(Written in the interest of making it clear what political nihilism truly entails for those who see it less as a chosen philosophical sports team and more as a material imperative for those who have self-respect and lack the sense of comfort in lying to themselves, in denying their own intelligence. My intention is for this relatively short text to inform creativity wherever and however it's needed.)
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Point number Zero (0): It's all fucked and then some. It pains us to come to accept, but there is no sleek-designed radical progressive think piece on a corporate platform to disprove this or offer a workable alternative. Stop vilifying intentional bottom-up participation among neighbors, either as a means of harm reduction, as a means of change or as a means of directly sustaining any functioning social sphere among one another, as if That is the "organized crime" and not the masked state terrorists in the streets inventing more distractions from the ongoing Epstein files cover-up. Stop enforcing "Hope" through some humanist guilt against refusing to participate in the same cult chants of "Community", the same cult demands against effective self-assertion, the same cult cheers of symbolic deeds done to be seen doing in the midst of the social vessel having Fully Sunk. It's already sunk! Accept the stage we're all at! Stop getting angry that fewer and fewer people share the same capacity to lie to oneself with the salvation of American Democracy rather than to abandon the cushy delusions, throw some water on one's face and apply the right things to get through. The post-WWII order is done. Done! Get real about being a sentient, terrorized individual, ultimately alone without tether of perfect safety, choosing to persist, to get through, in the combustion engine of history, through the exhaust fumes and oil fire smoke of fascist rage.
Point number One (1): There is no unfucking it. There is no "going back to normal". Even if you witness remnants of the old order being conjured up and simulated by some successful candidacy, there's never going to be the same level of "checks & balances", of measured scrutiny, semi-balanced funding and a distinction between state and paramilitary interest. At best, our futures will consist of carving pockets of shelter, salvaging, foraging, establishing dynamic points/routes of supply, horticultural ground, and so on. Even if some trademarked "Old Normal" is forced back into being, it will not be without the same militarized occupation forces, the same poisoned barbs of artificial intelligence. The "Old Normal" is what got us here. The veil is already burned away for so many, of every age, of every walk of life even remotely in solidarity with other humans' suffering. The veil that separates our sacrifices from our desires is no longer sought to remain. We don't retreat "back" to the Old, to the same Old that gave us this fatal Present. We move forward, forward: day by day, hour by hour. And we make it the best we can — without political tether, without exact social definition, carrying instead the unique audacious resolve that comes from the many brimming trunks of knowledge, of radiant spiritual steadiness and living exaltation — that comes from our own potential, in gatherings or as individuals. That is the "progress" out from the cult of its political reification that makes each and every American progressive look conservative.
Point number Two (2): Displayed outrage, i.e., non-applied outrage, outrage without ingenuity, without smarts and without guts is never going to save you or make your situation any better than it could be if you applied yourself and gave some back instead of wailing for a savior and throwing away potential for excuses and "not" excuses. Nobody wants to feel the force of the baton, the shackle, the elements and the unending cycle generally. So why do we not overwhelm the possibility of Any of our loved ones, of our neighbors, of our unacquainted siblings feeling these? We should not affirm ourselves as wronged, angelic citizens of any order that's merely "gone awry". We ourselves must assume the adult role over our own persons, aspirations and actions. We ourselves must be the navigators over ourselves, the friend to one another, as self-possessing individuals with no pretense of any perfectly foreseeable liberated future where there is none to surmise. Only in America, never in France, Italy, Germany or Indonesia, does anyone need to be reminded that they are a flesh and blood universe of individual life far, far before they even begin to slightly resemble an obligated subject to an order that itself feels no obligation to clearly justify its existence.
And point number Three (3): Sorry, white electoral optimist, Centrist, Social Democrat and "Anarchist" alike. It's here and now: fascism is solidly our lived reality because of your stubbornness, because of hesitation, because of a liberal tendon that moves the battered human in agreement with the batterer, in fearful agreement with great, menacing entities self-describing as "The Good Guys", in renunciation of living and feeling plainly. The "politics" of ducking beneath the live rounds. The anti-politics of never needing to duck again. The bliss of holding one's head high forevermore. After everything — that is all we have left to see to.
(End of points)
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Closing Remarks
The ongoing fuckshit is a cluster of fuckshits. Intersectional analysis is all well and good for a social, mid-range radicalism. I simply think, looking out from my own solitary intake, that the centuries of fuckshit have gradually congealed into one amalgam of every Anglo-Protestant weapon, engaged at full capacity in 2026. There is no perfectly distinct origin point to go and sabotage. It all comes from hatred of women and queer/trans people equally as it does from heinous anti-black racism, gut-wrenching cheers for white supremacist violence, equally as it does from being groomed to seek personal redemption through capitalist neo-fascist cruelty and domination, through a revival of colonial violence as we see in encounters such as the forced disappearing of 3 [known] Oglala Sioux tribal members, through ceaselessly justifying, through flailing — as only a sad, angry white man can — the unjustifiable.
Unfortunately, things come to a head whenever the fuck they do. This had to happen, creeping into a fever pitch, a chorus of screams behind smartphone footage of blood-spattered airbags and brain matter-coated stuffed animals in Minneapolis because everyone felt entitled to telling anarchists for decades that we're ridiculous, unrealistic, alarmist and uncooperative with "official channels". As if anyone in "official channels" would ever have a sudden epiphany beyond a better-paying job in the private sector of domination, of discarding human cries for life to make any sense again, for life to have any living, feeling character to it.
I am sorry. I am. I hate this. I hate seeing vast numbers of average people being terrorized by out of shape 4chan nazis given vengeful "cause" in 2013-15, given military equipment and the blessing of Egg Head Miller to shoot libs in the face and call them bitches, asking bystanders if "they had not yet learned." I hate that we got here because of obscenely unconscionable slander against Latin and South American peoples who toil for a country that spits on their souls, because of patriarchy made only a point of memery against feminists rather than a point of sincere curiosity, because of colonial lashing-out against Bare Minimum recognition and Pitiful excuses for redress, because of interlocking bigotries bound to a mythology-driven stubbornness. Because a predator's twisted pseudo-rationale made an ideology needed white nationalist "DEI" to be granted False "Merit". "Transferring" a Nobel Peace Prize to someone who had just kidnapped a sovereign head of state. A casual chuckle at colorful slurs on Rumble made the basis for lending a hand in the terror. The comforting canvas, the stage owned by liberalism on which progressive hopefuls perform their brave roles, made ashes at the boots of the Proud Boys and Patriot Front members made armed Gestapo.
It is no instantaneous defeat for the determination of the kind and intelligent that certain contrary slivers of humanity have become cancerous, proudly intentionally ignorant, waving the worst of symbolisms, the most fantastical mythologies of malignant scrutiny, crazed mockery, torture and murder. Here, at many places, I sat and watched the process. I watched the social mutations, metamorphoses of capital, of design, of lingo, of sentiment that equally drove things from Occupy Wall Street to GamerGate. Of the latter, a new chapter of esoteric Curtis Yarvin dogshit was aided in being written and activated by young white men, their token women, token reactionary people of color, token reactionary queer and few token reactionary trans people, all of whom were lured in by ethical concerns over journalism in video game culture. All of whom then saw the sentiments in the group chats beneath the public optics. I know because I did too. Some got a whiff and turned on their heels. Others stayed, laid the framework of the grifter influencer model we see copy-pasted on every Internet and sometimes IRL corner of life. Not simply of the figure, the stage presence of Joe Rogan or Charlie "'Gang Violence' [Gets Kirked]" Kirk, but also of the idea that any audience member can exit the theater and go on to do the same, amass the same following, the same drama, the same crashout, the same persistence through the points of mockery, the same sinister intent with a goofy face. It was all outrage, passing and premeditated, at the efforts to allow people, to allow All People their opportunity to ascend within what very limited boundaries where just barely beginning to open further. And then it slid away. Yes, it was the farthest right cells of the GOP. Yes, it was the Curtis Yarvins of the world. Yes, it was the 21-year-old Rhodesia enthusiasts in South Carolina. But it was enacted by no Single One of them. It was simply the harmony of constructed chaoses powered by the painfully unfortunate winds of history. I watched this on-ramp being constructed. I wish I could have destroyed it before the first pillar could stand. But it is no sustained or instantaneous defeat. The left/anarchists do not know the same "Victory" as the fascists because it's not a part of their mission. Their mission is, at its simplest, to live on self-determined terms. The mission of all fascism is to hype up an in-group for the wiping out of all self-determination, of all agency, for the reconstruction of The State as the center of every flinch of terrorized, perfectly Unfree "Life". In a thoroughly anti-self-determination existent world where impotent [controlled] opposition passes itself off as defenders of "The Land of Choice", "The Land of Opportunity", acting as tissue paper barricades against angry fascist bulls, the mission for self-determination is often a losing fight when the tactical layouts of elections, candidates and legislation are haphazardly adapted and imposed on expressly "liberatory" intents.
This is antithetical to any living, coherent arrangement. It is purely antithetical to any intelligent procedure to refuse to factor in trends, points of cohesion, glaring stressors, in this case, for fascists and their sympathizers, and likewise for the merely "more radical" impotence of whatever comprises the opposition. Now standing at the exhaustion point with the contents of every academic philosophical drawer, in the face of total fascist aggression coupled with unrestrained ecocidal resource extraction through total war logistics of conquest, nihilism has never been more resonantly affirmed than by those who are "Better" than nihilists, always slipping and sliding on the juices from the fellatio they give to classical so-called "Enlightenment" foundations.
Like every last fucking thing, conceptual, material, emotional, spiritual: the struggle, the being in the thick of it is the only something. Nihilism means the school and frame of analysis which posits that there is no precise Beacon of Truth and Perfect Substance at The Root of any concept, convention, institution or combination of these. It proposes a sobering lack of entitlement to any Grand, Shining Prize for Good Behavior as judged by the Good Center of All Things. It proposes a lack of panic in the realization that there is no Book of Truth secluded in God's Nightstand in the universe that says, for a Perfect Truth, that fascism is undesirable dogshit. To the nihilist, regarding great matters such as what Is and Is Not, and how to understand what to agree to, it is simply understood as "Bad" and ergo undesireable dogshit by the mutual agreement made by mutual experience of the overwhelming majority of the world's working people who are engaged with enriching their intelligence and good spirits to any degree. That mutual agreement, as is the case with gender roles in a patriarchal world or with the humanity of poor and unhoused people in a capitalist dystopia, is the basis for any reality, immediate or cosmic. The only Beacon of Truth in the moment of poor unhouse people, of gender minorities and others coming together is the shared grievance, the shared realization of the obligation to assert freeness, to assert one's Nerve over the Fact of one's Being Alive, over the Potential to Become More than just a terrified bag of meat to toss into a body bag.
To the nihilist, the intensity of fascism is no proof that one should just throw up their hands and Never Try. It means knowing and accepting when something in particular is not producing the desired result, is not pulsating with vindication on the wind, is not evident as External Truth reflecting in the eyes of fellow True Believers, but is generated behind them by their learned delusions. The nihilist watches and listens, building on what can be understood or understandable, contextually where in connection with a wider net of things, put in its greater picture where it can no longer be dismissed. What we can understand thus far is that all of this has to go.
And now more than ever, the Nothing at the center of everything is outlined by strobing neon lights.
"Making our cities safe" by shooting 37-year-old mothers in the face.
"Liberty and Justice For All" as masked thugs taunt bystanders with "Have you not learned [from Renee Good's murder]?"
"Domestic terror threat" for documenting and reporting on the active terror perpetrators. Potentially stating the truth by calling them fat and unfuckable.
"Weaponizing her vehicle" as her tires are Aimed Away from her would-be captor and assaulter suddenly turned murderer.
The strobing neon lights of "SOMETHING! SOMETHING! SOMETHING!" only accentuate the abandoned lots of deactivated American dreams, the rotting centers of mass manufactured dupes of optimism, of possibility within strict bounds.
None of this is to say that we all Must self-identify as nihilists to be realistic about where we're at now. It simply means we need to embrace the entire scope of useful tools of critique, communication, gathering, deliberating, deciding as collective bodies and as individuals with agency over themselves and the outcomes of their decisions put into practice. The nihilist anarchists, far from being the mechanized super soldiers of some imagined Soros private military, are actually the everyday artists, musicians, scholars, educators and loved ones urging people to come to grips with their vital being, to place that over any traditional or alternative decorum. The baseline decorum of humanity is already being sacrificed to the sloppy, drunken decorum of outright institutional malice. What more can we give to them? When will we finally give to ourselves instead?
Do you want to continue being a terrorized individual in the combustion engine of history? If not, cease to look around for "A Side" to join. Start to simply refine yourself as best you can, in all areas that interest or afflict you. Be friends among friends, holding a level of practical cynicism unique to you that drives the better way, with a steady nihilism, in explicit name or not, that knows all ways to be open for ourselves to become the centers of.
Deepest regards to the family and loved ones of Renee Nicole Good. No one on Earth should go through this.