The New Skinny: January 2025 Blogs
January 2025 Fediverse Blogs
Meta Declares Open Season on Marginalized People
Obviously things in my life haven’t been going well, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the changes in Meta moderation policies expressly designed to facilitate fascist propaganda, the dehumanization of people nazis don’t like, and why this is an obvious example of the mainstream establishment (private and public) accommodating and directly supporting fascist agendas that will literally get marginalized people killed in the long run.
Facebook lifts restrictions on calling women ‘property’ and transgender people ‘freaks’
“Added in to the policy are new clauses apparently designed to explicitly allow common anti-trans arguments, such as advocating for trans people to be banned from public bathrooms, school sports, or certain jobs.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” reads one exception. The same section previously said that users couldn’t call protected groups “freaks” or “abnormal”.
Meta also replaced language banning “generalizations” about a protected group’s “inferiority” on the basis of “intellectual capacity”. Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity” — seemingly opening the door to scientific racism.”
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 targeted harassment and terrorization 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 shit 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.
Furthermore, while I won’t argue with the obvious reality that part of why Meta and Zuckerberg are doing this is an attempt to curry favor with an incoming fascist Trump administration, I don’t think calling this appeasement goes far enough. In Meta’s own explanation for these policy changes, they are making it clear that as far as they’re concerned this type of hate speech and dehumanization is now mainstream and normalized enough that they don’t mind actively supporting it and providing a platform for expressing it; providing an outlet for speech (in exchange for advertiser revenue) is after all the business model of these platforms. Appeasement would look like keeping the policies against hate speech, but simply refusing to enforce them against influential fascists in the public and private sectors; which has already been the de facto policy at most large social media companies before now. By actively providing a megaphone for this type of hate speech and dehumanization, what Mark Zuckerberg is now doing is directly collaborating with a fascist agenda that will lead to violence against marginalized people, in precisely the way I told you several years ago American corporations would collaborate as the Pig Empire fascist movement gained power.
This is what that collaboration looks like, and while you might argue with me that it won’t be that bad, the entire history of pogroms and genocides conducted by fascists against targeted marginalized groups says you’re wrong.
Trump Releases His Brownshirts
I’m not going to lie, I think all the maudlin hand-wringing about political violence, injured murderpigs, and “eroding democracy” in a rigged oligarchy owned and operated by rich fascists regardless of which party they claim to support, is a bit much. Despite their borderline fanatical adherence to polite fictions however, the media is correct in pointing out that Trump’s January 6th pardons are a very ominous sign; they just lack either the language or the courage to properly explain why.
‘Rewarding Political Violence,’ Felon Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Insurrectionists
“This move not only erases accountability for one of the darkest days in our nation’s history but also emboldens far-right extremists and grants them free license to continue their ideological reign of terror.”
“These are not patriots, these are traitors who will now be free to recruit others into what Trump views as his own personal militia,” he asserted. “By granting clemency to these individuals, who sought to overturn the peaceful transfer of power, Trump is signaling that political violence and the rejection of democratic norms are acceptable tactics in service to his authoritarian agenda. This is a direct threat to the foundations of our democracy and the safety of our communities.”
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 unmistakably 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.)
If you want Brownshirts, this is how you create them; and for all the whining about a democracy that isn’t real and murderpigs who side with the nazis the vast majority of the time, that’s the real danger here. Letting fifteen-hundred fascist rioters go for their part in a coup attempt isn’t about the rule of law; it’s an open signal that Trump wants these freaks to commit violence on his behalf, and will prevent the American police state from doing anything about that if necessary. This doesn’t end here.
How We Refuse in the Era of Trump
I don’t want to sound like a broken record but throughout the lead up to the 2024 US election, which I predicted would end in disaster because when two parties run on a fascist platform, only fascists win; even if ONE of those openly fascist platforms was significantly worse than the other, I explained repeatedly that a fascist regime doesn’t function via elections, but rather widespread collaboration, cooperation, and public surrender in the face of a fascist program to transform society into something even more violent, reactionary, and inhumane than Pig Empire society already is.
A politician like Trump (or his minions) can’t personally round up queer people, deport millions of migrants, enforce rampant ableism, white supremacy, misogyny and so forth; this requires armies of collaborators, and a populace too disinterested, afraid, or selfish to bother opposing this regime. I also warned you that a mainstream liberal establishment (read: rich people, the politicians and media they own, as well as bougie suburbanite Democrats who don’t give a fuck about anything but their own material benefit) were not going to help you organize an effective resistance to fascism, and indeed many of them would collaborate with the nazis; a good example might be the Democratic Party arguing their deportations were somehow more humane than Trump’s. 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.
Given however that a great number of people seem to think I’m an unhinged radical who hasn’t spent the past thirty plus years of her life studying fascism, resistance, and oppression, I’d like to share this recent editorial on Truthout saying the very same things in slightly less direct language.
Trump Needs Public Cooperation to Enact a Fascist Vision. Here’s How We Refuse.
“Witnessing and disapproving will not save us. We must be willing to act and refuse to act on the basis of what we know is right. We must build a rebellious culture of care in defiance of a death-making culture of greed. We must reject the disposal of our fellow human beings. Rather than allowing this fascist oligarchy to invisibilize its violence by cloaking its harms in criminalization, we must be willing to become criminals. To be orderly and cooperative in a fascist state is not a virtue. We must be prepared to live and act defiantly, deriving no legitimacy from the illegitimate brutes who would govern us.”
Look, this article isn’t perfect. For starters, the author still seems to place far too much faith in institutional resistance from the liberal establishment; which if you’ve been watching the US Democratic Party fall all over itself to embrace portions of Trump’s fascist regime (particularly around migrants, the immigration carceral complex, and youth trans medical care), will seem like a sick joke. Additionally, Hayes repeats some tired tropes about doom-scrolling as a method of telling people that simply decrying the fascist turn will not be enough. While I support the overall point that social media reaction is not resistance, you’ve clearly been asleep if you think everyday Americans already know everything terrible that’s happening and why it’s bad; this is an insular activist mindset – we are still very much at a phase where people are ignoring the problem of fascism, and raising awareness remains a vital activity.
Finally of course, the article doesn’t outline a particularly effective course of action. But on that last point I’d like to remind folks that we are living in a fascist police state that will come for anyone telling you how to break unjust laws. Frankly, you already know how to disobey, how to shut the machine down, how to battle security forces in the streets for our rights; even if I weren’t talking about the living memory of the Ferguson protests, Charlottesville, and the George Floyd anti-police violence protests, we’ve got libraries full of books about how to resist unjust laws and fascist regimes. It’s not a question of knowledge, it’s a question of will; the will to sacrifice your security to prevent a worsening nightmare. It’s time to “be ungovernable.”
Becoming Ungovernable for Beginners
To tell you the truth I simply refuse to believe the problem is folks don’t know “how to resist” a fascist takeover. 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.
If however my cynicism is getting the best of me, and you really are committed to fighting fascism but you honestly don’t know your ass from your elbow or what “shut it down” means, this November 2024 article on Crimethink is a good place to start in terms of how to think about resistance, how to formulate your own plan for resisting, and the pitfalls you need to be prepared for while resisting. This also isn’t a “how to break the law in a fascist police state 101” article, but it will at least help you frame acts of resistance against fascism and the Trump regime in their proper place mentally, and help you identify the purpose of that resistance so you can come up with your own ideas on how to enact that resistance.
The Case for Resistance: What We’re Up Against—and What It Could Look Like to Fight
“Many of Trump’s ostensible opponents have maintained that two of the negative consequences of the next Trump administration will be that more people will “radicalize” (to the left as well as the right) and that there will be “chaos” (which is to say, disruptive protests). The implication is that Trump wants and benefits from both of these phenomena. It is incumbent on us to articulate which kinds of polarization and chaos actually benefit Trump and which do not. Donald Trump did not win the 2024 elections because people took to the streets—he lost the 2020 elections as a consequence of disruptive protests, and he won the 2024 election in part because those died off. Everyone must understand this.”
- nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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