Announcing a hostile takeover of the left
Current managers are hereby dismissed; the movement will be rebranded and relaunched with a focus on the issues that matter
I. We’ve seen this all before
In the run up to World War I, labor was ascendant and capital was prone to endless cycles of boom and bust. The Second International was a collection of socialist and labor parties from twenty different countries that ostensibly was building a global alternative to capitalism. When the war began, all that these groups had to do was to abide by their stated principles and tell their members to put class ahead of nationalism (‘don’t fight in capitalist wars’). The various nation states of Europe would have crumbled, ushering in the worker-led world that they had been trying to create for seventy years (since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848). Instead, these socialist and labor parties succumbed to nationalism, providing the troops for what was at the time the bloodiest war in human history. The Second International collapsed and the left has been marginalized ever since.
All of the efforts to develop an enlightened ideology dissolved in the face of pure animal instincts and bloodlust. Nationalism trumped class. Lizard brain trumped rational brain. Cheap propaganda trumped decades of political organizing. On the precipice of achieving their dreams, the left found a way to take a dive and make capitalism more powerful than ever.
History is repeating itself. In the run up to the Covid wars, the left was ascendant. Women, LGBT, people of color, environmentalists, and unions had formed alliances that enabled them to take power throughout the developed world. When the Fauci-funded gain-of-function virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan all that they had to do was to practice their principles; distribute 20 safe, effective, and inexpensive treatments to anyone who needed them; and tell Pharma (the most corrupt industry on earth) to pound sand.
Instead the left collapsed morally and intellectually and became zombies enthusiastically helping Pharma to carry out global genocide.
II. Foreshadowing of the unraveling
Journalist and author Thomas Frank is beloved on the left and is one of its most insightful critics. His 2016 book, Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? sounded the alarm that the Democratic Party in the U.S. (and left parties in general worldwide) had lost their working class base and now only represent the interests of highly educated technocrats — about 10% of the population. Listen Liberal thus foreshadowed Hillary Clinton’s defeat later that same year and even Joe Biden’s inability to govern effectively today.
Frank’s premise has gotten picked up by the left in the most peculiar way.
The Winter 2022 edition of Democracy: A journal of ideas has a cover story titled, “Winning without the Courts.” Progressives know that the Supreme Court is lost for at least a generation so they are proposing to find a work-around to advance their goals without it.
The entire winter edition of Jacobin, a glossy bougie Marxian magazine out of Brooklyn is about “The Left in Purgatory.” It laments the declining relevance of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the squad, and the Working Families Party in New York and wrestles with the question of how to do “working-class politics without the working class.”
Others on the mainstream left have noted that Latinos are abandoning the Democratic Party and that the Democratic share of the Black vote is declining as well.
In all of these critiques though, there is never any self-reflection, never any reckoning, never any demand to change course to meet people’s actual needs. Instead these articles are all about, how do we win without the courts, how do we win without the working class, how do we win without Latinos, Blacks, and women? The focus is always, hilariously, about messaging, as if tweaking a few words, but not the underlying ideology, would be enough to bring back the people who have rejected the party.
It all becomes like the Monty Python skit, “Just a flesh wound!”
Apparently it never occurred to anyone on the left that perhaps they could be wrong.
III. Total collapse
The intellectual and moral collapse of the left accelerated and became complete in response to the pandemic. The left was handed a straightforward problem — a rogue federal bureaucrat, in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry, engineered a gain-of-function virus in collaboration with a Chinese bioweapons lab that got out and started killing millions of people.
To use a baseball analogy, this was a languid fastball right over the middle of the plate. The left should have been able to crush this pitch into the outfield bleachers. Arrest Fauci; distribute safe, cheap, and effective antiviral and antibacterial treatments that the CDC already knew would work against coronaviruses; nationalize Pharma; suspend trade relations with China; problem solved.
Of course Trump was President at the start of the pandemic. But Democrats were a government in waiting and just 8 months from taking power. That gave the left plenty of time to articulate a sane response and to begin implementing it in the 22 states that they control. Furthermore, Democrats controlled the institutions that were (and still are) in charge of pandemic response — FDA, CDC, state and local public health departments, mainstream medicine, and the corporate media. Given that there was almost no change in strategy when Biden took power, it shows that the Democratic plan was the official pandemic response from the beginning.
Handed a golden opportunity to show that the meritocratic, progressive, regulatory state could effectively govern when it actually matters, the left went full Pharma fascist instead. All logic, reason, and principles went out the window in an instant. The party became all lizard brain all the time and rushed to set up Pharma Jim Crow, Pharma Apartheid, and Pharma Fascism in any jurisdiction under their control. The Democratic Party became the point of the spear for the most deadly and corrupt industry on earth in violation of all of their anti-corporate principles.
Nothing they tried worked because nothing they did was based on actual science.
It was not just the Democratic politicians who succumbed to Pharma junk science and propaganda. The brightest scholars on the left, one by one, announced their hatred for logic and reason and their love for Pharma Fascism.
IV. Announcing a hostile takeover
In the corporate sector, when a company is underperforming, investors often stage a hostile takeover. They push out the current management, sell-off underperforming assets, and refocus the company on its core mission.
I’ve spent much of the last two years criticizing the left, pointing out the error in their ways, hoping that they will wake up. But it strikes me that there is a better alternative. I come from the left too and have just as much right to this intellectual space as they do. It is time to reclaim this movement and push out the Pharma Fascists.
So I’m announcing a hostile takeover of the left. The movement is underperforming, current leadership has completely lost its way. First we need to fire a bunch of people. Then I am going to jettison underperforming assets and refocus the brand on what matters.
You may be thinking whoa whoa, the left is not a corporation so one cannot just announce a hostile takeover. Are you sure about that? The climate change movement is funded by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg (amongst others). The BLM campaign is funded by George Soros. Billionaire MacKenzie Scott funds Planned Parenthood. Democratic dark money groups spent $1.7 BILLION on the 2020 presidential election.
The left is definitely a corporation at this point and ripe for a hostile takeover.
V. Current managers are hereby dismissed
As of today, the following leaders are dismissed. This is not cancel culture, this is zero tolerance for actual Nazis.
Noam Chomsky. I loved Manufacturing Consent. Really solid work. Reagan and the CIA must have been displeased. But in 2020 you started to manufacture consent on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. I get it. You’re old. Scared. Probably cannot read original source documents. But you should have been able to tell that the playbook is the same. Anyway, you flushed your legacy down the drain. Pack up your stuff and get out. We don’t ever want to hear from you again.
Naomi Klein. No Logo was a revelation. Your timing was perfect and you gave voice to the feelings of workers crushed by globalization. No Logo was the manifesto for the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and likely helped build the ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ coalition. After that you pioneered left scholarship with multinational research teams and global multilingual book launches for Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, and On Fire. Every book you wrote helped us to see the world more clearly.
But in 2022, when Trudeau brought the shock doctrine to Canada you cheered for the fascists and against the people. Working class people got trampled by jack booted thugs on horseback and you stayed silent. You expressed contempt for the truckers and adoration for the reactionary forces. It was the most stunning betrayal of principles I’ve ever seen and erased twenty-five years of scholarship in an instant. When the game was on the line, you sided with your bougie class interests and abandoned your principles. This changes everything, indeed.
Slavoj Žižek. Yeah you’re smart, you read everything. But watching you speak is like being in the front row of a Gallagher Smash-O-Matic show as people have to roll out sheets of plastic to avoid your spittle.
Your schtick was always disingenuous because you use an if-by-whiskey style of argumentation that allows people to hear whatever they want to hear. I’m struck by the fact that of the thousands of pages that you read, and the hundreds-of-thousands of words that you utter at the drop of a hat, you cannot be bothered to read original source documents on masks, vaccines, or really any scientific aspect of coronavirus. Opining about Hegel without a firm grasp of statistics is just wankery.
Re-watching some of your interviews and speeches now I see that you are badly vaccine injured (the clues are the strabismus plus tics and other Tourette’s movements). I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. But what you do from here on out is your responsibility.
So brother, please put down whatever Lacan book you are reading and pick up Forrest Maready if you really want to begin the healing process.
Michael Moore. When Pharma started poisoning people in Michigan with their junk science mRNA products, how come you failed to apply your homespun investigative journalism skills to get to the heart of this matter? Interviewing Albert Bourla or Stéphane Bancel in your Roger-and-me style would have been another blockbuster documentary. Instead you went fascist and pissed on the Canadian truckers because you’re worth $30 million dollars and hate the peasants. Anyway, you’re done.
Every corporate Dem who worked for Clinton, Obama, or Biden. You were never progressive. You hijacked the movement to serve your own interests. You’re transactional, you do not actually believe in anything other than being in power. You were silent when the epidemics of chronic childhood illness took off in the 1990s and you’ve gone full fascist now under the guise of Covid. Nobody cares what you think because you don’t actually think. You’re already forgotten because you were never really here.
The entire left media infrastructure. NPR, Amy Goodman/Democracy Now, Media Matters, the Nation, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, Vice, BuzzFeed, HuffPo, every astroturf narrative check organization. You work for Pharma, you have no critical thinking skills, and you are actively participating in genocide. Find another job immediately or prepare for Nuremberg 2.
The billionaires. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Nobody likes you. Go away.
Who would you add to this list?
VI. Sort the organic wheat from the chaff
It is an enormous problem that the left has collapsed morally and intellectually. The world needs a vibrant counterculture and a multitude of different visions for society. Through dialogue, debate, and competition, ideas are refined and improved and everyone benefits. In taking over the left we must keep what was working and toss out the ideas that have outlived their usefulness.
Keep 1960s left values. 1960s left values are fine and should be fully implemented. Obviously equal rights for people of color, women, and people who are LGBT are foundational. (Of course biological men should not compete in women’s sports, I should not have to explain this to anyone — it’s not a 60s value anyway). Protect the environment. Stop the war. Crack down on toxic polluters. The dreams of JFK, RFK, and MLK for a fair and just society must be completed.
Jettison postmodernism and identity politics. Foucault and postmodernism were a life preserver for millions during the era of Thatcher and Reagan when the system was so monolithic, homogenizing, and totalizing that “there is no alternative” became its motto. Foucault offered a way out, a way to be a termite to gnaw away at the pillars of state power from within.
But that era is over. Foucault and postmodernism accomplished their goal — creating space for a diversity of viewpoints especially including LGBT perspectives. Now Foucault and postmodernism have been weaponized as tools of totalitarian control and agents of Pharma/State power and must be repudiated.
Identity politics has become a dead end. The reason you are sick, depressed, and confused all the time is because Pharma is poisoning you. Come join us as we hold them accountable.
Climate change is not our biggest worry. Focusing on global warming is fine to a point, alternative energy sources are nice, but vaccine injury is going to wipe out life on earth long before rising seas ever do. And no, you don’t need $500 billion of taxpayer money to set up electric car charging stations nationwide. If the technology works as well as you say it does, great, then it should be market-competitive and capital should fund it.
VII. Focus on what matters.
Stopping Pharma Fascism is the defining issue of our lives.
The pharmaceutical industry has captured our political system, science and medicine, the media, and academia and is using these institutions to implement an incredibly profitable genocide worldwide.
The scale and mendacity of the pharmaceutical industry will soon eclipse the horrors of the Third Reich.
Pharma’s goal is to enslave the whole planet. Vaccines create chronic health conditions that leave people dependent on expensive patented pharmaceutical products in order to survive. Pharma is sucking all wealth out of every individual, every family, and the entire global economy and directing it into their own pockets.
Pharma seems to enjoy all of this — the money, the power, the control, and the sadism of inflicting harm on others. This industry wants to create a Pharma Fourth Reich in which they are the junk science high priests who will rule over everyone for a thousand years. We cannot let this happen.
To be crystal clear:
• The rise in chronic illness in children including autism, development disabilities, and childhood cancers is driven by the childhood vaccine schedule.
• Gulf War Syndrome, the rise in dementia and Alzheimer’s, and the explosion in chronic illness among adults is driven by vaccines and other toxicants.
• Covid vaccines are unsafe and ineffective and the current Covid vaccine campaigns are genocide.
In order to keep this criminal scheme going Pharma requires a vast Big Tech surveillance system, a constant fog of propaganda, and the destruction of democracy and individual liberties. This is already well underway and accelerated dramatically under the guise of the pandemic.
Our challenge is to dismantle Pharma Fascism and replace it with actual science, actual health, and respect for individual liberty. This will likely take a lifetime to accomplish. This is the work, this is what we will do, everything else is secondary.
VIII. There is no left nor right anymore, it is time we retired those worn out terms
The entire left vs. right framing of politics was always dreadful. Only 12% of the world’s population is left-handed so defining certain political ideas as “left” was to assign them to a permanent marginal status. And the entire metaphor never made sense — what do two relative directions have to do with a multitude of ideas about how best to live in harmony with each other?
Left and right are hereby retired.
The world is now divided into Pharma Fascists vs. Free and Sovereign People.
Pharma Fascists have a lot of wealth, capture, and obedient zombies under hypnosis. But that’s about all they have.
Free and Sovereign People is the descriptor for the vast majority of people on the planet. We have science, logic, reason, rationality, evidence, data, health, joy, love, families, liberty, puppies, spirit, and nature on our side.
We just have to press our advantage and drive the Pharma Fascists out of business and out of polite society forever.
I believe the way to do this will be through massive DECENTRALIZATION of all aspects of politics, economics, and knowledge.
Pharma leadership must be arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for crimes against humanity.
Those are my thoughts for now. Needless to say, I will write much more about these matters in the future, so please subscribe if you have not done so already.
Blessings to the warriors! 🙌
Prayers for everyone around the world fighting against Pharma fascism. 🙏
Huzzah to everyone working to build the better world our hearts know is possible. 💫
Hugs for people who are just getting through the day. 🤗
In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.
(As always, please help me to improve this piece by alerting me to any typos.)
Thank you for giving voice to everything I've felt since March 2020. This article is a life-saver, in more ways than one.
Toby, this is courageous and original while at the same doing what the tepid Dems and ineffective do: avoid identifying and voicing the truly human values YOU DO STAND FOR.
Attacking Big Pharma is necessary but is more a policy position than a statement of values. Values are what bring people together, not issues. Consensus on values come first; then, the issues to move on become obvious. Beware also of cancelling the cancelers, that goes no where because it's an "away from goal" not yet a forward goal towards making things better.