Can’t You Read: Advice to the Young Leftist

NinaIllingworth September 9, 2020November 5, 2022 Advice, anti left smears, antifa, antifascism, attacks on the left, between a rock and a hard place, Can't You Read, capitalism, class war, Donald Trump, expect rain, FA1, fascism, fascism exists against the left, fascist violence, informal writing, Joe Biden, Journals, liberalism, liberals prefer fascism to sharing, neoliberal authoritarianism, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Offsite Writing, Opinion, police state, Pork Reich, resisting immoral authority, Social Justice, ST2, stochastic terrorism, the hammer is coming, the right wants you dead, The War on Sharing, the young left, young leftists

Editor’s note: after struggling against online censorship and some procrastinating, I’m getting around to reorganizing my website. As part of that process, I’m posting links to older content that I will never find again otherwise.

This activity is tedious, but necessary for my archives. Please bear with me in the meantime and thanks for all your support.

Hard Truths and Dark Roads

Despite my best efforts, I don’t think I’ve ever quite mastered the distinction between a blog, a journal, and a short essay. Originally, this September 9th, 2020 journal was intended to be a short advice column for young leftists facing down the darkest moments of the Trump presidency and the unknowns of a neoliberal authoritarian future. As it turned out, I ended up having a lot more to say and the work transformed into a lengthy, informal opinion article about why the fight against fascism (and by extension capitalism) always seems darkest before the dawn. Whoops, my bad.

Which leaves the question; how much does this still matter today in 2021? Well, I have noted many times that you can vote out Trump, but you can’t vote out the fascist strain that is Trumpism; and given the Biden administration’s current inclinations to continue coddling murder pigs while condemning protestors, the situation doesn’t seem to have changed much. In that light, I’d say it still matters quite a bit; but as always, your mileage may vary.

“In other words history, even recent American history, says that this story ends in a jail cell or a shallow grave for some of the folks reading this journal right now and I don’t know how to sugarcoat that for anyone, let alone a young person with their whole life (such as it is) ahead of them. The plain, god-awful truth is that the American right wants you dead, and the center-right American liberal establishment simply doesn’t care, just as it has never cared, because they also want the left destroyed and fear sharing their ill-gotten wealth more than they fear fascism.”

To check it out on my Can’t You Read blog, click on the header or the image below:

Looking the Fascist Beast in the Eye

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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