It's Faaascism. New Rules. | Part 3 |by Esmée Streachailt
Don't collapse. Don't comply. Don't collaborate with power.
Note from 15 April 2025: I'm writing most of these posts well before they publish. I didn't want to just doom-and-gloom us all for weeks, so I was spacing them out with other posts. But, events are speeding up here in the US. 72% of the world already live under authoritarian regimes and systems. Knocking the US out significantly weakens the endurance of freedom for the rest.
[I agree, the US's 'pragmatism' and 'exceptionalism' have allowed this country to ally with and support many of these abusive governments in our 'national interest.' I am not writing out of concern for the fate of that international order, but for the women who live in all these places in the whole world. USians have a chance to take what is now shattered in the US and build something more humane. The MAGA contingent is a small minority losing popularity every day, the actions of this administration discredit them utterly. There is a chance, only just.]
The president has ignored a ruling from the Supreme Court regarding a legal resident's deportation to a gulag in El Salvador. It's been found that most of the people sent to CECOT have no criminal record. Even if they did, this is all against our laws. And now the president is laughing with his staff about disappearing 'home-growns,' meaning criminals, too. But this means every person on US soil is in danger of disappearance now. So, I'm going to hurry up and finish these posts with all their links and suggestions for action and get them out to you over the next two weeks. I'm also going to make all these posts both public and free to access – so share them all over.
I'll be open with you. I'm scared. But, I'm also ready. Not prepared exactly, but ready.
I also need a break from thinking about The Emergency. I need to do things about it. Meanwhile, I need to write about something else. So, after this series, I'm turning back to my series for THE RADICAL NOTION called RE: Framing Radical Feminism. It's Hélène Cixous time, y'all! What can it mean to ‘write the body’ now, to glory in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’?? And what about Cixous's deep friendship with Derrida (they really were a mutual admiration society)?
A Quick Fugue on Fear & Seeing Around Corners
OK. Deep breath.
The reason that you've got rapists in Florida who were in prison in Romania is that they, the Corporate They, plan to do basically a sex trafficking style feudal economy on all of us. I fear this. I don't know this. I fear they're planning to crash the value of your apartment building, your house, your land, your farm, your ranch, even most of your businesses, your employers and they're going to let private equity and these billionaires buy them up for pennies on the dollar. Then, as with sex trafficking you can get your passport back, get your house, your business, your land, your cattle, your farm, your trees, your whatever the f*** you think you own if you work it off. And that's before Trump's 'new baby boom.'
I fear this because I keep looking at everything ‘they’ are doing in a long-term frame, at the spiritual vibration of these people, and it feels possible. Sure, the more apollonian minded op-ed/podcast types and the negging internet bros will call this panic, hysteria. But the hysterics were right last time and we are right again. All you have to do is listen to what these men say.
I suspect the NRx-Broligarchs (and long-time fascist/authoritarian states) think that AI is going to replace most of the fun/complex/creative/technical work and they will keep the rest for themselves while using the rest of us for manual labor (my metaphor for this is 'picking cabbage').
As much as anything, this fashy ‘great replacement’ includes a design that would stop cultural growth and change. Since feminism, and RadMatFem especially, is a project of culture making, I think our resistance needs to meld with others while insisting on its RadMatFem values and goals. Actual feminists, rad or anarcha or materialist, are backfooted and have been. I can't tell if we'd do best to ally with other more powerful sites of resistance or keep striking out on our own or blend both of those strategies. This is part of why I'm scared. I know we're all going to make choices about this that we think are best. I don't want that to split us again, deeper.
MAGA & Co seem to be destroying the very foundations of the systems on which we all live (more and less securely) and convert them into levers to use against us to force us to work for them for the debt we owe. That's the classic patriarchal move: using a human good as a weapon against humans. That debt will be our lives. I have no doubt they will continue intensifying the suffering and oppression of these systems by race, class, sexuality, ability. They sure talk that way. The Middle Ages when things were pretty hard for most people. Life was short, life was brutish and life was lived entirely at the whim of whoever owned the land you lived on (that link is about the future).
When We Get Kinetic
We're probably going to end up fighting these people for real. Under previous circumstances, most feminists have been anti-war and anti-violence. But making ourselves easy targets of their violence feels deeply unwise now. As one of my feminist friends in the EU said, I see no reason for any woman in the US to be unarmed now. She could see what we see: fascism is also rape culture because it's patriarchy crystalized. Arming ourselves is probably a bridge too far for most of our readers, but I implore you to fill any gaps in your understanding of what to do when a peaceful protest converts to a confrontational one, best strategies for civil disobedience (which is not speaking in parks, but taking curated actions that break the law quite intentionally), and in your self-defense skills.
It’s not that I want feminist women in street fights, obviously. It's that there is nothing we can really do to stop it coming to us and the many otherized people we care about.
My beloved-departed dad taught me how to punch through a target and to fight dirty because I am little and have to cheat to win. Get 'em down and keep 'em down, he would say, A man's solar plexus is about shoulder height for you, knock the wind out, knock the knee out, and start kicking the soft organs. That is also what it happens to take to stop a fascist take-over of a country. We, the people, certainly the feminists, are little and we probably will have to cheat.
These men and their allies want us frozen
Let's do Freedom Making Actions. That's kinetic. Got a book club, card group, co-op, ladies libation league, volunteers at a public kitchen or food bank, any group of people you've been around long enough to trust? That is a potential site of resistance and rebellion. Mobilizing in how we get through.
- Let us deepen our connections so that we increase each other's security and authenticity. One way to do that is to seek out women to buy from to meet your needs (food coops, bookstores, pharmacists, herbalists ... ) but also to give to. We may have some of the highest employment rates ever in the US, but we also still have massive weights of poverty and homeless affecting women and children.
- Let's loosen some room and cheer for each other's unpredictability. We are faced with new forms of old fuckery, and our feminisms may need to adapt and act in unforeseen ways. A doctrinaire rad fem is still a predictable subject.
- Let's make RadMatFem a kind of laboratory of uprising.
- We will need to protect and increase each other's mobility. I am especially concerned for our sisters of color under this regime. Their legal residency, their families, their speech, their ability to work in safety, all are rendered arbitrary and sites of vulnerability to the state violence. These attacks on mobility are attacks on the very foundations of women's agency. Let us, at the very least, be pushing back, maybe physically. Who are you going to hide when they need it? What groups are you attached to with members you trust enough to mobilize with (like trust with your life trust)? Mobilizing is the way through.
- Let's share as much good research and reporting as we can find and keep our factuality and sanity intact. The voice of the state is increasingly divorced from both law and fact. If you have good archives, find good investigative writers, witness fashy infractions against our citizens and neighbors — put that into the world, please. We will be grateful for every preserved portal to reality.
- Let's build in our solidarity. If we remember the lessons of (the old kind of strategic) intersectionality, if we build in good faith alliance across communities designed to meet needs, we can ultimately out last The Emergency. We must focus less on identities and more on needs. What needs do we share, what needs can we fulfill for each other, where can my resource become another's source? Identities are ideas and not fit for a fight with forces that mean to limit us to our needs, and then make them more and more precarious in a search for our perfect compliance. Camus was right to call these men "the psychopathic dandies." They have avarice, they have ambition, but they do not have any real grit. Solidarity is grit.
As I write this in March, I think the hard realities are clear. The MSM is 'illegal,' fulfilling passport applications is optional, and a whole bunch of people are in a prison in El Salvador (disappeared to the land of los desaparecidos) for we are not at all sure what and we are not all sure who they are. Criminals? No trial, no way to know. Biden's pardons (of say, former congressional representatives) were invalid and Liz Cheney should expect a knock on her door any night now. Support for libraries, museums, and overseas media promoting democracy are done for. Our national ecology? Do you remember the 1970s? A lot of it was ... gross.
Add to the chronic stress, isolation, and mirthlessness of life under regimes that can delete you any time they like the literal toxicity of air, water, soil, food. Life gets more brutish and shorter and yet Leviathan rules through his Stasi.
By the time this post drops later in April, I am sure it will be unavoidably obvious. We have a future to rise up and claim. Not only in the US, but in the US and for the world. The kind of extractive domination logic that would raze Yosemite or Yellowstone National Parks for their timber and minerals will also want the forests and minerals everywhere, to dump mine tailings and plastic production chemicals and raw sewage into waterways everywhere it's not already happening. To rise up and claim our future is to lay claim to well-being for all of life, everywhere, in both word and deed.
I want us all to remember that while 'kinetic' is a military euphemism for active violence, that's not what that word means. It means movement, moving, our bodies, our energy, our loyalties, our creation, our trade and mutual aid, the world's energy. In the witchery language of RadMatFem, Kinesis and Flow are one. When I suggested doing Qigong flows (this one really wakes up the energy in the fascia), I was being deliberate.
The NRx/Opus Dei types might be aiming for is the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe, but that's a kind of freezing of flow, a patriarchal reversal that shatters our embedded relation to both Earth and history. Even then, the women were not compliant easy maids. (When Max Dashu is digging up stories of 13th Century French women of the Languedoc killing a Pope's general with a trebuchet, it's time to start thinking about how far we are all prepared, or can be prepared to go.)
They are vibing at this level/color/amplitude:
"freedom seeds" is somehow both cringe and incredibly dystopian
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) March 27, 2025 at 9:27 AM
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The author of that post was The White House (!!). It's an image of Vancy Pants posed with a military rifle as if to shoot someone while kneeling as if in a firefight while wearing a 'military' costume. The bullets being the 'freedom seeds' in a metaphor so ripe for feminist vivisection I will not insult you with the analysis.
And of this sincerely nazi-level sadism, speaking of compliant token women:
Kristi Noem in El Salvador today.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 8:30 PM
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It's Nihilism, though
Psychopathic Dandies are men who adhere to the toxic and unbalanced aspects of a pathological masculinity. The fash, the incel, the manosphere influencer, men with no sense of containment that allows others to be.
RadMatFems know allllll about that guy. Because nihilism is the final drive of the Godlet, the male default, the toxic man. What you'll see as I read in the video (linked below) is that while many say the Existentialists are nihilists, I am here to tell you that's a lie told to keep us from this truth: The Existentialists are the antidote to nihilism, especially the nihilism that drives the fascist soul to swallow the world in its drive toward a totality it imagines will vivify it. And if you don't want to watch me read and riff on Camus, you can watch Viggo Mortensen read Camus's talk explaining the predicament we are about to experience: how do we re-invent a sense of meaning in the wake of continent-wide and epoch-ending insatiable violence not only to bodies and lives but meant to collapse the souls of the living? He reads it on 28 March 2016, 70 years after Camus first delivered "The Crisis of Humanity" in the same theatre on 28 March 1946. How these dates echo now.
Don't collapse. Don't comply. Don't collaborate. These are not a causal chain. Any one of these can lead to the others or render a person despondent and able only to obey. We all have to survive this, and none of us will be cleanly virtuous when it's done, but I feel we have to give either nothing or nothing more than will get us to the next possibility for punching through. Remember, these tech-broligarchs and their real estate con artist patsy run like that: tell the lie that gets you on to the next thing you want to take is as good any truth (Kara Swisher's observation). It's OK to lie to power. It's necessary to lie to despotic power.
Just know what, when, and how much risk is OK in your particular life. It might not be much. It might be your very pulsing life. We can't ask more than one has to give, and we mustn't be the cause of collapse for each other.
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