~ Louis Further ~ As anarchists we can’t get excited about constitutions such as that of the United States. But its 14th Amendment also guarantees citizenship (and hence protection against deportation) to non-white children who are born in the US – regardless of their parents’ origins. Any amendment to the constitution would be a lengthy and complex process requiring congressional majorities. But the US Supreme Court announced that it would hear Trump’s challenge to this ‘birthright citizenship’ Amendment, which seeks to annul those rights. This is unnecessary if judges wish to hear the case merely to re-affirm that they cannot amend the Constitution. Alternatively, if they uphold his challenge, they will unequivocally establish a supremacist dictatorship which is legally and officially above the law and against the constitution. Similarly, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case which would confer on Trump powers to sack state officials without cause or notice, something which the law also currently forbids. What’s more, the Court has finally sided with moves in Texas to redraw electoral maps along unequivocally racist lines. There is some token resistance to the kidnapping, abduction and trafficking of non-whites from the streets particularly in some of the United States’ larger cities. But one would hope this were much stronger in the light of the harm being done by the ICE raids – particularly since over 97% of those abducted are not criminals; just not white. Those attacked increasingly include Asian Americans. Trump’s overt racist abuse and threats towards the Somali population need little comment. Indeed, tirades like those reported here and ‘views’ reported here would probably be enough to end the career of a politician under most ‘normal’ circumstances. HEALTH Health has become a greater locus of dogma, dispute, dismay, distress, disease and death under Trump’s second term than in any recent presidency. Legislation and changes are driven by the MAGA belief that only the fittest should survive. Tenets of proven medical science are disregarded in favour of fascist dogma advancing ‘superior’ race(s). Monstrous liar and eventually struck-off anti-vaccine fraudster, Andrew Wakefield, was recently rehabilitated to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) by quack Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has lauded Wakefield’s work, while influential Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson posted, “Time to apologize to Dr. Andrew Wakefield and all the others who were maligned and vilified for simply asking the right questions.” This as fake claim after fake claim is published on the CDC site replacing helpful and verifiable medical facts. Medical professionals at all levels are retiring or otherwise exiting Kennedy’s mess rather than promote junk science and collude in spreading preventable diseases and deaths. They are being replaced by ill-equipped MAGA cult members who act out of uninformed dogma, like Dr. Ralph Abraham, surgeon general in Louisiana who will be the second in command at the CDC; Abraham ordered health officials to stop promoting vaccinations. Paradoxically, this degradation of federal health agencies could sponsor a positive turn of events. Local, putatively independent, alternative bodies are quickly springing up to take matters into their own hands for the real benefit of residents who need proper public healthcare. Regional coalitions are beginning to share communications, briefs, and insights. Data is being tabulated across traditional demographics and communities by non-federal groups like the Vaccine Integrity Project. Professional groups like the AAP and The Evidence Collective are promoting the publication and spread of reliable information while initiatives like PopHIVE are fully aware of the disastrous effects of disinformation put out in the interests of fascist dogma. Nor is there evidence of ‘partisan rivalry’ amongst these enterprises. But to replace a nationwide structure ostensibly designed to advance public health won’t be easy, of course. Neither is an attempt to impeach Kennedy. Then if Trump/MAGA is serious about discriminatory ideas like his announcement that he will oblige visitors to the USA to disclose recent social media before being allowed into the country to ensure that they are loyal to fascism, and given that he considers criticising him a crime punishable by death, there could be a concerted attempt to shut down anyone providing accurate health information. This would be endorsed and supported by a legal system hell-bent on advancing the MAGA ‘agenda’ regardless of the law – as one of the US Supreme Court justices herself recently outlined. FASCISM Indeed, according to one source it may well not be long before criticising Trump and his policies becomes literally illegal; those belonging to groups which point out the illegality of the MAGA cult in power could soon be targeted as ‘terrorists’ whose “non-traditional” views are disallowed. This is in sharp contrast, of course, to Trump’s own blatant illegality in myriad spheres, in which he has complete immunity. The Trump administration has already designated Maduro as the head of a foreign terrorist organisation, fuelling fear of a potential U.S. invasion of Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest known reserves of oil. While the Trump administration claims its escalating attacks on boats in the Caribbean are in response to drug trafficking, critics say this is just another attempt by the U.S. government – effectively supported by the Democrat opposition – to destabilise Venezuela to force a regime change and exploit resources, including oil. As Trump lied in referring to the illegal murder of sailors in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean; but before his marine terrorists illegally seized a Venezuelan oil tanker (imagine if the Venezuelan navy had boarded a US vessel!), Florida Congressmember María Salazar, Republican assistant whip, remarked: “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity.” And to complete your holiday cheer, you may need to read this twice: in 2023 the US State Department adopted the Calibri font for its memos and publications because of its greater readability than the previous standard, Times New Roman, particularly on screens and when employees were engaged in text-to-speech and optical character recognition. Last week Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, ordered a return to Times New Roman because helping the visually impaired is seen by MAGA cultists as a weakness and too ‘woke’. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Molly Riley, official White House photo on Flickr The post Notes from the US: Supremacist dictatorship appeared first on Freedom News.

FAR-RIGHT GLEE TELLS YOU ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT’S ASYLUM PLANS ~ punkacademic ~ Plans announced by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to “shake up the asylum system” have finally achieved what Labour appears to have hoped for: the support of far-right extremists, if not their voters. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson)  has been quick to claim that Labour’s moves have shown that ‘the Overton window has been obliterated’, meaning that far-right politics are now mainstream. Given Yaxley-Lennon epitomises Labour’s own fantasy caricature of the imaginary ‘white working class’, this probably means Labour are getting what they wanted from this with his quasi-endorsement. That and the gushing headlines in the right-wing press. That support though should tell you all you need to know about what these policies mean. This is fascism, which needs to be described unequivocally as what it is. The fact that it is a transnational phenomenon or that electoral politics has not merely failed to stop it but actively enabled it should not stop us calling it out. The plans—which include attacks on those provisions in the European Convention of Human Rights which aim to ensure the right to a family life and to protect individuals from torture—are, put simply, heinous. They aim to reduce refugee status to a temporary affair, with continued uncertainty hanging over refugees for decades, unable to achieve permanent status until they have been in the country for twenty years. And of course, being a policy from Starmer’s Labour, there’s the customary genuflection to AI, which will supposedly be used to verify refugees’ ages, something mooted earlier this year. Labour has rolled out the full fash playlist. Jewellery can be confiscated from refugees to pay for processing them, as one minister gleefully told the press—seemingly blissfully unaware of the horrific echoes such a despicable policy conjures up. Indeed, those with living memory of the Holocaust or with a family connection to it have been amongst the quickest to call out Labour’s plans for what they are. Alf Dubs, who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, was clear that Labour’s plans sought to “use children as a weapon”. It has been a long road to here, and though the rise of the far-right is international, the variant in Britain gives the lie to myths the British state has long fostered about Britain’s status as a ‘welcoming nation’. Indeed, despite much rewriting of history, in the 1930s and 1940s Jewish refugees were often met with prejudice and legalised discrimination if they even made it to England. Claus Moser, ultimately a leading statistician and Establishment figure at LSE and Oxford in the post-war period, was placed in an internment camp despite his family fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis four years’ earlier. But history isn’t relevant to technocratic centrist politicians, for whom every political question is merely a cost-benefit analysis of fiscal implications or polling data. As far as elites are concerned, the BBC’s much-vaunted TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History, broadcast the same year Blair came to power, seems to only have reinforced the view that the experience has no relevance for now. Instead, centrists not actively convinced by fascism and far-right politics have resorted to the 1990s playbook of contrarianism and triangulation. But you cannot ‘triangulate’ fascism. As scholars have noted, with a force that wishes to destroy freedom and whole communities, there can be no middle ground. The non-fash press continues to persevere with weasel-words such as “populism” and ‘both sides’ perspectives, as if those doomed advocates of greater social spending and council housing in Parliament were of the same ilk as those wishing to open concentration camps. Otherwise, it seeks to report in the depoliticised language of the ‘game’, the hyper-personalised style that makes a big deal of who’s up and who’s down in Westminster rather than making any attempt to consider why people across the country have embraced far-right politics. This tells us something else, a truth we anarchists know too well: that no salvation is coming from centrist parliamentary politicians or their media outriders. Societies are only so receptive to hate on this scale thanks to their complicity in the destruction of what passed for political choice in favour of an oligarchic dystopia, where the donors pay well and news moguls own Downing Street Those who have fuelled a fire won’t douse it. That task falls to us, and those many outside our movement who also know that the answer to fascist politics—in parliament as in the streets—is a total lack of compromise and a total emphasis on human dignity and solidarity. Institutions cannot do that for us. As one of our predecessors reminds us, we must always and everywhere act for ourselves in practices of mutual aid that know no boundary of border or nationality to combat a fascist menace that is itself international, and which cannot be appeased but which must be destroyed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: UK Home Office on Flickr CC BY 4.0 The post Labour rolls out the full fash playlist appeared first on Freedom News.

THIS MONTH SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A CONTRIBUTION TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING WHY THE APPEAL OF SELFISHNESS GRIPS SO MANY PEOPLE SO FIERCELY ~ Louis Further ~ Right-wing beliefs are ultimately attempts to rationalise and justify selfishness. Fascism, ‘conservatism’, US Republicanism—call them what you will: the differences are essentially procedural. “My needs matter. Yours don’t”. But in order to explain much of what motivates those in the MAGA cult it’s necessary to understand the state which precedes selfishness. That is the primacy of the self devoid of empathy. Members of the MAGA cult thrive on the stark clarity of its identity and their adherence to it… badges, merchandise, flags, clothing. This applies less to other (far right) systems imposed on majorities in most other polities and other shades of élite, hierarchical, coercive political opinion—notably the Democrats in the US. But they too take what’s useful in selfishness. For that self (or selves) to be distinct first there have to be ‘others’, who are not the self. Secondly there has to be a qualitative comparison between the two entities. This drive to compare may originate in the psychology of their childhood wounds, in ongoing brainwashing, in fear, in ignorance, insecurity and so on. For cult members’ biographies (individual or collective) to make sense no two (or more) things can (co-)exist without being compared. Once the apparent ‘need’ to compare is admitted, it becomes inevitable and compelling. This adherence to the dogma of comparison for those in the MAGA cult often bypasses assertions of perceived ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’, ‘good’ vs ‘bad’. The very act of comparison (between races, sexes, classes, ideas of society etc) replaces rational analysis. Defining superiority-inferiority becomes an end in itself. This is much more than pragmatism: justifying selfishness and oppression becomes its own goal. Objectivity, tolerance, compassion, caring, empathising are all irrelevant and play no part in advancing such agendas as those which Trump/MAGA is now imposing on the US. The self (individual of collective) is the sole arbiter of such qualities as ‘strength’, ‘ruthlessness’, ‘bullying determination’; so they are more readily adopted when compared with such perceived opposites as ‘weakness’, being ‘soft on crime’ than for their innate qualities. If those in this camp subjected their perceived need to come out on top to logical or rational analysis, they would fail. So a spurious teleological element is (unconsciously) introduced: a wilful conviction that “history is on our side; we have the untrammelled right to impose”. This sense of historical inevitability both has its genesis in, and reinforces and encourages, the millenarian streak with which current US foreign ‘policy’ has been shot through at least since the élite upped its ‘war on terror’ a generation ago. It grew more harshly with the anti-Muslim fanaticism propagated by George W. Bush after the events of September 11 2001. It can still be found in establishment antisemitism and the Islamophobia of Trump and his fellow cultists. The need to capture, torture, and kill the ‘bomb-carrying Middle Easterner’ around every corner is readily satisfied by the élite’s assertion of white-male-American superiority over everyone else. Even when the hunts produce spurious results—or none—someone has to be punished. The same thing is happening now as ICE kidnaps and traffics many who fail to look ‘white’—in comparison with everyone else, especially the hunters. Such binary ‘decisions’ (“I belong. You don’t”) are endpoints. It’s easy to bask in the approbation which they receive—in propaganda outlets and legislative echo-chambers. After all, again, the ‘superior self’ is sole arbiter of what to subscribe to. CIRCULAR LOGIC Belief (as opposed to reason) also has its own circular justification. This is hardly surprising when you recall that fascism is a system which seeks to ‘solve’ a problem which it has itself created. Once the primacy—and so the perceived necessity—of binary comparisons has been accepted (as it is in fascist beliefs), then condemnation of the other is even more compelling and convincing to the likes of the MAGA/Trump cult: non-whites are undesirable because they are criminals (not even remotely true, of course). This means that they are criminals because they are non-white. Analogously “We whites are better than ‘illegal aliens’ because… we are not ‘illegal aliens’”. This horse-before-cart assertion of white superiority (currently, with ICE, towards all LatinX communities) uses such circular logic: “We kidnap them because they are immigrants. If they get kidnapped, they must deserve it because they are immigrants who have been kidnapped”. This is analogous to much back-and-forth, tit-for-tat threads on social media when attempts are made to denigrate all opinion which the right lumps together as ‘liberal’: “You are bad because you are socialist; but the reason why you hold socialist views is that you are ‘bad’; and—while we’re at it—you’re bad because you do not belong to or with us”. Then “‘Liberals’ (socialists) are bad and evil because they believe in taking away what we’ve striven so hard to accumulate; therefore believing in equality is bad because it’s what bad people like you socialists believe in”! But this is where it gets even more frightening: the immediacy of accepting and acting on selfishness also makes a nuisance of both facts and nuance. Who needs facts when what individuals say must always be right because it would be a breach of my freedom to stifle that. Once fascist dogma has (successfully) rendered decisions based on falsity and false ‘logic’ acceptable, popular even, the need to examine phenomena such as climate collapse and the efficacy of vaccines against verifiable facts is removed. The mere act of pronouncing on these issues is sufficient for what’s said to appear true to those who want it to be true. To hold a ‘position’ is itself a valid and worthy end. What’s more, fascist belief is both immature and simplistic. So it’s all too easy, for example, to justify climate denial by saying “Well, I can’t see evidence of the collapse that all of you keep saying is upon us; so it doesn’t exist.” Similarly, the White House issues reports almost daily about ‘necessary’ actions against immigrants and to combat crime, the rates of which are not rising. The unsophisticated fascist system accepts them at face value because to do otherwise would run counter to its anti-intellectual stances. Facts mean less than dogma. It seems likely that many cult members probably do know that much of what the cult stands for is based on sand. But shame and hero worship (the psychological aspect again) and the pressure to adhere are so far eclipsing any chance of their revising their views.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Los Angeles, June 2025 via Corazónegro Cerbatanero on Facebook The post Notes from the US: The MAGA war on empathy appeared first on Freedom News.

EVEN MORE PREDICTABLE THAN THE RISE OF FASCISM AROUND THE GLOBE HAS BEEN ITS SHARP DESCENT INTO INFIGHTING AND BICKERING ~ Sourdough ~ The coalitions that had propelled the far right resurgence have begun to break down. With of Elon Musk recent split from Trump, the tech right is acting like a microcosm of how fascism cemented once again within state power will work. Having failed to successfully cut the federal government’s spending by his intended $2 trillion —–and jumping ship to rescue his flailing stock prices—the rapid deterioration of Musk and Trump’s relationship has become something of public laughingstock. What likely began as a feud over electric vehicle subsidies, and ostensibly the budget, deficit soon climaxed in Trump’s top campaign donor accusing him officially of being a paedophile, and top Trump stooges calling for Musk’s deportation. Following this blow-up and subsequent celebration, however, there has been a period of détente, and it grows increasingly likely that the feud will simply be paved over and forgotten to allow the right to be re-integrated. So what does this mean for those of us without the carefully calibrated amnesia of a fascist? The first takeaway is that the fascists are not as secure in their position as they may seem. The brutality they so often express outwardly will repeatedly turn inward once their self-styled ‘drive for action’ becomes momentarily unsatisfied. Fascism thrives on conflict. By perpetuating conflict and a general state of warfare against the human race and human mind, fascism may distract from its immiseration of even its most fervent supporters, an outsourcing campaign of diversion, whether cultural, ideological, or based on external  features. To fuel its forward propulsion, fascism must continually cannibalise itself and its supporters. No easier can this be seen than in the Nazi’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when the brownshirts who had done their utmost for fascism to gain power were liquidated by the same monster they had helped to create. Although not its first victims, the fascists themselves will inevitably be their regime’s last. The second takeaway is that fascists have no solidarity, or if they do it is the solidarity of vultures. The world is for now their rotting corpse, and they are only allied so long as it helps them pick it clean. In a worldview where opportunism and strength overwhelm all other urges, constant backstabbing and jockeying for power are inevitable. Fascism is foremost an ideology of victimhood—at the hands of foreign and internal enemies. By victimising others, and outsourcing their suffering to someone lower on the ladder, fascists overcome their own humiliation as well as ensuring their inevitable place among future victims. Rather than banding together in solidarity, fascism teaches survival of the fittest and permanent war. It is the perfect ideology for capitalism’s de-classed: increasingly isolated, materially impoverished, and always angry. Instead of solidarity fascism teaches a sort of ‘individualism of fools’: you are special and unique, and yet something is foiling your flourishing, and therefore you must outsource your agency to these great men who now control your fate, squabbling on television. The struggle for the liberation of humanity—for a stateless, classless society—must also include liberating people from the hold of these dangerous ideologies. Not out of sympathy, but simply as a byproduct of our desire to free all humanity from all forms of oppression. As our enemies engage in warfare amongst themselves, they demonstrate how un-sustainable their own system is. No doubt this infighting will continue to grow, even if for now it is hastily forgotten and contained. The death of fascism will come by a thousand cuts, many internal. The more they struggle to enact and shape their despotism, the more they will fall on and victimise each other. We must continue to resist in any way possible. Give nothing, and you give them the weapons to harm themselves. The way forward is through the mouth of the fascist beast together, while it chases its own tail. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Parrhesiastes CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post The fascists eat themselves appeared first on Freedom News.

FASCISM AND HATE FOR WOMEN ARE BEING PUSHED BY A GROWING INDUSTRY OF ORGANISED FRAUDSTERS ~ Anon ~ Last month Owen Lawrence went to Otley Road in Leeds with arms full of weapons and, according to his Facebook (FB) profile, the explicit intention of engaging in a “killing spree”. Having lived in Leeds for the best part of two decades it was big news amongst my social circles, so I checked out his multiple FB accounts to find out who he was. A lot of his posts fitted a certain stereotype, complaints that he’s struggling to meet women, a photo of him doing a Nazi salute, many many posts about mass shooters, and so on. Your classic shooter profile. Almost a cliché. However his profiles also had over 1,800 FB friends, almost all of whom appeared to be young, conventionally attractive women. This might seem unusual for a guy who was struggling socially and romantically but it’s the kind of friends lists I’ve seen quite a lot recently, belonging to men who can’t seem to meet anyone in person. A small part of Owen Lawrence’s very long friends list, and some posts outlining his motives for his attack in his own words. He specified a hatred of “female psychopaths, female sociopaths, female narcissists”. There are a lot of social, economic, and political factors contributing to the rise of misogyny, many of which have been covered by other people, but one thing that seems to be likely to be contributing to incel culture specifically is the sheer number of scammers targeting heterosexual men. These scammers are at least as likely to be men as women, and as with scams in other fields their patterns indicate they’re likely to be working as part of bigger operations, rather than alone. While the views expressed by a lot of these men might not endear them to many of us, it is concerning that many men are coming to conclusions about what women are like based on interactions with teams of professional fraudsters. The internet in general has been feeling very Bladerunner, with endless bots and fake profiles with AI generated profile pictures or photos stolen from OF models. Some of the fake accounts are more obvious than others, some seem to have a chatbot behind them, with comments ranging from slightly off to completely nonsensical. Many of them seem to have humans or teams of humans behind them, but certainly not the individuals they’re claiming to be. Dating apps, dating websites, and dating groups are particularly bad for this. If you have any experience of online dating or talk to people who have, you’ll know it’s getting pretty rough out there for everyone for various reasons. If you talk to heterosexual men, or see what they’re saying about the apps, the Facebook dating groups, the various websites for meeting people, you’ll find a lot of them declare it’s a total waste of time. Some of these men claim that the dating platforms are full of bots and scam profiles. Some of them say the dating platforms are full of gold diggers. It’s took me a while to put two and two together, but I think they’re talking to the same people. My first clue that some men might be getting angry at non-existent women was a few years ago when an old classmate of mine got into Jordan Peterson. It was your typical situation, he would bombard me with videos, ask me what I thought, wouldn’t read my response, and would send me more videos. One of the last videos he sent me was a comedian complaining about the “epidemic of money grabbing whores”. It seemed strange to me that my friend was even complaining about this. He’d not been in a relationship in years, he wasn’t dating, he was just getting drunk online and getting himself wound up. At the time I suspected that either he’d purposefully hired some women and was upset that they were only interested in getting paid, or he was just sat at home imagining reasons to get resentful, inspired entirely by claims from other men. Having seen the similarities between his statements and those from men who’ve been talking to scammers, it seems just as likely that this happened to him too. That didn’t really dawn on me until a little later, when FB recommended me an absolute train wreck of a dating group. Post after post from fake profiles who’d stolen their photos from the Instagram pages of OF models, each one with hundreds of comments from men saying “stunning”, “GORGEOUS [loveheart eyes emoji]”, “hi”, etc, to which the fake profiles replied with the exact same responses “Send me a friend request so we can chat” and so on. This can’t be improving these men’s conversational skills. Stats stating 10% of profiles on dating sites are fake are pretty believable, but clearly some places have turned into havens for them. I’d often see the “women’s” profiles use bad ai generated profile pictures which have the advantage for the scammers, that they’re not wasting as much time on guys who are less naive, (making scams obvious is a tactic used by some scammers to focus their efforts on easier targets), plus their profiles won’t get reported by the model who’s photos they stole. The stolen photos are the source of much frustration to the women who they belong to. These scammers are not just giving a particular impression of women, they’re fleecing men while posing as the specific women who’s photos they’ve stolen. So at least the AI photos are a welcome development away from that. A post in a dating group using an ai photo (check out the hat that turns into hair). The comments were predictably enthusiastic. The men in this group also wrote posts, not very alluring ones. Just a photo of the underside of their chin with no info about themselves, but with lots of comments seemingly from supermodels saying they wanted to date them and to get in touch. The posts from men that specified “no scammers!!” got even more responses from scammers, because it’s clear that they’d not only been successfully targeted before, but are naive enough to think that simply announcing that they don’t want to be targeted will ensure that they aren’t. The group would also regularly have men complaining about how women are all after their money, how none of them will meet up without being sent a gift card code (or whatever the preferred scammer payment method was at the time) with some excuse about travel/babysitting/etc, and then when they get the money they ghost. They’d often conclude that women think that just because they’re super hot and look like models that they think they’re owed men’s cash. I realised this group wasn’t the most egregious example of a scammer hangout. The admin was at least a real person doing a bad job. There were occasional posts from genuine women, and people from the group occasionally did meet up. But a superficial search found more groups, each in a worse state, and “dating pages” clearly set up by the scammers themselves. For example Single women in UK (sic) where pictures of nameless women are posted by the page (no profiles are linked, it’s just a photo). Men comment trying to somehow get the attention of the nameless profileless woman in the photo, and then scam profiles reply. I find it hard to believe anyone would fall for this, but the men continue to comment and the page wouldn’t exist if they weren’t successfully fleeced at least every now and then. Reading through this stuff is exasperating, and feels sad and weird. An example of a page set up entirely to trick men. Photos posted without profiles, the comment sections entirely dedicated to scamming. Some of the guys are such easy marks that almost all the comments on their personal FB profiles are from fake profiles. As is often the case with victims of scamming, a lot of the guys who are consistently successfully targeted seem to have other stuff going on (lack of support, failed relationships, drug abuse problems, etc). The scammers swarm their profiles like flies on shit, and the men continue to engage in the hope that they’re talking to real people. These men’s FB friends lists looked a lot like Owen Lawrence’s. Conversations in a dating group that acknowledged the issue Understanding the rising popularity of misogyny in general requires looking at the broader economic and political landscape. One of the trends causing a rift between men and women is the usual fighting over scraps, the classic pitting of one group against another that works to detract from the ruling class robbing us all. The amount of time people need to spend at work to survive has been going up, and in the vast majority of couples both people need to work full time. Women are working longer hours before they start on the second shift. Still many men feel like being exhausted means that surely they shouldn’t have to do any housework. Though that’s wildly unreasonable on the face of it, sexist ideologies are going to look a lot more attractive when you’re increasingly desperately looking for excuses not to clean up after yourself. If you add up all the hours of paid and unpaid work, job, childcare, housework, etc, then men are doing less than women, and single mothers have more free time than married ones. In light of this the constant talk of “gold diggers” broadcast by the manosphere can look utterly delusional. This myth of the gold digging woman persists even in spite of the fact that women’s wages have overtaken men’s and its persistence provides a cover for these scammers. If men continue to believe that this is how women typically behave, they won’t be able to identify scammers as scammers and this will reinforce their perception that women behave like this, creating a misogynistic feedback loop. In spite of the reality of the situation, a lot of men are becoming increasingly resentful, fuelled by Tate, incel forums, etc, convincing them that women are soulless harpies trying to bleed them dry and take them for all they’re worth. Unfortunately this description of women very accurately describes scammers, which can’t be helping the situation. Public posts from the personal pages of men who’ve been targeted. Most men falling victim to this either don’t realise they’ve given money to scammers, or don’t want to admit that they have, but it’s the former that we need to be worried about. It’s hard to know how much fuel they’re adding to an already raging fire of misogynist sentiment online, but if we’re going to spend a full two weeks discussing the possibility that teen girls leaving mean emojis on social media accounts might be driving teen boys into a murderous rage (consider yourself lucky if the weird both-sidesing victim blaming conversations around Adolescence passed you by), then we could at least acknowledge that the social media dating scam industry might be priming grown men to accept the arguments presented to them by misogynistic grifters. More from Owen Lawrence’s profiles. MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, an incel adjacent offshoot if the manosphere that promotes no longer interacting with women As is generally the case, Owen Lawrence’s social media accounts were taken down within a few hours of the incident. The counter terrorism police are still investigating motives, though since he died in hospital of his self-sustained injuries, finding a motive is no longer a priority for them. Given the choice between “incel shooter” and “far right shooter”, the press has mostly opted for the first, as if these are two distinct groups, with only an occasional focus on his racism and nationalism. In fact the rise of misogynistic views and the rise of fascist ideology, particularly amongst men, are mutually reinforcing, and the despairing resentful worldviews promoted amongst incel culture have been a gift for the far right. Fascism capitalises on men’s alienation and frustration, and if the vast majority of your friends are scammers then that’s likely to be a very frustrating and alienating experience. Terror attacks are only the most headline grabbing form of a far wider societal problem. Even just looking at the numbers of men killing women, for an individual woman the chances of being killed in an “incel terror attack” are low compared to the two women killed a week by men in the UK. Extreme public violence is the tip of an iceberg, the most visible manifestation of a larger hidden threat. Men are still the leading cause of premature death amongst women worldwide. Misogyny is already killing women, mostly behind closed doors. Owen Lawrence posted fairly openly about the fact that he had mental health problems, his struggles with addiction, his hatred of his Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and how incredibly angry he felt. Both scammers and fascists are well known to prey on vulnerable people with mental health problems. Misogynistic views make men more susceptible to scammers as they’re less likely to identify them as such, and the scammers in turn reinforce these misogynistic views. The “angry at life” to “loving Hitler and hating women” pipeline is already well travelled, and the scammers are helping shuffle people along it. The post Investigation: The Leeds crossbow shooter and misogynist social media scams appeared first on Freedom News.

LIBERALS CONTINUE TO PROVE THE WILLING, IF SNARKY, FOOT-SOLDIERS OF FASCISM ~  Sourdough ~ Political reality is changing at ever-quickening speeds, it seems: the newly emboldened and ascendant fascists in the United States and abroad are making a continuing effort to produce one calamity and crisis after the next, creating a perpetual stream of never-ending sorrow and bad news. It is a perpetual assault on the psyche of resistance, whipping up the reactionary base with grand promises of the immaterial and symbolic to their great excitement. With the glacial pattern of the neoliberal order firmly wiped away to be replaced with the cult of action, one can only imagine this mass production of spectacle will only increase in speed and scope to maintain the current fervour. This is the bullshit factory, and this never-ending deluge is no doubt to the benefit of the fascists, who have always gained from the suspension of critical thinking and general confusion, allowing them to provoke their foot-soldiers and adherents into a permanent hateful euphoria. Amidst all this, the sole remaining project of the liberal order is to find a rational basis for this fascist terror that is now about to befall us. They weave hidden webs of complexity into fascist thought, developing their justifications for them in their opining for it to make any logical sense. This search for logic in absolute nihilism defies the central feature of fascism as an ideology itself: that of the inherent lack of a political strategy or thought. This seems to be the hardest thing for the liberal to grasp about fascism, its sheer irrationality. Even at the end of things they are left pointing their fingers to happily and obediently inform their curated opposition among the bourgeoisie that what the fascists are doing is illegal, unable to grasp that the law has always been a single and simple flexible mould for capital’s extraction. The fascists mass produce irrationality, begging for someone to waste the time necessary to thoroughly dissect even a piece of it, allowing their argument to legitimise itself in the wider debate. Thus liberals continue to prove the willing, if snarky, foot-soldiers of fascism. The photochemical smog from the fascist’s bullshit factory will choke the world, but nobody among the entire liberal camp will contest their right to operate it. This has been proven quite succinctly already in their response to the enduring genocide in Gaza or any other intermittent crime perpetuated around the world by the bourgeoisie. The liberal’s argument against fascism is solely that it lacks civility, for they do not disagree with fascism’s program until its consequences have already come home to stare them in the eye, if even then. They demand a rational basis for terror, not an end to terror. They make the few snappy remarks they are allowed and try their best to prove that they can extract the final frozen drops of profit for the rich in a much more dignified and calm way. They may never understand fascism because they are both its embryo and enabler, the handlers of reaction. Fascism cannot be countered by trying to understand it. It resists analysis because it is nothing but the bluntest tool of the bourgeoisie to beat humanity wit in their times of greatest crisis. It is a purely irrational force of accumulation. Fascism is not something to be fought through debate or logic but by any means necessary; its violence will never be matched with words or any number of pens. Fascism can never be negotiated with, try as the liberals may. The liberals seek a truce with a raging inferno that threatens to consume the planet, feeding it even as it rampages and burns them alive. The time for reforms and measures of words has passed, and fascism and its master capital must be ruthlessly opposed on all fronts. There is no truce with capital’s entropy, no truce with the inferno. We must sidestep the bullshit and spectacle along with all hopes of reform to build a better future, against all gods and against all masters. The post Irrational terror & the bullshit factory appeared first on Freedom News.