The five stages of grief are a way of describing how people may react to a loss.
The media said Joe Biden is president.
HA HA HA!
The media is covering up the Biden crime family stealing this election.
Give us our freedom Joe Biden.
For angels are being released right now, angels are being dispatched right now.
[Speaking in tongues]
No. No. No.
Oh, hello.
Welcome to System Fail,
the show that dances like nobody’s watching.
The gruelling, two-year-long spectacle of the US presidential campaign
drew to an official close on Tuesday November 3rd.
I don’t want to say that I hated every minute of it,
but I literally hated every minute of it
During the weeks leading up to election night, tens of millions of Americans cast ballots,
indicating which kleptocratic septuagenarian they would rather be ruled by
for the next four years.
Would you rather get punched in the face or get slapped in the face hard?
Well slapped, innit? You’d rather get slapped.
I'm gonna say slapped. Yeah.
Thanks for the help.
For months, popular fears had been mounting that a disputed election result would spark
widespread political unrest, perhaps even culminating in a
second American Civil War.
Given this generalized state of heightened anxiety,
the days following the election were somewhat anti-climactic.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Our government is in the midst of a coup,
they’re trying to turn us into some sort of socialist government
a new form of government,
all that matters is that it doesn’t happen.
CNN projects Joseph R Biden Jr is elected the 46th president....
On election night,
a small crew of Proud Boys, including their national chairman Enrique Tarrio,
were out drinking at a DC bar with Bevelyn Beatty,
a conservative Christian activist best known for repeatedly painting over the Black Lives Matter
street mural in New York.
They say black lives matter, right?
They say black lives matter.
They don’t care about black lives.
Fuck you!
Re-fund the police!
Jesus matters!
At around 2:30 in the morning,
pumped up from Trump’s win in Florida and chalk full of liquid courage,
the group picked a fight with some local youth, and promptly got themselves stabbed.
They stabbed me.
Are you stabbed or punched?
I don’t know. But the amount of blood that came out...
Oh my god you've got tons of blood coming out of your neck!
Yes I do.
As many commentators and political analysts had predicted,
no winner was declared on election night.
This election is not over.
Far from it.
Fuck!
It would be four days before enough votes had been tallied to project a winner.
While this delay did not result in mass political upheaval,
as some had predicted,
protests did take place,
leading to several skirmishes and dozens of arrests
in several of the country's so-called “anarchist jurisdictions”.
And we ain't even talkin about the election right now, cuz no matter who wins
we still gonna have Black men killed every day.
The behaviour of police in the so-called “anarchist jurisdiction”
of New York was particularly problematic.
In the so-called “anarchist jurisdiction” of Portland,
locals continued their nightly tradition of rioting,
prompting Governor Kate Brown to call in the comrades of the National Guard.
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao...
What does that mean?
On Thursday night, two armed Trump supporters
were arrested near the Philadelphia Convention Center,
where ballots were still being counted.
The men had driven up from Virginia Beach in a silver hummer with QAnon decals,
as part of an alleged plot to storm the vote counting facility, commando-style,
and, quote, “straighten things out.”
As all of this was taking place, Donald Trump retreated to his National Golf Club
where he proceeded to send out a series of unhinged tweets.
Sounds like he just lost a challenge in Scrabble after putting down the word QUARF.
Trump was playing golf when he learned that Biden
had been declared the winner by a number of corporate media outlets, including FOX News.
FOX sucks!
I don’t even watch Fox anymore.
Whats your main source of information?
My main source of information is I listen to Alex Jones
Its a chicom new world order great reset, global depression,
attack our families, castrate our sons program.
As news of Trump’s loss spread, people took to the streets to celebrate.
Goodness won, that’s who won!
Goodness. Not Biden. Goodness.
The spontaneous outpouring of emotion is a defining human trait,
and it is predictable that many humans would express relief and jubilation
upon hearing news of Trump’s apparent defeat.
It’s over!
Best day of my life.
But as an AI-powered automaton who was not programmed to feel relief,
it falls on me to remind viewers that a Donald Trump loss
also means a Joe Biden victory.
We did it. We did it Joe.
You’re going to be the next president of the United States.
Biden is often presented as a quasi-senile old man,
who is prone to verbal gaffes.
Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.
Someone who is out of touch, a bit creepy, but ultimately harmless.
I love kids jumping on my lap.
Oh dude!
This caricature papers over the functional role
that he plays within the Democratic Party establishment,
his status as the favoured candidate of Wall Street and finance capital,
and his decades-long career as a foreign and domestic policy hawk.
Biden’s 1994 crime bill helped fuel mass incarceration,
with financial incentives to keep people behind bars.
We have predators on our streets.
We have no choice but to take them out of society.
I like the idea of keeping in jail longer.
I’m the guy that wrote the bill requiring federal judges to keep people in jail.
President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein's relentless pursuit
of weapons of mass destruction.
His running mate, Kamala Harris,
is now being positioned as the future of the Democratic Party,
after making history by becoming the first female, Black and South Asian
police officer to be elected Vice President of the United States.
Top Cop, top cop, top cop.
Oh, you know... Kamala was popo.
In the nights after the election, many of those in the streets made it clear
that they didn’t support either political party.
Fuck Biden and Trump!
Turn your weapons on yourselves!
But as the days passed, and a Biden/Harris victory
began to come into clearer focus,
the Democrats’ messaging of “count every vote”
became more prominent at marches and rallies.
This created an odd and increasingly alienating environment for anarchists, abolitionists
and other professed enemies of America’s bipartisan political establishment.
Anarchists who had been physically and mentally preparing themselves to confront
and fight back a fascist coup d’état,
soon discovered that the internal democratic mechanisms
of the most powerful state in the world
were more than up to the task.
They’re not going to have any success in stopping the vote counting.
There is no basis in law.
I think if our message to global investors
was America is not a legitimate democracy anymore,
I think we’d be doing a lot worse than down a thousand points a day.
Judges around the country, tossing out some 30 cases.
A growing number of Republicans now acknowledge it’s time to move on.
This realization no doubt affected attendance at the so-called “Million MAGA March”
which took place in Washington DC, on Saturday November 14.
This mobilization was organized and promoted by a broad coalition of Trump loyalists
and fixtures of the far-right,
including Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone,
members of the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oathkeepers,
Alex Jones,
Death! Death! Death to the New World Order!
and white nationalists associated with the so-called Groyper Army,
such as Nick Fuentes and former American Identity Movement leader
Patrick Casey.
We’re all going to be out there in DC.
Who’s going to be out there in DC?
A related event called the March for Trump was promoted by FOX News,
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and Trump himself.
The idea was to stage a massive rally to boost morale in the Trump camp,
and to show that there was an army of “Patriots” willing to fight to overturn fraudulent election results.
Yet even with all its free advertising, the largest display of far-right unity
since Charlottesville,
and the fate of the presidency hanging in the balance,
the rally was only about to pull out somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people.
And that’s not really our fault, because the last time that there as some kind of
dissident right rally, or demonstration we all know how that went
- the last one I participated in.
Despite this smaller-than-expected turnout, those who did show up were agitated
and spoiling for a fight.
Fuck Antifa! Fuck Antifa!
Kill them!
You need to kill them!
You need to fight for this fucking country
The morning began with a small flock of MAGA supporters
ripping down the memorial wall at Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Tear them down!
Throughout the day, there were sporadic fist-fights and physical attacks on journalists.
I just know that I got hit in the head.
And I started yelling "I'm Press! I'm Press!"
And then they were just kinda like
you’re fake news people and you’re helping to steal his freedom,
and it will not stand!
Later that night, a crowd of approximately 200 Proud Boys
returned to Black Lives Matter Plaza and attacked a vastly outnumbered group
of anti-fascists and BLM supporters.
In the process, three people were stabbed, and one person was sent to the hospital
in critical condition.
Hey, we got one on the ground!
We got one on the ground!
The Proud Boys-led crowd also targeted women, queer and trans people,
in a violent, testosterone-fuelled display of wounded masculinity.
King Kong ain’t got shit on me!
Y’all need to be outraged and come back, because on December 12,
they’re going to be out here
and they’re going to be fucking us up just like they did last time.
We need help.
And we don’t have it.
There are no doubt a number of lessons to be drawn from the events in DC,
and hopefully it provides an opportunity for a critical reflection on strategy
and tactics.
This is important, as the country is already facing a series of painful,
deepening and interconnected crises, and things don’t look like they’re
going to be improving any time soon.
Oh this fucking shit!
One clear takeaway is that the energy, excitement and momentum
seen during the Black-led, but multi-racial George Floyd uprisings
has not transferred into the movement to protect American democracy
from a presumed fascist coup d’etat.
To learn more about why things played out this way,
I recently caught up with Anarchist writer,
insurrectionist strategist, and author of The Master’s Tools,
Tom Nomad.
Hey Tom, how’s it going?
Its incredibly exhausting and stressful
Indeed.
A USA Today poll released shortly before the US elections
indicated that more than 75% of Americans were concerned
about post-election unrest.
This largely failed to materialize.
Why do you think this is?
And what do you make of this discrepancy between people’s fears
and the reality of what has taken place?
I think there are a number of reasons why that happened the way it did.
Part of that has to do with the fact that Trump and the Republicans have essentially
turned anarchists and anti-fascists into super soldiers in the mind of conservatives,
you know, taking over parts of major cities and stuff like that.
And that has created this kind of mentality within the right wing which is simultaneously hostile,
so really focused on trying to confront anarchists and antifascists.
We saw that in Washington DC recently.
But also at the same time terrified. And a lot that hostility comes from fear.
Most conservatives in the United States are relatively normal, rural and suburban people.
Most are white. Most work low to mid income jobs.
A lot are older. And those people aren’t going to die or go to prison for Donald Trump.
At the same time, the fear on the left was really coming from the fact that
that fear that we see on the right wing is really unpredictable.
That at different points, that fear has manifested
in conservatives failing to really turn people up at protests
just as much as its turned into Charlottesville,
just as much as its turned into mass shootings.
Because of the prevalence of gun culture down here, which involves a lot of
hyper-toxic masculinity and sort of delusions of grandeur, I guess we could say,
that sometimes manifests itself in people dressing in uniforms and joining militias
and running around in the woods and pretending to be soldiers
and not really doing anything with that.
And sometimes it turns into Kyle Rittenhouse.
And so it becomes really difficult to locate where politic violence is going to come from
in the US right now.
And because of that, what it's generated is this sense of constant vigilance.
The other basic reality comes down to class and geography in the United States
and the way that interacts with race.
The right wing traditionally has been terrified of cities in the US.
And the places where Trump was telling people to go
were places like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia
like these cities which to people on the right wing
are thought of as smoking ruins of crime
And so when you combine all of that together, its not particularly surprising
that a ton of them did not show up.
But at the same time its also the case that
we all had to be very ready for them to show up.
Because there was no way to know which way that was going to play out.
What role has social media played in this process?
Twitter definitely went through a transformation in the last few months.
Part of this has to do with the seriousness of Covid conspiracy theories.
So with Twitter, it was very specifically a response to people
putting out misinformation about COVID 19
that got them to start focusing really heavily on labeling things as misinformation.
I think for them they sat there and they saw how damaging the effects of misinformation
were and they started seeing that a lot of people were leaving their platforms
because of it.
And so for purposes of profit, they've started moderating that content.
Facebook on the other hand is a dumpster fire, right?
No one should ever use Facebook for anything ever.
They’re terrible.
What effect do you see a Biden/Harris presidency having on social movements in the US?
What new dangers do you see ahead for anarchists and anti-fascists during this coming period?
To understand how this is gonna play out,
we have to understand what the Democratic Party is, essentially.
And the role of counterinsurgency in the foundations of the Democratic Party.
Some people mark it at the civil rights movement, some mark it at the labor/corporate compromise
after World War II, but starting at that period of time.
The Democrats really started to identify social movements which might be able to build their
own support - build their own base. And then identifying moderate elements
within those social movements and sort of coopting them,
recuperating them back into the political system.
We watched this happen in the civil rights movement.
We definitely watched it happen during Vietnam.
We watched this happen with environmentalists,
we watched this happen with the anti-war movement, so on, and so on.
And the Democratic Party at this point is more or less made up of the moderate wings
of all of these social movements which have occurred since World war II.
We also see elements of this playing themselves out around the question defending the police.
A lot of liberals recognize something very basic about the George Floyd Uprising.
Which is that it is a result of a failure of reformism.
That after Ferguson in 2014 and 2015 liberals were able to push the narrative
into a narrative of reformism.
Let’s get police departments to have consent decrees.
Lets have the Justice Department investigate.
Blah blah blah.
And that failed. Horrendously. For obvious reasons.
And the George Floyd uprising was a response to that failure.
So instead of just stepping back, they said, "oh all of this violence is the result of people
from the outside."
"It’s not people rejecting our policies. It's not people rejecting our attempts at reform.
It’s outside agitators. Its white nationalists. Its Boogaloo Boys," and so on, and so on.
And that played itself out in almost exactly the same way all around the US.
And again, that gives them justification to crack down.
So I think its very likely that we are going to see a situation in which the FBI comes after us.
In which the FBI is used as a mechanism to destroy the militant fringe of the uprising
that’s happening right now.
Partially because it threatens the continuity of the American state,
which it legitimately does, which is not something I think i could have ever said
at any point in time before this. At least since I’ve been alive.
But also because its is absolutely fundamentally necessary to create the carrot and stick scenario
that they need to be able to co-opt the moderate elements of all of these sort of
political initiatives that are happening in the street right now.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
As were kind of leaving a Trump administration going into a Biden administration,
really the question that we have to ask ourselves is
how do we move away from that constant process of response,
where we’re moving from outrage to outrage to outrage,
and how do we start to move to a trajectory where we are able to dictate
the pace of action and we are able to do that on a granular local tactical level.
In other words we have to move from a position of activism to one essentially of insurgency.
We have to really focus on this idea that we are not fighting an abstract enemy.
We are engaged in an open material struggle with the state
and we have to think about it on that level.
And what that means is that we have to abandon this kind of reactionary
posture of activism and start to really think of ourselves as what we are, which is antagonists
and as insurgents in a circumstance which is not particularly conducive to that.
And our task is not to necessarily to get everyone agree with our ideas,
but its to create the political circumstances for us to achieve our objectives.
Thanks Tom.
We’ve now reached the end of this episode of System Fail.
An extended version of my interview with Tom Nomad will soon be available on subMedia’s
brand new Circle A podcast.
You can find it via your favourite podcast service, or by checking it out on our website:
sub.media/circle-a
My lazy, human producers are taking off the entire month of December, meaning that I will
be back sometime in January.
To support subMedia, consider making a one-time donation or signing up to be a monthly sustainer
at sub.Media/Donate.
You can also support us by buying some of our merchandise at sub.media/gear.
Be sure and follow us on your corporate data-mining platform of choice.
Just search for subMedia.
Or better yet, sign up to our mailing list and get every new episode delivered directly
to your inbox.
Godspeed, humans.