The New Skinny: January 2025 Blogs
Author’s note: in addition to my work here on NIDC, I also blog about fascism and current affairs on the Fediverse; click here to check it out. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.
A Note About Backdated Posts
As I explained in this April 15th, 2025 edition of The Skinny, you are reading this because I’m paranoid about fascist censorship and behind on posting my writing here on NIDC; you can find more details in this Fediverse blog post. These Fediverse blog posts from my Treehouse account were posted throughout January 2025; a time period where I was barely writing, and certainly not writing well. I’ve standardized the format of these The (New) Skinny posts, so you can either follow the links below to read on my Fediverse blog, or you can just find them on page two of this post with the buttons at the bottom of the article.
I absolutely understand that this is annoying, and I apologize in advance for the inconvenience. If I could figure out a less labor intensive way to collect all my writing in one place I control as a shield against digital fascist censorship, I’d probably go with that; but here we are. Archival backdated posts will go up very early Sunday mornings until I’m caught up: to make them easier to ignore in your inbox if you so desire.
January 2025
Meta Declares Open Season on Marginalized People
“I chose this article, despite its simplified headline, because while most of the coverage of Meta’s policy update has been critical, very few outlets are highlighting the reality that Zuckerberg is expressly creating exceptions to allow the targeting of marginalized groups like trans people, migrants, nonwhite people, and even women in general, while still maintaining rules that protect cracker fascists from that same form of targeting. Facebook and Instagram are still gonna suspend the crap out of you for saying things that make fascists uncomfortable, criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and advocating for the end of reactionary capitalist police states; they are just creating direct exemptions for fascists to dehumanize people they don’t like and facilitate pogroms against those people. As such the popular framing of this policy change as being about “free speech” or “depoliticizing moderation” is in fact a sick farce.”
Trump Releases His Brownshirts
Although it’s not properly taught in Pig Empire history class, the reality is that every single “successful” fascist movement in history has relied on the violence of “irregulars” or “Brownshirts” to maintain control and further a fascist political and social agenda that is invariably unpopular and would be resisted by the populace at large, without the threat of force to keep them in line. It’s literally “how to install a fascist dictatorship 101.” What Trump is doing here is making it 100% clear to fascists that the ruling party is totally fine with whatever violent crimes they commit as long as they serve the purposes of the larger American fascist movement. And he’s not the only one; racialized fascist violence has already received strong support and similar pardons in places like Texas, New York, and even at one point California (although that was ultimately unsuccessful and cost a judge his position on the bench.)
How We Refuse in the Era of Trump
Finally I pointed out that when fascists control the law and the courts, it guarantees that effectively resisting this fascist takeover and transformation of our society would require people to abandon bootlicking subservience to legality and act out of a sense of MORAL or collaborative justice; to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” In short, I told you that the slide into overt (rather than covert) fascism can only happen if enough people let it or even help it happen, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty because the cavalry is not coming, and doing so may in fact put you at personal risk of reprisals; whether that reprisal comes via extrajudicial violence, or carceral violence is very much a function of how far we’ve gone in the process of the fascist takeover.
Becoming Ungovernable for Beginners
If you’re waiting for someone to write you out a step by step guide to breaking the law in a fascist police state,(which America was long before it “elected” Trump in a rigged oligarchy, you’re more or less saying “I’m looking for an excuse not to act.” Shutting shit down, going after the ability to make profit, using your body to grind the gears of the fascist police state to a halt are all pretty self-explanatory endeavors and you’ve got plenty of examples from both recent American history (fighting cops in the streets during 2020) and America’s past (occupying draft offices during Vietnam, battling fascists and their police escorts on Cable street in Britain, helping escaped enslaved people run to Canada via the Underground railroad, and so forth) to show you the way.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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