antifa: the rise of radical centrism.

Antifa did January 6th.

When Charlottesville ended in disaster in 2017, it did not take a prophet to realize that the days of the alt-right were numbered. Less clear was the impending death of antifa. Why did antifa die in 2017? What will replace it?

Antifa self-identified as far left, and most commenters took this label at face value. The far left label served several purposes.

Firstly, for antifa itself, the term was moralizing. Antifa prided itself as the purification of a great ideological and moral tradition, the left, and stood as the vanguard or cutting edge of that tradition.

Secondly, for conservatives, it was useful to position themselves as moderates or centrists between a "far left" and "far right." They endorse antifa's leftist cred as a means of presenting themselves as the true defenders of centrist democracy. Trump, in paradoxical fashion, inverted this horseshoe to say there were "good people on both sides."

Thirdly, although of least significance, the "far left" designation was promoted by the alt-right. Antifa, as a masked black block, could represent every opponent simultaneously: Jewish trust fund kids, homosexuals, the mentally ill, pedophiles, the unemployed, satanism, the forces of chaos incarnate!

If antifa saw itself as far left, and so did its conservative and alt-right opponents, how could it be anything else? In order to understand antifa as something other than "leftist," an independent definition of leftism must be established.

what is leftism?

Leftism is the imperial consolidation of order around centralized superstructures. Leftism was first invented by the priests of early religions who used a combination of drugs, sex rituals, human sacrifice, fear-mongering, and magic tricks to bewitch the population into voluntary slavery.

Before the invention of leftism, humans lived as hunter-gatherers for millions of years, with a relatively healthy diet of meats and fruit. The transition to agriculture was disastrous for human health. Tooth decay occurred for the first time in the archaeological record. Humans became several inches shorter as a result of malnutrition. Life spans dropped. Contrary to Hobbes, who imagined the hunter-gatherer as "nasty, brutish, and short," it was actually settled agriculture which introduced trash, sewage, wars of extermination, and subsequent disease.

Leftism is both the origin and output of taxation. No individual benefits from taxation, at least not at first. Eventually, through taxation, public works can be built, wars can be waged, and economies of scale created. Thousands of years later, we have "civilization," with writing, electricity, and automobiles.

Writing is the oldest of these inventions, but a majority of the population was never literate until 1500 in Europe. Electricity and automobiles have only come about in the last 200 years. That's 10,000 years of suffering just to squeeze out maybe 500 years of progress. With ratios like that, it's enough to make anyone consider the ethics of anarcho-primitivism, especially in light of the mass extinctions and environmental degradation now occurring.

Love it or hate it, leftism is real. It is opposed by the intuitive, genetic, physiological, and biological tendencies of the human animal to "regress to the mean," or "return to tradition." Each human being has a desire for open spaces, adventure, freedom, excitement, expansion, violence and sexuality (often intertwined); as well as a desire for nepotism, familiarity, homeland, stability, sacredness, safety, and love. Leftism offends all of these tendencies simultaneously.

Leftism confines humans to slavery in cubicles, to plastic masks; it twists sexuality into a logistical nightmare; it treats every human interaction as an HR decision tree. Leftism is cringe. At the same time, it runs roughshod over every concept of tribal, national, religious, and ethnic identity, in a rather ingenious way. In every conflict between two groups, leftism always favors the disadvantaged group: black over white, Muslim over Jew, gay over straight, woman over man. The result is that the disadvantaged group becomes a client of the leftist superstructure. This new-found reliance results in "intersectional integration," like a giant amoeba eating up the opposition and growing ever bigger.

Leftism depicted as a giant ball of trash rolling under a rainbow.

When leftism sucks up clients from different backgrounds, there is a frictional force of contradiction when these clients have opposing interests. Feminism and Islam are diametrically opposed, but they both find themselves wiggling around on the same spider's web. The result is "leftist infighting." Yet this is not a new phenomenon.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek." The story of the 12 tribes of Israel is a story of "leftist amalgamation." The land of Canaan was already populated with cults, including Zoroastrianism, the cult of Aten Ra, Pythagoreanism, and perhaps even Brahminical offshoots, and it is from this hodgepodge that Judaism formed — not out of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob "ex nihilo."

Judaism's insistence that "we are definitely not descended from Canaanites" is invalidated by genetic testing. Palestinians today complain that Ashkenazi Jews are white immigrants from Europe, but this is only half true.

Judaism’s antipathy to the Canaanite religions is a kind of denial of one’s own ancestry that is common among leftists: take Elizabeth Warren claiming descent from Native Americans, or Shaun King claiming to be a "black" man. Claiming descent from "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" is like claiming descent from "Superman, Batman, and Spiderman." If civilization collapses and all that survives is Marvel movies, then we could imagine people adopting such mythological genealogies.

Judaism was not the first or only cult making up revolutionary ideologies to bring disparate ethnic tribes together. Zoroastrianism in Iran went on a rampage, destroying traditional religion and turning the ancient Gods of the common people into demons. In India, the Vedic king of the Gods, Indra, was repeatedly humiliated with claims that he was cursed by a priest to be covered in vaginas. He was later replaced and overshadowed by new Gods such as Rama, Krishna, Shiva, and eventually Buddha. In Egypt, an attempt was made to abolish polytheism and replace it with the cult of Aten-Ra.

By the 6th century AD, these religious experiments had spread from Egypt to Indonesia and Japan, affecting 90% of Eurasia's urbanized populations outside of Rome. Christianity should not be viewed as the only multi-racial world-conquering religion, but merely as an especially successful variation among dozens of similar cults.

Pre-Historic Leftism

Before the rise of Zoroastrianism, it is likely that the origins of the Upanishads precede even the Indo-European invasions of 1600 BC, going back to an ancient Dravidian religion of India. The Dravidian language is not native to India. It comes from Iran, prior to the Indo-European expansion. The character of this Ur-Dravidian Upanishadic religion is clear: it is pacifistic, universalistic, priestly, and vegetarian.

Unfortunately, we have no written record of this "pure" Dravidian-Upanishadic religion prior to the arrival of Sanskrit. It is reasonable to assume, however, that leftism was dominant in pre-Indo-European India, so dominant that it was able to survive the invasion period and reemerge centuries later.

Leftism was already highly developed in a very easily recognizable and "modern" form in 3000 BC. This is not to say that leftism began in India in 3000 BC and then spread to the rest of the world. It is likely that leftism was invented independently in a number of places, just as agriculture was invented a number of times.

In fact, Ur-Leftism and agriculture are consubstantial. Hunter-gatherers cannot be forced to discontinue their happy lives as human-animals and forced to work on farms without the moralizing, totalizing, enslaving and domesticating force of leftism. This might be true today, with all the advantages offered by the cellphone, but it was certainly not true when agriculture introduced sewage, disease, malnutrition, tooth decay, and stunted growth. Leftism and agriculture reinforce one another, but leftism is a necessary precondition for the enslavement of a population. Leftism is a technology of human domestication.

Antifa as Radical Centrists

Antifa represented a frenzied attempt to defend the leftist doctrine using anarchistic means. There is an inner tension within leftism between two forces:

1. The centralizing, pacifying, vegetarian, universalistic bureaucracy of the state as a monopoly on violence;

2. Individual bravery, tribal skirmishes, street battles, and Dionysian orgies of violence, alongside drug use and general anarchy.

This tension is hit upon by Jewish intellectual Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Mailer saw modern life in the 1950s as a prison planet: drugged up on valium; every problem could be solved by a shrink or a doctor; television provided a universal culture of banality and tasteful banter; American sports confined masculinity and violence to the playpen of the playing field. Mailer's solution was an outburst of sex and violence, which he likened to the stereotype of the black as hyperviolent and hypersexual.

The fact that Mailer's "Hipster" now refers to a metrosexual wearing a scarf in a coffee shop that sells music records proves the point he was trying to make. There is a totalizing force (which he identified with capitalism) which bends humans toward bourgeois passivity.

Antifa, like Mailer, is part of a tendency within leftism to want to "break out of the system." The Hippies in the 1960s modified Mailer's call to "break out of the system" by focusing on sex and drugs but denouncing the call to violence. The purest expression of Mailer's ideal came from the "radical centrism" of Charles Manson. Manson was a hippie, a promoter of psychedelics and free love; but also antisemitic, and later a correspondent with James Mason, who promoted "lone wolf" tactics of neo-Nazi terrorism.

Although "the redpill" is now seen as a part of the right, The Matrix (1999) and Alex Jones were, in the early 2000s, were part of a movement against the "corporate establishment and the Bush crime family.” The WTO Protests were the last expression of this era. By the time of "Occupy Wallstreet," (2011) the violence inherent to Antifa had begun to peter out. The force identified by Mailer was reactionary, as was the hippie movement, and the reaction burnt itself out.

Antifa got a second life because of the alt-right due to its reactionary nature. Antifa punished economically and politically dispossessed white and blue collar workers for their laughably unpopular extremism. It was not taking on big corporations, "the man," attacking banks or corporations. Instead it was harassing street thugs, throwing bottles at bloggers, sucker-punching incels. At the subconscious level, antifa was impotent and unable to "punch up" at the halls of power. So in a last hurrah after the failure of the Occupy Movement, they "punched down" on someone their own size: an extremely online movement of racists and misogynists calling for "white sharia."

Antifa had no positive vision of what to do after the alt-right died, in the same way that the alt-right had no positive vision after Trump cut them loose. The term “centrism” can be properly understood when we compare the antifa of 2017 to the antifa of 1999. It had moved to the center, not longer attempting to push forward a new vision for the country, but only jumping into action to defend the status quo; to protest the comic-book villains and scapegoats of the alt-right: the Proud Boys, the National Socialists, the Whites Trailerpark Trash Trad Workers, and so on. Antifa was sterilized and castrated, except when it came to the most egregious violation of social norms: open white identity.

The morality of antifa was that of your 8th grade teacher’s lecture on why you all get the day off on MLK Day, with a bit more violence. Theoretically, ideologically, there was nothing more going on.

In the same way that America First could be viewed as the “return” of the alt-right, BLM could be viewed as the “return” of antifa. Both BLM and AF introduced Christian elements (the tacky low-church element of Civil Rights; groyper Catholicism) and moved away from the implicit whiteness of edgy ideology toward the multi-racialism of mass populism.

BLM showed that a corporate-led movement of racial grievance overshadowed any kind of "ideological communism" that previously existed. The aesthetic of antifa was white or Jewish kids with black masks and baseball bats. They were overshadowed, put to shame, and cucked by black hooligans without a care in the world looting Macy's. The self-esteem of antifa was further crushed when the remnants of that group, attempting to make a name for themselves by hunting down a kid with a gun, were shot by a "literal child" in a 3 on 1 fight. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young Hispanic, took antifa off life support.

On January 6th, antifa didn't bother to show up. The conservative movement still had a use for them, and invented their presence among the protestors. It was revealing that, after antifa had been gutted and defeated, conservatives resurrected their ghost. This wasn't always a conscious lie (although in many cases, it was). It revealed that, from the conservative perspective, only radicals are capable of violence. Since Trump supporters are conservative, radicals committing vandalism must be federal agents or “spiritually” antifa, possessed by the spirit of George Soros!

In some sense, this is correct. The protestors of January 6th were animated by the same radical centrism as the antifa protestors at Charlottesville. Both of them fought for anodyne and mainstream beliefs: anti-racism, equality for all, secular democracy, Martin Luther King. Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie. "The people" versus "the man." Break out of the system! The spirit of antifa lives on in the soul of January 6th: feckless, populist, radical centrism; the belief that street violence starts revolutions.

Both BLM and January 6th were hollow and empty “lashing out” without making any significant departures from mainstream American ideology. This is the meaning of “radical centrism”: violence and vandalism without any sort of alternative vision for the future of the country.

Just because a group or event is violent does not mean that it presents a threat to the system. Violence should be put in historical context. The Weather Underground Organization (WUO) was much more violent and threatening than January 6th or BLM.

During the Days of Rage, the WUO blew up a statue commemorating the police in 1969. When the city rebuilt the statue, the WUO went back and blew up the statue a second time. Then, the city put up a 24-hour guard to protect the statue, but this didn't stop the WUO from blowing it up a third time. Finally, the city relented and relocated the statue to the police headquarters where there was tighter security.

On February 21, 1970, the WUO threw three Molotov cocktails at the house of Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh, shattering his windows. On June 9, 1970, they detonated 10 sticks of dynamite at the NYC police headquarters. In September 1970, they conducted a successful jailbreak of Timothy Leary out of prison so that he could flee to Algeria.

In 1971, the WUO bombed the Capitol. On May 19, 1972, the WUO bombed the Pentagon. In 1975, they bombed the Department of State building. The main goal of the group, which was to end the war in Vietnam, was accomplished by 1977, and it subsequently dissolved.

When thousands of protestors were corralled by police into the Capitol, none of them carried weapons. Yet “the left,” demanded that these miscreants would be detained indefinitely, maybe sent to Guantanamo; that they be declared “terrorists” and “insurrectionists” and stripped of their rights. In this sense, the left has become a bourgeois defender of the “radical center.”

Is a “dissident left” possible in 2024? Opposition to vaccines is right-coded. Opposition to foreign wars is right-coded. It’s not even possible to use the shield of communism to maintain one’s status as a “leftist”: Jackson Hinkle and other MAGA communists find themselves, effectively, on the right.

The inability of the left to avoid being rolled into the Katamari Damancy of the “radical center” is a mythological defeat by cultural victory. The central myth of the left, the revolution of the underdog, is made impossible when the state flies the rainbow flag.

The exhaustion and defeat of the left can be contextualized within the general decline of the populace at large. Leftism saw its first victories when the masses became educated, literate, and industrious following the Black Plague and rise of Protestantism. It was a rise in quality out of serfdom into a “working class” that allowed for political leftism to take shape. A decline in quality has taken place in the last 100 years, with the killing fields of the world wars and the intensification of industrial pollution.

It isn’t that “the left” abandoned “the working class,” but that the vital life force of the working class has degenerated on a biological or even spiritual level. The resurrection of the spirit of revolution, which has died under the radical centrism of antifa and BLM, can only come about with a revolution in spiritual biology. The breaking point of the system will come with a Renaissance in human quality.

The Hollywood trope of the Golem, Frankenstein, the Cyborg, AI — something transhuman — is the nightmare of the system: a military technology that it cannot control, which mutates and develops independence. This is the last and final refuge of a true Radical Left outside of the radical centrism of mass politics.