The US fascist movement, like most fascist movements, is subject to vicious infighting.  If you observe their chatter you will see the expression ‘don’t punch right’ used frequently. This means focus your attacks on the real enemy. For them this is the left. Kill All Normies while providing a somewhat useful introduction to the new internet driven fascism unfortunately punched left and down with far more intensity than it punched right. Its taxonomy of the alt-right was sabotaged by often mean spirited attacks on the author’s (Angela Nagle) left enemies. Throughout the book she attacks women game developers who dare to insert feminist themes, obnoxious tweeters, intersectional feminists, gender rebellious Tumblrs and even anti-fascists who recognise the need for physical confrontation. 

Kill all Normies is thus best understood not so much as a book about the alt-right but as a collection of polemical essays, mostly directed at the radical left, making use of the moment of crisis that was the Trump election.  This piece should not be seen as a simple ‘is it worth reading’ review.  Instead I use KaN as a starting point for a number of important discussions for the left and to explore modern fascism as well as looking at some of the events involving the US far right that occurred after it was published and what they have to tell us about the real weaknesses of that movement.

Discussions about Identity Politics (IdPol) absorbs a huge amount of energy across the political spectrum.  Discussion on the left however is often complicated and made overly hostile because they take place along the single axis of oppression which means proponents of IdPol get lumped in with Hilary Clinton while opponents get lumped in with Donald Trump.  This understandably encourages bad faith discussions that throw a lot of heat and very little light. Here we are going to argue that a much more useful exchange can happen when we instead create a plot where one axis is oppression and the second is exploitation as that puts both Trump & Clinton a good distance away from socialists. [Audio of this article]

 The vote to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution in May 2018 was overwhelmingly carried, with almost 2 out of every 3 voters voting Yes remove the ban. The margin of victory was such that some post-referendum polemics made the mistake of arguing that victory was always inevitable, that the campaign didn’t matter. Such arguments tended to be made by opinion writers who never liked the Repeal campaign and in some cases published pieces during the campaign arguing that unless whatever aspect they disliked was dropped the referendum would be lost.

In 1994 Class War organised an international anarchist gathering in London under the heading of ’10 days the shook the world’. It provided a location that brought together a number of anarchist who had been working on the promotion of the anarchist idea online and set off a string of collaborations that would last in some cases to the present day.

I wrote the following text in November 2012 to have ready in case a smear campaign directed at the freshly renewed pro-choice movement in Ireland gained any real traction beyound the media stories mentioned below. I didn't publish it at the time as it failed to get traction and thus this would, at best, have been a distraction from the organising work being done, work that was going to succeed in a few short years in overturning Ireland's ban on abortion access through the Repeal referendum in May 2018.   The smear was built around an email I had sent as rumours of the death of a women having died in a Galway hopital after being denied an abortion spread amongst pro-choice activists and was basically just me proposing we have a meeting to organise a protest if this turned out to be true and the family did not object.  My main concern was that the anti-choice activists and their pet journalists would work out who I was and concoct a weird conspiracy story through misrepresenting my long activity as an anarchist in Ireland and elsewhere in a somewhat similar fashion to the way they has used the involvement of individual republicans to smear Shell to Sea a few years previously.

In May five houses on Summerhill Parade in Dublin were evicted on almost no notice with some 120 people being thrown on the street.  All were owned by the same landlord who in order to make super profits had packed people in, 6-8  to a room, charging them 350-450 each  per month for space on a bunkbed.  Last night, August 7th, as part of a direct action month around housing people marched from the GPO to Summerhill and occupied No 35.[see video]

At the start of the referendum campaign in March, I took this photograph showing the poster image of Savita, who died because of the 8th amendment, and in the background a huge billboard with a CGI / cartoon of what is meant to be an 11 week old foetus.  Both have the common slogan ‘one of us’ - the photograph invites us to consider if the life of this 31-year-old woman of colour, who was denied a life-saving abortion, really has the same value as an anonymous and unknown 11-week-old foetus.

This is the question we will be voting on this Friday, indeed beyond that we are voting on whether a doctor who gives a life-saving abortion in a Savita-like case should have the threat of a 14-year jail sentence hanging over them - as the 2013 law lays down - whether any of the hundreds of pregnant people taking abortion pills at home in Ireland should be doing so under the risk of that 14-year sentence.  That is the law as it stands - to change it, the 8th must be repealed.

This seemingly bizarre tweet from a No campaign leader in their attempt to prevent the repeal of the anti-women 8th amendment gives a few things away about their ideological mind set.

It read "Referendum will repeal our property rights. Ignore the fact the the Goverenment then plans to pass a law nationalising half the housing stock. #8thref #refcom @morningireland"

On Saturday one of our photographers was assaulted and threatened at the ‘No’ campaigns’ anti-choice Rally for Life.  He wasn’t injured and although his camera was punched (see video) no damage was done but this is yet another example of how the No campaign, having failed to make any impact in the polls, are becoming nastier in their desperation.

The ‘Love Both’ anti-choice rally itself was very poorly attended, attracting around 1500 people.  The feeling in the crowd was one of tiredness and demoralisation with a few people even admitting out loud that the turnout was miserable.  Radical Queers Resist were holding a small silent counter protest opposite the entrance to the rally so after counting the crowd we headed over to this.

In a pattern all to common across rural Ireland hundreds of Yes posters were torn down in an organised fashion by what had to be No activists across Country Cork last night.  This anti-democratic rage typifies the No campaign which has has so much wealth that it is printing 10 No posters to every Yes.  All across Ireland the few Yes posters there are to distribute have been torn down, in one case we have heard of in the west they have even been discovered in the houses of No campaigners.  This is ahead of the May 25th referendum to remove the article of the Irish constitution that equates the life of a women with that of a foetus.